On July 31 this happened:
> The Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon Julie Bishop
> MP, announced today six new initiatives that will support greater
> collaboration between researchers, both domestically and
> internationally.
> <http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/Bishop/2006/07/B001310706.asp>
One of the six initiatives is an extension to
[ICE](http://ice.usq.edu.au/), known as ICE-RS.
> **6. Integrated Content Environment for Research and Scholarship
> (ICE-RS)**
>
> Lead institution: University of Southern Queensland
>
> Funding recommended: \$196,000
>
> ICE-RS will create open standards based technical solutions to
> facilitate and encourage the efficient creation of flexible documents
> in the process of conducting and reporting on research. ICE-RS will
> deliver a research authoring environment that assists researchers to
> systematically create, structure, and manage their publications and
> reports, and aids the automation of research workflows. The project
> will build on existing work undertaken at the University of South
> Queensland, and The Australian National University along with
> contributions from the Regional Universities Building Research
> Infrastructure Collaboratively (RUBRIC) project.
This means funding equivalent to two full-time people for one year to
pilot ICE in a research context, and some money to travel to other
sites. We'll be looking for people writing theses at various stages of
completion (Hi Katie Cavanagh – you can be first!), papers, books and
chapters.
Why would authors want to use ICE?
# What ICE can/will do
ICE will offer:
1. A template that makes the technical aspects of authoring, preparing
a manuscript and submission easy.
2. Automated backup and version control via Subversion.
3. HTML and PDF conversion for all content with no effort.
4. The ability to run project intranets.
5. Distributed collaboration.
6. Best practice referencing and bibliographic support.
We'll be working on ways to manage bibliographies and citations that
will interoperate between Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org and with
online services.
7. Automated ingest into institutional repositories (IRs), such as
[USQ's ePrints](http://eprints.usq.edu.au/),
[Fez](http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/),
[DSpace](http://www.dspace.org/), or the [ARROW
repositories](http://www.arrow.edu.au/).
This project will give us the resources to add some basic infrastructure
to ICE. Notably:
1. Full-text search and metadata indexing for discovery and automated
browsing.
2. Annotation and discussion features.
3. Feeds (ATOM / RSS).
4. A first version of ICE on a server (until now it only runs on a
desktop computer with content kept on the server).
5. A plugin architecture that will be used for bibliographic support
and IR integration.
# Next steps
The next step is to organize the project team, which will take a couple
of weeks. Then we'll set up our tools and begin recruiting pilot users.
# Finally
How do you pronounce ICE-RS?
Well one of our senior colleagues says it is “ICE arse”.