Current science and technology has produced more and more publically
accessible scientific data. However, little is known about how the open data
trend impacts a scientific community, specifically in terms of its
collaboration behaviors. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the
dynamics of scientific collaboration in the open data eScience environment via
a case study of co-author networks of an active and highly cited open data
project, called Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We visualized the co-authoring
networks and measured their properties over time at three levels: author,
institution, and country levels. We compared these measurements to a random
network model and also compared results across the three levels. The study
found that 1) the collaboration networks of the SDSS community transformed from
random networks to small-world networks; 2) the number of author-level
collaboration instances has not changed much over time, while the number of
collaboration instances at the other two levels has increased over time; 3)
pairwise institutional collaboration become common in recent years. The open
data trend may have both positive and negative impacts on scientific
collaboration.Comment: iConference 201
