APSR 2008

Brief update as I haven’t been able to log in…
Very good meeting today at Brisbane – in the Customs House which belongs to the University of Brisbane, Queensland [Sorry! Got it right lower :-)] overlooks the river. On APSR home page (Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) – run by Margaret Henty.
This is blogged after the eve nt so only impressions. (Gentle niggle again – please can we have internet access – certainly for speakers. So I didn’t blog as I went…) .
Australia has really got its act together on the e-infrastructure. It’s created repositories (not all full) and now the Australian National Data Service (couldn’t find a home page). It got pulled off track last year by trying to make the repositories an instrument of research management for the RQF (Australia’s answer the the UK Research Assessment Exercise).
Moral: If you try to use the repositories for things other than helping authors, then you will lose the authors.
This was a strong theme. If you don’t address what people need to do, then no technology or investment will save you. Australia is pragmatic and learns quickly. It means it can avoid the mistakes of putting lots of investment into cutting edge computer science and then wondering why no scientists go near it. Australia understands the need to concentrate on data. Have we learnt this in the UK? Not sure we have.
Off to Queensland University of Technology tomorrow – a shining light as early adopter of mandating Open Access deposition. To see if we have synergy in capturing chemistry data. And then the University of Queensland to talk about ORE.
More later
UPDATE… I can’t write a new post (cannot authenticate for some reason).  Just a few words to say I had a wonderful day first at QUT with Ray Frost (chemistry). Ray is a very prolific chemist – ca 1 paper /week – and we had very fruitful discussions with him and colleagues about how SPECTRa can help to capture data.
Then on the UQ by ferry to visit Jane Hunter and colleagues about ORE and ther impressively wid range of informatics projects.
Have to get up early yet again – this time to Canberra. This trip is exciting but hard work.
Hopefully more later.