This is being presented by Brian Gilmore.

The JISC Support for Research Committee – fills gap between research councils – can provide service required to support research, which is not research in itself.

Currently Research is often done in ‘research council silos’ – and at insitutional level usually also done in silos. Often money is spent by the ‘principal investigator’ – without any reference to others.

Some research has too much infrastructure for a research council, and too much research for JISC.
Much of the time research funding results in the principal investigator, or department, investing in ‘local’ (rather than institutional) solutions (typified by running research infrastructure on a PC underneath your desk).

So – JSRC started working on the concept of ‘E-Infrastructure’ – the first element was the ‘VRE’ – Virtual Research Environment. In 2004, HEFCE GAVE £10M IN ‘CAPITAL’ MONEY TO THE JISC FOR:

ID Management (UK Federation)
VREs

In 05/06 JISC was awarded a further £81m (by HEFCE and HEFCW) for:
Super Janet5
Digitisation
E-Learning
(plus others …)

At the same time the OSI (Office of Science and Innvoation) – published report Science and Innovation INvestment – including a national e-infrastructure for report. This will advise the JISC, and Research Councils on forward planning (there are 6 sub-groups, with some reports on the NESC website

JISC now in phase 2 of VRE – 4 bids have been funded

VRE phase 1 – was technology focussed, experimental
VRE phase 2 – is more user and practice focused, looking to move towards ‘service’

Looking for Collaboration, Supporting small and large-scale research.

I can’t help thinking about this JISC approach compared to the North Carolina Virtual Computing lab described by the previous speaker. To some extent it feels like JISC when challenged to help develop e-infrastructure to support research does it by funding doing Silos on a large scale. This is probably a bit unfair – but where JISC has a real impact on my day-to-day work is where it produces a service, not where is funds projects. In the long term, I know these projects inform my work – but isn’t this ‘research’? Overall, I feel that JISC is in the situation of both being a service provider, and a funding body – and I don’t see why we try to squeeze both roles into a single organisation…

Some interesting stuff on Grid Services and Tools – National Grid Service – which sounds like a real step forward – this does feel much more like a real rationalisation of resource to support research.

Finally some stuff on the Identity Project, in which RHUL is a partner.