The future of research communication
Lee Dirks, Microsoft

e-Science and Scholarly Communication—In the future, frontier research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of globally distributed groups of researchers needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to expensive, multi-national specialized facilities such as telescopes and accelerators or specialist data archives. There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research - from systems biology and bio-informatics to earth systems science and chemo-informatics. There will also be an explosion in the amount of scientific data collected in the next decade - 100's of Terabytes will be common in many fields. These requirements of scientific research in the future form the 'e-Science' agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary 'Cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this Cyberinfrastructure. Such an infrastructure must support the creation of light weight and dynamic 'Virtual Organizations' of researchers for many types of applications in science and engineering. A key part of this Cyberinfrastructure will also be services accessing digital repositories containing both scientific data and full-text publications. Open access in some form or other to these repositories is likely to underpin scientific research in the future and this talk will give some examples of open access repositories and speculate on the future of research libraries.

Session 1: How researchers really work today

A Day in the Life of a Research Scientist
Evelyn Jabri, ACS Chemical Biology

On an average day, the research professor is juggling multiple tasks. The scientist starts the day finding facts and images to enhance the lecture course they are teaching. They evaluate textbooks, instruments, techniques, prospective collaborators, graduate students and faculty candidates by "Googling them". They help their graduate student process data and determine if the recent result is the first observation of the phenomenon. They review the scientific literature through PubMed, CAS, ISI and Google searches to assess if their student has made a sufficient step forward to warrant a publication or grant. All the while, they are popping in and out of meetings and performing service activities for the department, college, and their scientific society. It's a daily whirlwind of activity where juggling deadlines is the key to success.

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How does a clinician-researcher really work in 2007?
John Hurst, University College London

As a physician I need rapid access to robust research and authoritative reviews that inform my clinical practice. As a researcher I wish to see my findings readily, rapidly and transparently submitted for peer-review and disseminated to others in ways that they can digest and debate. Computer technologies have revolutionised every stage of this process, from on-line grant applications to data collection and analysis, from manuscript preparation, submission and review to searching and accessing the work of others.

Current research behaviour in archaeology: a quantitative & qualitative assessment
Dan Hull, Council for British Archaeology

How do archaeological researchers do their research? This paper will attempt to answer that question by drawing on the results of a study carried out on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee, entitled 'StORe'. The StORe (Source to Output Repositories) Project aims to assess how researchers in a range of disciplines make use of electronic source repositories (containing data) and output repositories (containing publications). To what extent do they use online resources, and how does the possibility of linking between data and publication (and vice versa) affect their work patterns? What views do researchers hold of developments towards Open Access? Do they embrace the opportunities increasingly afforded to them of conducting research through online resources, or are researchers reluctant to deposit within and make use of the world wide web due to concerns over copyright, over-exposure of their research data and too much transparency within the research process? The results of the archaeology component of the StORe Project will be presented and some comparisons made with the six other disciplines surveyed. Finally, an eye will be cast towards the future of online resources for archaeological research: does research behaviour suggest that our efforts are best invested in the digital environment? If so, what forms should online publication resources take in the future?

Advanced Knowledge Technologies Project
Leslie Carr, University of Southampton

Dr Carr's background is as a researcher in distributed information systems (Hypermedia, Web, Semantic Web), which has led him to involvement in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies project to look at novel ways of gathering and using information within the research process.

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Researchers and the Information Infrastructure: the Services Researchers Use and Need
Michael Jubb, Research Information Network

This presentation will look at the key elements of the information infrastructure that researchers make use of in the course of their research, and how their behaviours and needs are changing. It will look at what we know (and what we do not know) about how researchers operate both as users and creators of information; how the environments in which they operate influence the ways in which they handle information; and at how information service providers are seeking to develop their services and to respond to researchers needs.

Session 2: The central role of data

How data differs by discipline
Christine Borgman, University of California, Los Angeles

A key theme of e-Research is distributed access to data. But what are data, to whom, when, for what purposes, and under what conditions will they be made accessible? All of these factors vary by discipline. The sciences generate their own data or use data produced by others for scientific purposes. The social sciences generate some of their own data and use data produced for non-research purposes by other parties (government records of demographics, econometrics, etc.). The humanities generate very little of their own data, instead relying on cultural artifacts. Texts can be literature to be read and data to be mined.

