This paper examines how two contrasting academic publishers are responding to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 to innovate their services. Our findings highlight the need to take seriously the role of publishers in the move towards a vision of more rapid and open scholarly communication and to understand the factors that shape their role as intermediaries in the innovation pathways that may be needed to achieve it.

The work of the Jisc Managing Research Data programme is – along with the rest of the UK higher education sector – taking place in an environment of increasing pressure on research funding. In order to justify the investment made by Jisc in this activity – and to help make the case more widely for the value of investing time and money in research data management – individual projects and the programme as a whole must be able to clearly express the resultant benefits to the host institutions and to the broader sector. This paper describes a structured approach to the measurement and description of benefits provided by the work of these projects for the benefit of funders, institutions and researchers. We outline the context of the programme and its work; discuss the drivers and challenges of gathering evidence of benefits; specify benefits as distinct from aims and outputs; present emerging findings and the types of metrics and other evidence which projects have provided; explain the value of gathering evidence in a structured way to demonstrate benefits generated by work in this field; and share lessons learned from progress to date.

Research and higher education are facing an on-going transformation of practice resulting in the need for effective collaboration and sharing of resources within and across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Portal technologies and portal-based virtual research and learning environments (VREs and VLEs) already have become standard infrastructures within a large number of research communities and institutions. From 2004, a series of research and development projects began to ask the question whether an open source videoconferencing and collaboration system could be used as a complete, or as a part of, VRE. This study presents the evolution of these projects and at the same time, describes the definition of a VRE and their future possible integration. The OneVRE portlet integration project attempted to create missing components, including adding secure and universal identity management. This moves the idea of shared data to a different level by creating a new administrative domain that is outside the control of a single local institution portal and resolves certain administrative virtual organizations problems. We explain some of the hurdles that still need to be overcome to make this venture truly successful, when a complete toolkit can be designed for the researcher of the future.

The aim of this work was to scope the community for needs, raise awareness and encourage adoption of new social simulation models and tools developed in the National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) and gather findings, establish contacts, and build capacity for future activities.

Management and curation of digital data has been becoming ever more important in a higher education and research environment characterised by large and complex data, demand for more interdisciplinary and collaborative work, extended funder requirements and use of e-infrastructures to facilitate new research methods and paradigms. This paper presents the approach, technical infrastructure, findings, challenges and outlook (including future development within the successor project, MiSS) of the ‘MaDAM: Pilot data management infrastructure for biomedical researchers at University of Manchester’ project funded under the infrastructure strand of the JISC Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) programme. MaDAM developed a pilot research data management solution at the University of Manchester based on biomedical researchers’ requirements, which includes technical and governance components with the flexibility to meet future needs across multiple research groups and disciplines.

Ontologies – a form of structured and logically related knowledge or classification hierarchy embedded in a computer system – are regarded by many scientists as having enormous promise for the consistent use and re-use of data. To realise this promise, however, is not straightforward. In this paper, based on ethnographic observation, we argue that the challenges for ontology building are ‘social’ as much as they are technical. By this we mean the routine work undertaken in the building process and the problems and difficulties entailed can be understood in terms of the practices of knowledge workers and the practical nature of ‘sorting things out’. Getting a better sense of how, in practise, this work gets done gives a sense of the main challenges of building successful ontologies and how this impacts on the design of tool support. In considering the practices of one group in particular, we try to show how, for members, the technical problems of determining what classification structure is appropriate, and what its boundaries might be, depend substantially on assumptions about the ‘community’ and its interests and purposes. This ‘turn to the social’ has ramifications for the understanding of ontology building and use. Specifically, ‘modelling’ approaches to ontology building tell us little about the practical organisation of the work and how this relates to the prospect of successful sharing. Ethnographic enquiry may reveal important issues that are otherwise missed.

In this paper we use a case study of a project to create a Web 2.0-based, Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for researchers to share digital resources in order to reflect on the principles and practices for embedding eResearch applications within user communities. In particular, we focus on the software development methodologies and project management techniques adopted by the project team in order to ensure that the project remained responsive to changing user requirements without compromising their capacity to keep the project 'on track', i.e. meeting the goals declared in the project proposal within budget and on time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the project team, whose members are distributed across multiple sites (and often mobile), exploit a repertoire of coordination mechanisms, communication modes and tools, artefacts and structuring devices as they seek to establish the orderly running of the project while following an agile, user-centred development approach.

This paper is a first attempt to describe and compare the adoption of e-Infrastructure across the UK, continental Europe, and the USA in the social sciences and humanities. A survey of early adopters identified three differences across these countries, each potentially affecting adoption: funding approaches, the technical configuration of projects, and research support. Our findings also suggest that the sustainable adoption of e-Infrastructure co-varies with the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the involvement of other people in the adoption decision.

Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.

This paper is a first attempt to describe and compare the adoption of e-Infrastructure across the UK, continental Europe, and the USA in the social sciences and humanities. A survey of early adopters identified three differences across these countries, each potentially affecting adoption: funding approaches, the technical configuration of projects, and research support. Our findings also suggest that the sustainable adoption of e-Infrastructure co-varies with the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the involvement of other people in the adoption decision.

Over the past 15 years, the web has transformed the way we seek and use information. In the last 5 years in particular a set of innovative techniques – collectively termed ‘web 2.0’ – have enabled people to become producers as well as consumers of information. It has been suggested that these relatively easy-to-use tools, and the behaviours which underpin their use, have enormous potential for scholarly researchers, enabling them to communicate their research and its findings more rapidly, broadly and effectively than ever before. This report is based on a study commissioned by the Research Information Network to investigate whether such aspirations are being realised. It seeks to improve our currently limited understanding of whether, and if so how, researchers are making use of various web 2.0 tools in the course of their work, the factors that encourage or inhibit adoption, and researchers’ attitudes towards web 2.0 and other forms of communication. Context: How researchers communicate their work and their findings varies in different subjects or disciplines, and in different institutional settings. Such differences have a strong influence on how researchers approach the adoption – or not – of new information and communications technologies. It is also important to stress that ‘web 2.0’ encompasses a wide range of interactions between technologies and social practices which allow web users to generate, repurpose and share content with each other. We focus in this study on a range of generic tools – wikis, blogs and some social networking systems – as well as those designed specifically by and for people within the scholarly community. Method: Our study was designed not only to capture current attitudes and patterns of adoption but also to identify researchers’ needs and aspirations, and problems that they encounter. We began with an online survey, which collected information about researchers’ information gathering and dissemination habits and their attitudes towards web 2.0. This was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of survey respondents to explore in more depth their experience of web 2.0, including perceived barriers as well as drivers to adoption. Finally, we undertook five case studies of web 2.0 services to investigate their development and adoption across different communities and business models. Key findings: Our study indicates that a majority of researchers are making at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools or services for purposes related to their research: for communicating their work; for developing and sustaining networks and collaborations; or for finding out about what others are doing. But frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. In deciding if they will make web 2.0 tools and services part of their everyday practice, the key questions for researchers are the benefits they may secure from doing so, and how it fits with their use of established services. Researchers who use web 2.0 tools and services do not see them as comparable to or substitutes for other channels and means of communication, but as having their own distinctive role for specific purposes and at particular stages of research. And frequent use of one kind of tool does not imply frequent use of others as well.

Until recent years, a focused and centralized strategy for the annotation, storage and curation of research data is something that has not been widely considered within academic communities. The majority of research data sits, fragmented, on a variety of disk structures (Desktops, network & external hard drives) and is usually managed locally, with little interest paid to policies governing how it is backed up, disseminated and organized for short or long term reuse. Recognition of how current practices and infrastructure present a barrier to research, has resulted in several recent academic programmes which have focused on developing comprehensive frameworks for the management and curation of research data1-3. Many of these frameworks (such as the Archer suite of e- Research tools1), however, are large and complex, and have an overreliance on new and novel technologies making them unwieldy and difficult to support. The paper discusses the development of a simpler framework for the management of research data through its full lifecycle, allowing users to annotate and structure their research in a secure and backed up environment. The infrastructure is being developed as a pilot system and is expected to work with data from approximately a dozen researchers and manage several Terabytes of data. The technical work is a strand of the MaDAM (Manchester Data Management) project at The University of Manchester which is funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme.1

By making research content more reusable, and providing a social infrastructure that facilitates sharing, the human aspects of the scholarly knowledge cycle may be accelerated and ‘time‐to‐discovery’ reduced. We propose that the key to this is the sharing of methods and processes. We present myExperiment, a social web site for discovering, sharing and curating Scientific Workflows and experiment plans, and describe how myExperiment facilitates the management and sharing of research workflows, supports a social model for content curation tailored to the researcher and community, and supports Open Science by exposing content and functionality to the users' tools and applications. Based on this, we introduce the notion of the Research Object—the work objects that are built, transformed and published in the course of scientific experiments—and suggest that by encapsulating methods with results we can achieve research that is more reusable and repeatable and hence rapid and robust. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Participation in online activities has become highly popular in contemporary society. There is evidence that the collection of technologies captured under the banner of Web 2.0 is changing the way we do research, facilitating communications between scientists and encouraging collaboration through sharing data. Research 2.0 (or Science 2.0) is the term commonly used to describe a platform, powered by Web 2.0 tools to support scientific and other research, for providing open access to information, allowing peer review, and the pooling of collective intelligence. myExperiment and Open Wet Ware are two important examples of such a platform.