Part 1: Overview of Literature

An overview of past research that is relevant to e-Infrastructures includes:

1. The changing relationship between science and society. This has been addressed in the literature under the labels of “Post-Normal Science” (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993), “Mode 2” (Gibbons et al., 1994), or the “Triple Helix” (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000;

Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1997). Key issues here include that researchers may have to have a more responsive way to address social problems which, moreover, are increasingly complex and face the constraint of diminishing research funding.

2. The shifting landscape of research towards new regions of the world (such as China) and the globalization of research (Leydesdorff & Wagner, 2007; Leydesdorff & Zhou, 2005).

1 The principal authors of this section are: Kathryn Eccles, Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder

Page 5 3. The increasing need for multi-institutional, large teams, and online collaboration (Wuchty

et al.2007).

4. Policy documents outlining visions and needs related to e-Infrastructures. We will not try to summarize or reproduce key points here (these can be found in the documents listed, and they will be discussed in the roadmap), but to present only salient highlights.

This review will not go into detail of the background of changes in the research system in depth, as it can be assumed that it will be familiar – except insofar as it bears on the question of e-Infrastructures.

The first trend to note is simply the rising importance of team-based research and

collaboration. Research is increasingly taking place in larger teams, and team efforts have a greater impact compared with individual efforts, or those of smaller groups, when measured by citations. This applies not just to the natural sciences, but also to social sciences and only to a somewhat lesser extent, to the humanities (Wuchty, Jones and Uzzi, 2007). Several reports have shown that the importance of scientific collaboration has grown in the last 25 years (European Commission, 2003; Narin, Stevens, & Whitlow, 1991; National Science Board, 2004). Growth rates vary by academic domain, but the overall trend is ubiquitous and visible for local as well as international collaborations, disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary collaborations, and those in the public research sector as well as university-industry collaboration.

These trends have created pressure for significant investment in technologies that support distributed research and collaboration. e-Infrastructures are being rapidly developed and deployed worldwide and across the European Research Area (ERA) to support team-based research. The European Commission is the main driver of these infrastructures in Europe through the Framework Programmes. In FP6 and FP7, this included supporting large

networking and Grid infrastructures such as GEANT and EGEE, as well as domain specific ones such as BioinfoGRID, and projects developing high-performance computing such as DEISA.

ESFRI (The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), EGEE II, and many others are carrying this work forwards.

There are now a number of bodies that address policy-related issues relevant to

e-Infrastructures, such as the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG). There are also some initiatives that are just emerging or being planned, such as the design study for European Grids (EGI). Finally, there are a number of initiatives funded by national research funding bodies and initiatives beyond the ERA such as the UK £250 million (over 5 years) e-Science programme that started in 2000 (Hey & Trefethen, 2003), and the German D-Grid initiative starting in 2005 (see Schroeder, den Besten, & Fry, 2007, for a comparison of the initiatives).

Outside of Europe the initiatives of the US National Science Foundation through its Office of Cyberinfrastructure should be mentioned; these gained considerable momentum after the

‘Atkins Report’ was published in 2003 (Atkins et al., 2003). Significant funding in the US is directed to cyberinfrastructure development and deployment. Outside of the US and Europe, smaller, but by no means negligible efforts are being undertaken in countries such as China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Some European efforts are already being coordinated with these (for example, EUChinaGRID), and such links will need to be increasingly coordinated in the future.

These investments in e-Infrastructures have produced without doubt some important advances towards realising Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision of a “memex”: a “device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” (Bush, 1996, p. 43 [reprint]). However, there are still many issues that need to be resolved to make globally distributed, collaborative and multidisciplinary science (science will be used in what follows to encompass humanities) a reality and to ensure that the

consequences are contributing to scientific progress. The key difficulties here, as argued in a number of seminal publications, are social as much as they are technical: for example, the

Page 6 collaboration that is typical of e-Infrastructures or e-Research, especially across institutional boundaries, remains fraught with difficulties, perhaps even more so than collaboration across disciplinary boundaries (Cummings & Kiesler, 2005; David & Spence, 2003). Increasingly global collaboration requires further institutional underpinnings (Drori, Meyer, Ramirez and Shofer, 2003).

