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When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata -usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets -serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this (5) evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

Biodiversity is a data-intense science, drawing as it does on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth. This paper argues that as sets of heterogeneous databases are made to converge, there is a layering of values into the emergent infrastructure. It is argued that this layering process is relatively irreversible, and that it operates simultaneously at a very concrete level (fields in a database) and at a very abstract one (the coding of the relationship between the disciplines and the production of a general ontology). Finally, it is maintained that science studies as a discipline is able to (and should) make a significant contribution to the design of robust and flexible databases which recognize this performative character of infrastructure.

Access to and sharing of data are essential for the conduct and advancement of science. This article argues that publicly funded research data should be openly available to the maximum extent possible. To seize upon advancements of cyberinfrastructure and the explosion of data in a range of scientific disciplines, this access to and sharing of publicly funded data must be advanced within an international framework, beyond technological solutions. The authors, members of an OECD Follow-up Group, present their research findings, based closely ontheir report to OECD, on key issues in data access, as well as operating principles and management aspects necessary to successful data access regimes.

This article argues that the medical record is an important focus for sociological research. In medical work, the modem patient's body that Foucault has so aptly described is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work, and the medical record plays a crucial role in this production. It does not simply represent this body's history and geography; it is a central element in the material rewriting of these. Simultaneously, the record fulfills a core role in the production of a body politic. As the record is involved in the performance of the patient's body, it is also involved in the performance of the clinic in which that body comes to life. Finally, we argue that different records and different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, bodies politic, and bodies of knowledge. As organizational infrastructure, the medical record affords the interplay and coordination of divergent worlds. Seen as a site where multiple stories about patients and organizations are at stake, including the interoperability between these stories, the medical record becomes highly relevant both analytically and politically.In The Birth of the Clinic ([I9631 1973), Foucault argues that the classical, premodern "medicine of species" required a two-dimensional table as an intermediary between the individual body and medical knowledge. The table would translate individual symptoms, yielding the true nature of the disease by showing how symptoms fit into the eternal scheme of things. Symptoms were not the disease; they were pointers to this higher truth, which merely "precipitated'' in individual bodies, and which the table could decode. In contrast to the medicine of species, Foucault argues, the modern clinical gaze requires no such intermediary. Truth is no longer found and organized elsewhere in some grand nosological scheme but rather in the pathological processes of individual bodies. The gaze deciphers this truth by following the symptoms inward, eliciting signs, and differentiating the pathological reality that now is the disease.

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