TOWARDS INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR E-SCIENCE: The Scope of the Challenge

The three-fold purpose of this Report to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Research Councils (UK) is to: • articulate the nature and significance of the non-technological issues that will bear on the practical effectiveness of the hardware and software infrastructures that are being created to enable collaborations in e- Science; • characterise succinctly the fundamental sources of the organisational and institutional challenges that need to be addressed in regard to defining terms, rights and responsibilities of the collaborating parties, and to illustrate these by reference to the limited experience gained to date in regard to intellectual property, liability, privacy, and security and competition policy issues affecting scientific research organisations; and • propose approaches for arriving at institutional mechanisms whose establishment would generate workable, specific arrangements facilitating collaboration in e-Science; and, that also might serve to meet similar needs in other spheres such as e- Learning, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Healthcare. In carrying out these tasks, the report examines developments in enhanced computer-mediated telecommunication networks and digital information technologies, and recent advances in technologies of collaboration. It considers the economic and legal aspects of scientific collaboration, with attention to interactions between formal contracting and 'private ordering' arrangements that rest upon research community norms. It offers definitions of e-Science, virtual laboratories, collaboratories, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative e-Science activities which is implemented to classify British e-Science pilot projects and contrast these with US collaboratory projects funded during the 1990s. The approach to facilitating inter-organizational participation in collaborative projects rests upon the development of a modular structure of contractual clauses that permit flexibility and experience-based learning.

Managing Operating Procedures in Distributed Collaborative Projects

In recent years, large distributed collaborative projects have become very prominent in scientific research, allowing exchanges between laboratories located in different institutions and countries and between various domains of competence. Particularly the work on nanotoxicity – a field which has only been under investigation for a few years and is still lacking regulatory framework – highlighted the need for well-controlled methods, as well as rules for the handling and disposal of used materials. To obtain comparable and reproducible results of experiments conducted in a distributed context, the standardisation and proper documentation of the applied methods is crucial. The European project NanoDiaRA, whose aim is to develop nanoparticles and biomarkers for the early diagnosis of inflammatory disease, faces this situation as it involves 15 European partners and brings together different scientific cultures and professional backgrounds. Protocols especially developed for Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles and a management system were designed and implemented within the NanoDiaRA project to fulfil those needs. The main goals were the establishment of standardised Standard Operating Procedures assuring transparency and reproducibility and the provision of access to these protocols to every project partner, as well as their clear allocation to carry out precise measurements and production steps

Inquiry-based learning in the arts: a meta-analytical study

This report summarises learning about inquiry-based learning (IBL) in the arts and humanities disciplines at the University of Sheffield during the period in which the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) has been in operation. It draws upon impact evaluation data from curriculum development projects that have been funded by CILASS in departments in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

A Web-based multimedia collaboratory. Empirical work studies in film archives

This report represents the latest study in the activity on Ecological Information Systems conducted in the Center for Human Machine Interaction situated at Ris National Laboratory and the University of Aarhus. The purpose of this activity is to give a description of the characteristics of work domains that will serve to outline the general context of concern to design of collaboratories. In addition, a set of preliminary implications for the design of a collaboratory are derived from the cognitive work analysis. To anticipate, further research on this approach to the design of collaboratories will show how the preceding analysis is likely to lead to a novel theoretical framework, called Ecological Collaborative Information Systems (ECIS), required for the design of collaboratories. The intention is to illustrate how the general principles of ECIS can be instantiated to develop a concrete design product: A crossdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboratory to support customer service and professional research in archives. A web based Collaboratory Numerous valuable historic and cultural films and their sources are scattered in various national archives. Knowledge and usage of the multinational film material are severely impeded by access problems. To fully exploit the cultural film heritage internationally, a high degree of cross-disciplinary and international collaboration among professionals working with the film media is required. The Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material (Collate) is intended to foster and support collaboration on research, cultural mediation and preservation of films through a distributed multimedia repository. The collaboratory will provide webbased tools and interfac..

Designing Institutional Infrastructure for E-Science

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more dependent upon access to, and sharing of digital research data. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate committed in 2005 to a major research funding initiative, “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standard middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science—through the collaborative activities supported by the "cyberinfrastructure," if it is to be achieved, will be the result of a nexus of interrelated social, legal, and technical transformations.e-science, cyberinfrastructure, information sharing, research

Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge

What will researchers be publishing in the future? Whilst there is little question that the Web will be the publication platform, as scholars move away from paper towards digital content, there is a need for mechanisms that support the production of self-contained units of knowledge and facilitate the publication, sharing and reuse of such entities.

 In this paper we discuss the notion of _research objects_, semantically rich aggregations of resources, that can possess some scientific intent or support some research objective. We present a number of principles that we expect such objects and their associated services to follow