The partners in the FutureTDM consortium share the ambition behind the EC’s call to develop policy and legal frameworks to reduce the barriers of TDM uptake and with it, promote the awareness of TDM opportunities across Europe. As a result, the consortium offers a concept that not only focuses on the required identification, assessment and analysis of current TDM obstacles, but also creates a practitioner-driven emphasis through engagement workshops and discussions. The consortium recognises that this topic is closely linked with the EINFRA-1 call Managing, preserving and computing with big research data, and thus will ensure strong connections with the EINFRA partners to guarantee a holistic approach to knocking down the barriers that are inhibiting TDM. An outcome of the FutureTDM project will include, guidelines that offer informed recommendations to practitioners from various disciplines, and propose solutions to overcome legal and policy barriers impeding TDM opportunities. Additionally, the project will create an online Collaborative Knowledge Base and Open Information Hub that will facilitate data-driven innovation through creative knowledge exchange and repositories of tools to address the gap in TDM skills across different areas.
An evaluation of the current state of TDM quickly reveals that there are several potential challenges to overcome if Europe is to address the gap in competitiveness in this area. Consortium members, LIBER and the British Library have already been involved in timely and insightful preliminary stakeholder dialogue. In September 2013, LIBER organised a workshop which brought stakeholders from science, policy, publishing, innovation, education and industry together in order to identify the issues blocking the potential of TDM. These issues ranged from the lack of legal certainty, the restrictiveness and lack of scalability of licences provided by publishers, a gap in skills, and lack of infrastructure. The following section identifies some key issues as well as the anticipated methodologies in the FutureTDM project to address these challenges.