Jisc and the British Library share an interest in the persistence and open access of the UK research record, and work together towards this aim. As the UK national library, the British Library is an integral part of the UK research infrastructure, a legal deposit library and a research organisation in its own right. Jisc is the digital agency for UK further and higher education and research, providing research infrastructure from the Janet network and cybersecurity to open science and research analytics. Where those missions coincide, both institutions are sharing experiences and intensifying collaborative dialogue to ensure that the new digital developments deliver the best results for the UK research community, our members, partners and users.
Repositories are now accepted as a core function of research organisations, to curate and share digital research outputs of all kinds and support open research. The BL and Jisc are working, so far as is practical, to align our development plans to maximise opportunities to cooperate in the areas of research repositories and preservation. We will, for example, work together on preservation workflows, on the interfaces between repository and preservation systems and metadata profiles, such as those for theses.
Looking further ahead, we will continue regular meetings between our experts in these areas, to identify further prospects for cooperation, possibly in cloud storage or in stronger operational relationships between our services.
We share a common belief in advancing open research, including ensuring that research remains available for scrutiny and reuse into the future, which underpins our collaboration. At the same time, we are aware that there is a lot to do to enable UK research organisations to meet this challenge. We hope that a focused collaborative effort between Jisc and the British Library will contribute to reaching this goal.
Neil Jacobs, Head of open science and research lifecycle, Jisc
Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services, British Library
