Scholarly communication and the web

Introduction

The social process of sharing research results underpins the progress of research. For many decades our research has been published in journal articles, conference proceedings, books, theses and professional magazines. With increasing availability of tools to disseminate knowledge digitally, and with increasing participation in the digital world through widespread access to the Web, we are seeing this scholarly knowledge lifecycle become digital too. Although we have seen some welcome changes, including open access publishing which makes material free for all to read, the shared artefact in this lifecycle is predominantly still the academic paper. We might call this “Science 1.0”.

e-Science is taking us into the “Science 2.0” world where we have new mechanisms for sharing (Schneiderman 2008) but also new artefacts to share. The tooling of e-Science produces and consumes data, together with metadata to aid interpretation and reuse, and also the scripts and experiment plans that support automation and the records that make the results interpretable and reusable – our new forms of artefact include data, metadata, scripts, scientific workflows, provenance records and ontologies. Our tools for sharing include the array of collaboration tools from repositories, blogs and wikis to social networking, instant messaging and tweeting that are available on the Web today, though these are not always designed around the new artefacts nor do they always have the particular needs of the researcher in mind.

These are already the familiar tools of the next generation of researchers and their uptake may seem inevitable, though it may take time for them to be appropriated and embedded in research practice. But crucially the other driver for change is the evolution of research practice as more work is conducted in silico and as we pursue multidisciplinary endeavours in data-intensive science to tackle some of the biggest problems facing society, from climate change to energy.

In this chapter we look at emerging practice in collaboration and scholarly communication by focusing on a case study which exemplifies a number of the principles in the paradigm shift to Science 2.0 and gives us a glimpse into the future needs of researchers.

Myexperiment

myExperiment is an open source repository solution for the born-digital items arising in contemporary research practice, in particular in silico workflows (see the contribution by Fisher et al. ) and experiment plans (DeRoure et al . 2009). Launched in November 2007, the public repository (myexperiment.org) has established a unique collection of workflows and a diverse international user community. The collection serves both researchers and learners: ranging from self-contained, high value research analysis methods referenced by the journal publications that discuss the results of their use, to training workflows that encode routine best practice scientific analyses or illustrate new techniques for new kinds of research data.