Pure UK user group meeting in Birmingham

Last Friday (1 Feb) I participated as an observer in the second day of the Pure UK user group meeting in Birmingham (by kind permission of the outgoing Chair, Anna Clements). I’m planning an update to the Adoption of CERIF in Higher Education Institutions in the UK study and thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up with some key people, which it was. It was interesting (although perhaps not surprising) that CERIF hardly got a mention, apart from by Anna (which appeared to be the norm!). CERIF is assumed as an underlying standard, but research managers have more important issues to engage with – such as REF…

Given the number of Pure users in the UK (21), it’s now a large group, with several working groups taking forward key issues outside meetings. Two members of staff from Atira participated – there was an good working atmosphere reflecting the positive relationships with Atira which institutions had previously reported.

Working groups reported on:

• OA and repositories – including connectors for Scopus/WoS, APCs, work on OA metadata in CERIF (and with CASRAI)
• data sets – minimal metadata as short term goal, with broader aims in long term; data sets are next big thing after REF!
• student data – most institutions don’t allow students to update their own profile in the CRIS (because of the resource requirement)
• activity data – work on UI, parallel CASRAI work
• web services – as another interface to institutional data