The massive availability of networked information and communications technologies today allows us to change the ways we go about our daily working lives as well as the way we spend out leisure time. New ways of shopping, of staying in touch with colleagues and friends, of learning or of navigating places have emerged that are enabled by the ubiquitous electronic devices and networked services that have become available over the past few years. Similarly, as researchers we are today utilising computers in many ways, be it through the use of basic services such as email or the utilisation of the most advanced digital technologies enabling new research methods. No matter what discipline we work in, there are legitimate questions about what potential use we might make of these technologies and what the implications of such use might be.
Over the past decade, funding organisations such as the UK's research councils have funded efforts to make the most advanced information and communications technologies available to researchers and investments are made to develop persistent and sustainable infrastructures to underpin a widespread uptake of digital methods – the development of e-Research. What has been lacking, however, is the development of appropriate learning material such as textbooks that would teach the basics of advanced information systems and digital methods in a way that is accessible to researchers from a wide range of disciplines. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. Its aim is to fill the gap between the initial interest generated by presentations of the potential of e-Research and the various training courses that convey the skills necessary to use specific technologies.
The book is divided into four main sections. The first two chapters provide a general introduction to the principles behing e-Research and introduce distributed systems, showing how they differ from single-user desktop systems. The second section discusses a number of different examples of e-Research from a range of disciplines, demonstrating how research can benefit from and be driven forward by the use of advanced information and communications technologies. The third section outlines a number of infrastructures for research that are available to researchers today and discusses the strategies behind the development of European grid initiatives that aim to provide a sustainable environment for the development of e-Research practices. Next, we discuss the role of data and its management over the research lifecycle as well as a number of relevant technologies. The fifth section discusses different ways that researchers can access infrastructure services and the ways they can be factored into actual everyday research practices. Finally, we conclude the book with a collection of resources that we hope will help the reader explore the field of e-Research further and make informed choices about the adoption of the technologies and methods described in this book.
First of all, we would like to thank our colleagues who have contributed chapters to this collection. They have given generously of their time and the essential input of expertise without which this book could not have come into existence. We would also like to thank the organisations that have provided support in cash or in kind:
The UK's JISC has provided financial support through the funding for the e-Infrastructure Use cases and service usage models project.
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance has supported the editing process by funding contributions made by Alex Voss.
The National e-Science Centre has supported the editing process by funding the contributions made by David Fergusson and Elizabeth Vander Meer.
The Manchester e-Research Centre has supported the editing process by funding contributions made by Alex Voss and by administering the production process of the first edition of the book.