PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Quoting the e-Infrastructure home page of the FP7 ICT Research Unit of the European Commission: “The e-Infrastructures activity, as a part of the Research Infrastructures programme, focuses on ICT-based infrastructures and services that cut across a broad range of user disciplines. It aims at empowering researchers with an easy and controlled online access to facilities, resources and collaboration tools, bringing to them the power of ICT for computing, connectivity, storage and instrumentation. This allows for instant access to data and remote instruments, ’in silico’ experimentation, as well as the setup of virtual research communities (i.e. research collaborations formed across geographical, disciplinary and organizational boundaries).” In other words, e-Infrastructures support research infrastructures from the “virtual” perspective, by enabling community “actors” (researchers or their applications) to exchange their “resources” (research data and literature) by means of a controlled, regulated, digital environment. Specifically, researchers in the field of e-Infrastructure investigate solutions and methodologies enabling and facilitating the realization of e-Infrastructure platforms capable of supporting the activities of domain-specific research communities (e.g. Agriculture, ICT, Social Sciences). In general, e-Infrastructures can be considered as a combination of (i) established policies, standards and best practices and (ii) a set of technologies and tools, which together support an environment where researchers of a given domain can accomplish their daily activities in a collaborative and synergic fashion (Atkins et al., 2003; Ioannidis et al., 2005). The main purpose of this chapter is to report how researchers investigating in the area of e-Infrastructures organize their activities of “data and publication management” and themselves rely on research infrastructures to do so. Due to the early age of this field and its rather multidisciplinary computer science character, no well-established research infrastructure is available and researchers tend to follow “infrastructure-flavoured” solutions local to their organizations. As a consequence, the authors of this chapter (from the D-Lib research group at CNR, Italy and the MADGIK research group at the University of Athens, Greece) opted to approach this study by collecting a number of experiences from relevant stakeholders in the field in order to identify “local infrastructure” commonalities and “research infrastructure” desiderata. We shall first elaborate on the strategy adopted to run this investigation, based on questionnaire-driven interviews to a number of representative organizations in the field. Subsequently, we shall present the specific case narratives, before finally drawing a summary of the current status and elaborate on possible future challenges.