Australia's Information Future

Innovation and knowledge management for the 21st century

Higher Education Division

Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs

99/5

December 1999

Evaluations and Investigations Programme Higher Education Division Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs

©Commonwealth of Australia 1998
ISBN 0 642 23951 7
ISBN 0 642 23952 5 (online)
DETYA No. 6417HERC99A

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without permission from AusInfo. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be addressed to the Manager, Legislative Services, AusInfo, GPO Box 84, Canberra ACT 2601.

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs.

Preface

Mr Michael Gallagher

First Assistant Secretary
Higher Education Division
Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs
Canberra

Introduction

I was delighted to be invited to open the workshop, Australia’s Information Future, Innovation and knowledge management in the 21st century. This gathering was organised to investigate, evaluate and develop national strategies for Australia to provide information resources for its research community in a time of rising costs, dominance of overseas publishers and the migration from print to electronic production and distribution of scholarly literature.

The Commonwealth’s interest

In co-funding the workshop with the Australian Research Libraries Fighting Fund, the Department acknowledged that the discussion of this issue is particularly urgent at this time. The preliminary readings distributed for the workshop (see Appendix C) highlight the urgency and extent of the problem. We are now looking to solutions.

The Commonwealth’s interest is to assist and support the sector to find those solutions. To that end, a number of investigative studies have been recently commissioned by the Department to contribute to the development of the higher education information infrastructure. A study into best practice in Australian academic libraries and comparable overseas countries is currently underway. This study is also linked to a more general study into the development and trialing of benchmarking criteria for Australian universities.

The Minister recently funded a major project to develop a business model for the development of Cooperative Information Centres in three subject disciplines, agriculture, chemistry and philosophy. The project is being managed by the Council of Australian University Librarians, the Academies, CSIRO, the Committee of Australian University Directors of Information (CAUDIT), the Australian
Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) and the National Library of Australia. It has been called the Janus project after the Roman god of doorways. We hope it will be far-sighted in its outcomes.

In addition to this investigative work, a number of academic teams have been funded under the Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Scheme to develop information infrastructure for the higher education sector.

I mention these projects to emphasise the fact that a number of initiatives are underway and also to highlight the need to ensure that these projects contribute strategically and positively to the national information infrastructure. This is a key challenge for all the parties involved in the creation, control, dissemination and application of scholarly information.

The earlier-mentioned Janus project focuses on how scholarly information is acquired and accessed. The concerns of this workshop were more directly concerned with the creation, publication and distribution of scholarly information. I hope that the proceedings of this workshop will contribute to development of solutions to the issues and concerns raised. 

A national issue

Access to scholarly information within Australia is not only an issue for the Academies, for research organisations and for libraries. It is a national issue. The public investment in research and research training in Australia is significant. Of Australia’s expenditure on research and development totalling $8.7 billion in
1996–97, for example, the public sector expenditure on research and development comprised 51 per cent of the total, with a further 47 per cent invested by the private sector and 2 per cent by the private non-profit sector. 

It is in the national interest that the product of that investment in both innovative development and published research be widely available in a cost-effective way. In addition, Australian researchers need to have access to quality, international research publications to maintain Australia’s competitive research skills and innovative practice.

Changes in the research environment

There have been significant changes in the research environment over recent years. The Triennial Higher Education Funding Report identified two key influences on the research agenda and environment, globalisation and the rapid advances in information and communications technologies. 

Knowledge itself, and how it is created, controlled, disseminated and applied will be a key factor distinguishing the strongest economies and most robust societies in the new millennium. Establishing an innovation culture in Australia which makes the best use of national and international information networks, encourages creativity in all forms of research, promotes collaboration between university researchers and industry and disseminates the outcomes of research to the wider community, is critical to Australia’s long term economic growth, job creation and social well-being.

(p 109)

The higher education sector’s importance is still critical to Australia’s research performance. The sector accounted for 27 per cent of Australia’s R&D activity during 1994–95. The sector is a particularly significant player in relation to basic research. Universities also have a unique responsibility in relation to the training of new researchers. But it is not the only player.

University research is changing, with an impact on the creation, publication and distribution of research and scholarly information. In a world in which knowledge is rapidly expanding, universities have made strategic decisions to focus research in particular areas of strength. Increased competition between universities for limited funds and research grants has meant that universities look to their strategic alliances at the national and international level, and look to collaborative research and shared research infrastructure equipment and facilities. There has been an increasing emphasis on teamwork, exposure to industry and the applications dimension of research in research training. 

The environment is continuing to change and our discussion of the generation, control and dissemination of scholarly information has to take account of these changes. 

In the knowledge economy, the Academies and university researchers are losing their monopoly in knowledge production. Increasingly, the Academies and universities are becoming knowledge receivers and transformers of knowledge as well as generators of knowledge. 

In the world of scholarly information, a range of parties interact and form partnerships to develop, create and disseminate scholarly information via a range of national and international networks and publication vehicles. The parties include universities, industry, research organisations, academics, the Academies, researchers, students, librarians and publishers. All bring special interests and concerns to the issue. And all are part of the solution. Each of the parties I have listed above need to review its assumptions about its practice and change that practice if it is inhibiting a solution to knowledge management for the 21st century. 

I mentioned earlier the change from paper to electronic publishing. There are many issues here for our consideration, including additional cost, access, intellectual property and archival. In addition, in any discussion of electronic access to scholarly information, the Internet is blurring the roles of creators, suppliers and distributors of scientific information. With the advent of electronic commerce, publishers can deal directly with subscribers, bypassing the normal distribution routes, including libraries. 

A role for government

Overseas, a number of Government initiatives are of interest: A proposal to Canada’s Foundation for Innovation for the national site licensing for electronic journals and databases in identified fields at a cost of around $50 million; and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funding of university library infrastructure in the United Kingdom. The details of these programmes are described in these workshop papers.

In Australia the information sector has a good track record in collaboration and sharing of resources, through work to develop a national distributed collection, the work of CAUL and State collaborative ventures, such as CAVAL. However, there is a tension here between collaboration among university staff at a professional level, whether they be researchers or librarians, and competition between universities for Government resources and research funds. 

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