Key Risk:
Collections are unavailable or intractable:
This was quoted as one of the key risks in the project plan. However, from initial conversations with publishers and other sources, the likelyhood of the project having too little data to work is rapidly diminishing.
Success Plan:
Success: The initial search, query and other compute-intensive services become over-subscribed from real demand.
Managed by: The service is hosted on Amazon EC2 and is designed to be scalable. If there is money left in the budget, the service could be transferred to a more heavy duty VM. Otherwise, part of the design is that anyone can setup and run the service as all the tools and data are open, so we could recommend to heavy users that they run a mirror instance locally to themselves.
Success: Bibliographic metadata from this project is begun to be used in production library management systems.
Managed By: Whilst we cannot affect the cataloguing processes by which the records are entered into a given institution’s system, we maintain URLs and provenance for all the records we provide. This enables those systems which reuse the data to be able to track and show the provenance for a given record, if they maintain a link to the source. We would also recommend that institutions or organisations that reuse the data to state openly that they do so, thereby increasing the profile of the project and of JISC, its funder.
Risk Assesment:
| Risk | Probability (1-5) |
Severity (1-5) |
Score (P x S) |
Action to Prevent/Manage Risk |
| Staffing | ||||
| Staff retention | 3 | 5 | 15 | Ensure staff are satisfied and challenged and have chance to give feedback by means of regular one-to-ones. Apply open management to ensure sharing of expertise thus enabling cover. |
| Key academic staff leave | 1 | 2 | 2 | There is sufficient in-depth coverage from expertise available in the university; recruit replacement |
| Technical | ||||
| Technical problems | 1 | 5 | 5 | Similar problems already solved; well-known experts on team |
| Difficulty in integrating tools in services and workflows | 1 | 4 | 4 | Use iterative development so as deliver at least a partial solution as opposed to nothing at all |
| OKF service not supplied | 2 | 4 | 8 | Move to other available platforms such as Talis connect commons,4store, Sesame |
| Hardware Failure resulting in loss of data | 2 | 4 | 8 | Use standard approaches to data and service backup, including automated backup and off-site replication |
| External suppliers | ||||
| Collections are unavailable or intractable | 2 | 5 | 10 | For catalaogues use other Open offerings (several are available, many are members of the OKF’s working group on bibliographic information). |
| Open Citations is not funded | 1 | 1 | 1 | Work with other citation experts |
| LEGAL | ||||
| Data protection infringement | 1 | 5 | 5 | Close consultation with University legal services such as UMIP, establish clear project staff guidelines w.r.t. commercial partners |
