[A2k] Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing

[Carolina Almeida Antunes Rossini]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
  " Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing
<http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/cyberinfrastructure-for-=
knowledge-sharing/>
 *John Wilbanks*, Scientific Commons

Knowledge sharing and scholarly progress

Knowledge sharing is at the root of scholarship and science. A hypothesis i=
s
formulated, research performed, experimental materials designed or acquired=
,
tests run, data obtained and analyzed, and finally a publication. The
scholar writes a document outlining the work for dissemination in a
scholarly journal.

If it passes the litmus test of peer review, the research enters the canon
of the discipline. Over time, it may become a classic with hundreds of
citations. Or, more likely, it will join the vast majority of research, wit=
h
less than two citations over its lifetime, its asserted contributions to th=
e
canon increasingly difficult to find =96 because, in our current world,
citations are the best measure of relevance-based search available.

But no matter the fate of an individual publication, the system of
publishing is a system of sharing knowledge. We publish as scholars and
scientists to share our discoveries with the world (and, of course, to be
credited with those discoveries through additional research funding, tenure=
,
and more). And this system has served science extraordinarily well over the
more than three hundred years since scholarly journals were birthed in
France and England.
The information technology revolution: missed connections and lost
opportunities

Into this old and venerable system has come the earthquake of modern
information and communication technologies. The Internet and the Web have
made publication cheap and sharing easy =96 from a technical perspective. T=
he
cost of moving, copying, forwarding, and storing the bits in a single
scientific publication approach zero.

These technologies have created both enormous efficiency gains in
traditional industries (think about how Wal-Mart uses the network to
optimize its supply chains) and radical reformulation of industry (
Amazon.com in books, or iTunes in music). Yet the promise of enormous
increases in efficiency and radical reformulations have to date failed to
make similar shattering changes to the rate of meaningful discovery in many
scientific disciplines.

For the purposes of this article, I focus on the life sciences in
particular. The problems I articulate affect all the scientific disciplines
to one extent or another =96 but the life sciences represent an ideal
discussion case. The life sciences are endlessly complex and the problems o=
f
global health and pharmaceutical productivity such an enormous burden that
the pain of a missed connection is personal. Climate change represents a
problem of similar complexity and import to the world, and this article
should be contemplated as bearing on research there as well, but my topic i=
s
in the application of cyberinfrastructure to the life sciences, and there
I'll try to remain."

For the complete article, go to:
http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/cyberinfrastructure-for-k=
nowledge-sharing/