Collaboration, and increasingly multidisciplinary collaboration across distances, is a fundamental and strategic component of the scientific research process. The importance of collaboration in the scientific research process has long been recognized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA. Its current policy is to fund the development or purchase of specialized scientific instruments in (not-for- profit) research labs across the USA and to help fund scientists to travel to those labs to collaborate and conduct scientific experiments using these specialized scientific instruments.

CSCW’00, December 2-6, 2000, Philadelphia, PA. ACM 1-58113-222-0/00/0012. Enabling Distributed Collaborative Science Tom Hudson1, Diane Sonnenwald2, Kelly Maglaughlin2, Mary Whitton1, and Ronald Bergquist2 1Department of Computer Science 2School of Information and Library Science University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Campus Box 3175, Sitterson Hall Campus Box 3360, Manning Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360 {hudson, whitton}@cs.unc.edu {dhs, maglk, bergr}@ils.unc.edu