Moreover, high expectations on tools supporting distributed collaboration have often been disappointed and as a result, domain scientists have become critical of the promises of computer scientists and developers. For instance, case studies and descriptions of different tools for on-line meetings and remote collaboration suggest that there are still several technical shortcomings relating to hardware and software, and that the technical staff and users’ proficiency with information and communication technologies is somewhat limited (Finholt, Rocco, Bree, Jain, & Herbsleb, 1998; Mark, Grudin, & Poltrock, 1999; Olson & Olson, 2002; Sanderson, 1996). The challenge is therefore not only to remove the technical

deficiencies and constraints, but also to convince and prove to scientists that adopting them, investing the time to learn how to use them, and even changing established work routines to integrate them, is beneficial and leads to better science in the end.

e-Infrastructure has thus far emphasized technology – shared and distributed computing tools and resources – yet it is clear that the social pressures on science for more distributed collaboration and access to shared and distributed tools resources will increasingly put organizational, rather than technical issues at the top of the agenda. As e-Infrastructures become more widespread, it will be important to assess critically to what extent they are living up to the challenge of supporting collaboration and distributed research, and if they have been able to address the problems of distributed collaboration not just technically - but also socially. Social science can help address challenges common to other disciplines,

contributing an understanding of how humans adopt and use e-Infrastructure, identifying the organizational and market mechanisms that create the best incentive structure for the development of e-Infrastructure, and the impact of e-Infrastructure on the economic, social and behavioural framework of society.

In different disciplines, e-Infrastructures are at different stages of maturity in terms of technologies and organization-building. The humanities have adopted e-research in different ways depending on the discipline (Nentwich, 2003). In the US, for example, it was found that 6% of humanities research was based on more complex forms of networked research and digital tools (Frischer et al. 2006, p. 4). However, the policy group which undertook this study recommended that construction of e-Infrastructures should be based on current practices that operate within existing research traditions, rather than training researchers to become ‘new users’ of tools developed through means and expertise that is external to existing practices.

Finally, the design and use of advanced Internet and Grid technologies in the social, natural and computer sciences as well as the humanities are reconfiguring not only how researchers obtain and provide data resources and other forms of evidence, but also what they and the public can access and know; not only how they collaborate, but with whom they collaborate;

not only what computer-based services they use, but also from whom they obtain services (Gläser, 2003; Hilgartner, 1995). Scientific networks and communities need time to reshape and adjust to these broader social changes.

The challenges to developing and making use of e-Research Infrastructures are thus as much social, legal, political and economic as they are technical. Some of these non-technical issues have already been partially addressed for some aspects of Infrastructures and particular e-Research projects. For example, some of the European activities worth mentioning are:

• Intellectual property issues: ESFRI has addressed this with workshops and including experts within each project, and Burk (2007) has clarified some of the issues

• Data sharing: Axelsson and Schroeder (2009) have identified the issues for Sweden, a country with uniquely favourable conditions for data sharing

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• Uptake among user communities: the AVROSS project has surveyed the catalysts and barriers for social scientists and humanities researchers to use e-infrastructures (AVROSS 2007a, 2007b).

• Business models, including the sustainability of e-Infrastructures, are addressed, for example, in BEINGRID (http://www.beingrid.com/).

• Another issue that needs to be addressed are the effects of requirements for depositing and sharing data on research. This is also a longer-term issue which involves the IP of databases (Wouters and Schröder, 2002, 2003; Borgman 2007).

Data and resource sharing are linked to wider issues. There is a link between trust and public understanding (or perception of) research and how researchers ‘trust’

in their data and make it more widely accessible.

Activities outside of Europe and in particular in the US also constitute part of the knowledge base on e-infrastructures and need to be monitored and evaluated in regard to their European applicability. The Atkins Report (Atkins et al., 2003) is a milestone in the advancement of Cyberinfrastructure in the US and the Berman & Brady Report provides an extension to the social sciences (Berman & Brady, 2005). The Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project at the University of Michigan has investigated the technical and behavioural principles of distributed collaboration (http://www.scienceofcollaboratories.org/). Nevertheless, since

e-Infrastructures span many academic disciplines and institutions across different national research policy settings, it has been difficult to share information across initiatives and thus develop best practice.