"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Job Title

Director

Contact Details

UKOLN,
University of Bath,
Bath,
BA2 7AY
tel: +44 (0) 1225 386580
fax: +44 (0) 1225 386838
email: e.j.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk

The Job I Do

As Director, I am responsible for the leadership, strategic direction and overall management of the organisation as described in the UKOLN Strategy. In all our activities, we work closely with our core funders, JISC, MLA and the University of Bath.

More specifically, I am involved with the development and implementation of an open and interoperable information environment for scholarly communication. This has included identifying strategies to promote open science and associated models for distributed digital libraries, and it is in this context that open data repositories are being explored and partnerships developed with the e-Research community.

UKOLN is a partner in the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and I am leading the organisation's contribution to this major initiative through the role of DCC Associate Director (Community Development). We are now co-leading the JISC-funded I2S2 Project (Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences), which has built upon earlier eBank and eCrystals initiatives. All of these have focussed on chemical crystallography.

More recently, I have co-led the Citation Workstream as a part of the development of the Sage Commons initiative, which seeks to enable the open sharing and re-use of large-scale predictive models of disease.

In 2009, I published the "Open Science at Web-Scale Report", which considered a range of issues associated with open data, citizen science and participative technologies for science. In May 2008, I co-authored the "Scaling Up Report", which presents the results of a JISC-funded scoping study to assess the feasibility of a federated model for data repositories in the domain of crystallography. Earlier in 2007, I completed a piece of consultancy for JISC, to investigate the relationships between data centres and institutions which may develop data repositories. The resulting direction-setting Report "Dealing with Data", was quoted in a number of international data strategy papers.

UKOLN also works closely with a number of other key organisations, and I serve on a range of international Committees and Boards. From May 2008, I have been a member of the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure. I am also a member of the NSF-funded DataOne External Advisory Board. In the UK, I serve on the UK ESRC Research Resources Board and attend the JISC Support for Research Sub-Committee.

I regularly give international conference Keynotes and more information is given here in the list of selected publications and presentations.