Social Science
Cormac Connolly, Economic and Social Research Council

Many of the biggest challenges facing us in the 21st century are social science issues, across a global landscape in which the distinctions between knowledge, information, and data are increasingly blurred. ESRC Society Today brings together a range of content and resources to allow social scientists, and the people who rely on the outcomes of their research, to better map the information environment in the social sciences - to track and find the facts they need.

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Streaming facts from scientific publications to the scientist
Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, European Bioinformatics Institute

Scientific literature is increasingly available in electronic form and early on after its acceptance for publication. Techniques to analyse the literature for contained facts are then applied to deliver individual facts directly to the scientist. This leads to the integration of the scientific literature into the infrastructure of existing IT data resources. This talk will explain how scientists in the biomedical domain profit from an infrastructure consisting of services for information extraction. All services automatically process the documents and interlink them with bioinformatics data resources. In addition they can be integrated into external IT solutions to directly couple experimental results with annotations from the scientific literature.

The Crystallography and Chemistry Research Data Lifecycle
Simon Coles, University of Southampton

Recent developments in scientific instrument hardware and a vast increase in computational processing power have seen an exponential increase in the rate and quantity of research data produced. This poses many problems with the effective capture and management of the data and despite advances in electronic publishing the traditional processes for dissemination are failing to keep up with this new pace of generation. The talk will outline the current problems with capturing and making available chemistry data and will present a model, based on institutional data repositories and harvester/aggregator services, for the changing landscape of the research data lifecycle in the field of chemical crystallography.

Session 3: New forms of interaction

The networked book
Ben Vershbow, Institute for the Future of the Book

Over the past two years, the Institute for the Future of the Book has been experimenting with a new publishing paradigm, "the networked book." The networked book is not a specific format or technical standard but rather a conceptual framework for moving beyond the stale discourse of "e-books" and "e-publishing" toward a more expansive inquiry into what the form and function of books could (or should) be in the network age. To explore the idea in practice, the Institute has run a series of online publishing experiments that adapt or combine common web technologies to create new kinds of books that foster direct interaction between author and reader and make the process of scholarship as visible as its product. Rethinking books as spaces for critical discussion and peer-to-peer collaboration naturally holds profound implications for peer review, pedagogy, scholarly research, and the role of scholarly presses. This presentation will give a brief survey of the Institute's networked publishing projects, suggesting their potential for broader application.

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Blogs
Sandra Porter, Geospiza Inc

Blogs allow scientists to communicate more freely with both their peers and the general public.? Through blogging, scientists can engage with a larger group of readers, publish information quickly, and present conclusions in a friendlier, more readable way.? Although it seems unlikely that the arduous process of publishing peer-reviewed articles will disappear, blogs eliminate many barriers and promote more direct communication as other scientists contribute to comment sections and participate in discussions.? In this talk, I will discuss scientific blogging and describe how this form of communication helps foster a sense of belonging in a world-wide scientific community.

Envisioning Cross-Cultural Grassroots Digital Spaces: Tagging, Folksonomies, Blogs and Beyond
Ramesh Srinivasan, University of California, Los Angeles

How can multiple traditions, contexts, and beliefs be integrated via online information systems without privileging one vs. another? Integrating multiple authorship in web spaces is certainly of great interest and emergent in the world of information architecture research and development. I will briefly explore three emergent systems of decentralized authorship: tagging, weblogs, and folksonomies. Each has presented powerful new opportunities in the creating of digital commons, yet each also maintains significant limitations. Finally, I will briefly touch on a reaction to such projects: my National Science Foundation-supported project ED2 - a study of how one may create a digital knowledge commons around cultural objects, authored by multiple, culturally diverse voices.

Do publishers have a role?
David Hoole, Nature Publishing Group

Publishers are developing innovative new approaches to support research communication in the Web 2.0 world. Specific projects at NPG and other relevant publishers will be reviewed. But is the Web 2.0 environment really that different? User-generated content has always been at the heart of scholarly communication, and so publishers should have skills that can be applied anew. We can identify where opportunities may lie, and explore how publishers will continue to add real value to the research communication process.

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