In my role as a member of the British Library Advisory Council, I was recently asked to present a few thoughts on how research infrastructure might change in response to the changing demands of academics. This post records my notes for that discussion. It does not record what I said to that committee on the day - and certainly does not imply that the British Library in any way endorses or subscribes to my views; but it does reflect what I believe is the necessary direction of travel in the provision of resources for academic research.
I have been asked to speak for a few minutes about
developments in academic research and the implications these might have for the
British Library; and where I really wanted to start was with a quick appreciation of
where we have come from.
It is important to remember that we are sitting at the
centre of what was a 200 year project to create a comprehensive – divided, but
universal - infrastructure for research and knowledge creation. All you have to do is walk down Museum Row –
from The Science Museum, to the Natural History Museum, to the V&A – each
with their active Higher Education equivalent research staff – to remember that we
inherited a powerful, cross disciplinary research infrastructure. Or look back to the old round reading room of
the British Library with its 400-odd volumes of an ever changing manuscript catalogue –
seeking to encompass all of human knowledge. Whatever your field, whatever you methodology,
the nineteenth and early twentieth century created an infrastructure in stone
and brick.
In the last fifty years much of this has either been
transformed, or else become increasingly redundant – catering for an ever
shrinking body of old-school scholars; while much of the effective
infrastructure that underpins research has moved elsewhere. Arguably 'Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine' (STEM) subjects, with their greater resources have led
the way in creating endless new data stores and distributed infrastructural
kit. And while buildings – like the
Crick Institute, or CERN – represent a fragment of a constant ongoing rebuilding of
intellectual infrastructure, they are just the tip of a much larger
transformation that has taken a new form.
Through repositories like Cern’s Zenodo project; through the
Genome project (with at the time, its seemingly huge demand for data storage),
with Gold Open Access science journals (built on commercial publishing models,
and incorporating their own data stores), with GitHub and with a collaborative
project-based approach to research, STEM has created a new distributed
knowledge infrastructure – because the older one failed first for their
disciplines.
In the process STEM has
largely side-stepped the brick and stone infrastructure along the way – in
particular the British Library. You will
not find a physicist or an astronomer in any of the Library’s reading
rooms. In other words the hardest end of STEM seems to me to have
cracked substantial elements of this conundrum, and left the other two thirds
of the research landscape – from the softer end of STEM, to social science,
business and economics, and the humanities, largely eating dust, and reliant on
an increasingly creaky twentieth century infrastructure.
So, in the first instance, it seems to me that we are
challenged to rethink ‘research’ data, and publication as a new form of
infrastructure. So, the Library – or
somewhere – needs to create a context in which notes and files, data stores of
all kinds can be shared and curated – in a digital form. And
this data, or data store, needs in turn to be tied directly to the public
commentary – or publication – built upon that data.
But in the process there is also something more subtle going
on. While STEM has led in a particular
direction, it has brought with it a particular style of research organisation,
which again changes the nature of the infrastructure required. All you have to do is look at the evolution
of the Research Councils UK – from its shared services centre, to an ever growing emphasis on
inter-disciplinary funding – and emphasis on large team projects, and the
training of Early Career Researchers to be ‘leaders’ – by which they mean
project heads – to see a direction of travel towards large teams of
‘laboratory-ish’ groups, fronted by media friendly ‘interpreters’. And of course, this
is all combined with a precipitate concentration of research funding on an ever
smaller number of ever more self-congratulatory institutions.
In other words, it seems to me that national research
culture – and in a more chaotic way, international infrastructure as well - is
faced with a twofold change. First,
there is a fundamental transformation in the most significant core of the
research ‘infrastructure’ from bricks and mortar, to online - to immediately
accessible data; with the tools to use it and ‘publish it’.
And second we are faced with a gradual, forced move towards
larger and more ‘laboratory-like’ forms of research, in which collaboration –
both virtual and face-to-face – are increasingly normal.
By way of a caveat, however, we are also faced with a
multi-generational lag in which every variety of lone and independent scholar
will want the same old, same old – to be available regardless of the cost.
All of which just leads me to believe that the evolving
nature of research – mainly that based in Higher Education – needs urgent attention in the
following areas.
- The shared curation and storage of data and research materials – building on STEM models, but made friendlier to different data types.
- We also need the tools to work with that data – and training that supports their use.
- We need to explore different validation and authorisation models for ‘publication’. At the moment we are allowing a multi-billion pound business to be built on national expenditure, and we need to reclaim elements of this – through new models of peer review and distribution. These in turn need to be tied to data – vertically integrated from data to experiment to commentary - and more amenable to collaboration – with a traceable development path through all of it.
- We also need a clearer commitment to non-HE researchers. We need to acknowledge that HE – as gatekeeper of research authority - forms part of the problem. And we need to keep a weather eye on the boundaries around who can research. The BL certainly needs to create an infrastructure for HE research, but it needs to be an infrastructure that is open to everyone.
In other words, and as usual, the British Library needs to remember that
it is a national machine for research and learning, committed to access to all
knowledge, for everyone who needs it; and to use these first principles to
navigate a remarkably complex and rapidly changing landscape.
We also need to remember, as William Gibson said: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’.
