Collaborative information management in scientific research processes

Abstract

Research is an incremental process that both generates and consumes diverse artifacts over its lifetime. A typical research lifecycle may involve creating experimental or observational data using multiple facilities or instruments; refining raw data into derived data to test hypotheses; publishing and presenting the findings in various formats. Each stage of this process commonly involves support systems with independent management; this however hinders e-scholarship as human mediation is required to track and access related research outputs. In this paper, we describe a collaborative research information management infrastructure based on STFC facilities. The pilot system uses the InteRCom peer-to-peer protocol to propagate typed links between digital contents spread across repositories. The resultant linked web of data offers a simple but versatile solution to the tracking of research outputs in context, as these semantically annotated links form a graph of citation and provenance which can be analyzed, traversed or aggregated according to the link resource or property of interest.

Evaluating the scientific impact of research infrastructures: The role of current research information systems

“…However, in spite of the need for evaluation, most projects dealing with RI and evaluation assess the RI content (i.e., data and documents), and do not consider the RI performance as an object of evaluation on itself. For instance, the initiative for collaborative research information management by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which "operates large scientific facilities to support experimental research in […] chemistry, materials science, and biochemistry (including) the ISIS neutron source, the Central Laser Facility and the Diamond synchrotron light source (with) large volumes of data and […] used each year by many thousands of experimental scientists from around the world" (Crompton, Matthews et al, 2012) focused on the description and linking of data, and not on the assessment of the infrastructures and facilities themselves.…”