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Thanks Hugh, I spoke with BL colleagues on Friday, and expect a full response from them to the Open Mirror feasibility project due course. They might also want to comment publicly via this list, of course. And just to add that, if the Open Mirror were seen as worthwhile to pursue, Jisc would see itself as working in collaboration with others, depending on the use cases that are identified as priorities. Best wishes Neil -----Original Message----- From: Hugh Glaser [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 28 October 2013 11:07 To: Neil Jacobs Cc: <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Open Mirror? Going back to the original, because it is something of a new thread. Where is the British Library in all this? They, like other libraries, have a legal obligation to preserve publications in the UK. And it turns out they are now doing this for digital preservation. It may be that we should not rely on them for everything, but we should at least look at the limits of what the BL does, and relate it to any of their activity. And I think that the digital preservation of repository content comes well inside what we all expect the BL to do. I (through my government) am paying the BL a lot of money to do this. Why would I also (through JISC) pay more lots (sic) of money to do it? I never expected JISC to fund the physical collection of papers from UK academics when they were only on paper - that would have been bizarre. If the BL isn't doing what we want, in terms of gathering publications and making them available for scholarly access, then it is the BL that should be influenced to do it properly, not pay more money to mirror(!) the activity - that is bizarre. And if we really want to provide a mirror, then getting the data from the BL, rather than harvesting ourselves, should be the cheapest, most obvious way to do it. JISC's limited funds can be used to add other value that is outside the remit or budget of the BL, such as "smarts"; or [perhaps better still by facilitating a culture and infrastructure so that value-added services by commercial organisations can be made economically attractive. Sorry, I don't know if the BL are up for this level of interest yet, but they will be in the time it would take for anyone else to be able to do this. Best Hugh On 25 Oct 2013, at 16:07, Neil Jacobs <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Mainly of interest to UK folk, but perhaps more widely too: > > Jisc is conducting a feasibility study into the "Open Mirror", which would provide access for the world to the open access research outputs from UK researchers. It would be an aggregation of all UK Open Access content, based upon the network of institutional repositories in the UK. It might support better discovery and access, text-mining, business continuity, management information and preservation services. > > The current work is a feasibility study, implying no commitment by Jisc to proceed; it is to assess how practical and valuable an Open Mirror might be. The study runs to December 2013. It is a Jisc co-design project, in partnership with our co-design partners, principally Research Libraries UK and SCONUL representing the library community, but also UCISA and RUGIT, representing IT directors. > > If you'd like to comment on the idea of the open mirror, please see the full blog post here: > http://openmirror.jiscinvolve.org/wp/author/neilj/ > > Best wishes > Neil > > Neil Jacobs, Jisc. +44 (0)784 1951303 -- Hugh 023 8061 5652