Barjak, Franz
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The Emerging Governance of E-Infrastructure
The paper studies the transition to ICT-based support systems for scientific research. These systems currently attempt the transition from the project stage to the more permanent stage of an infrastructure. The transition leads to several challenges, including in the area of establishing adequate governance regimes, which not all projects master successfully. Studying a set of cases from Europe and America, we look at patterns in the size and scope of the undertakings, embeddedness in user communities, aims and responsibilities, mechanisms of coordination, forms of governance, and time horizon and funding. We find that, though configurations and landscapes are somewhat diverse, successful projects typically follow distinctive paths, either large-scale or small-scale, and become what we term ‘stable metaorganizations’ or ‘established communities.’
The Future of e-Research Infrastructures
In this paper, we present selected results of a systematic study of different types of e-Research infrastructures. The paper is based on ongoing research to compare a range of e-Infrastructures of broad diversity focusing on: geographical diversity, representing efforts from around the globe; disciplinary diversity, including the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities; organizational diversity, for example, multi-institutional or federated; diverse levels of maturity, from those in the planning stage to those with a well-established user base; and diverse types of target user communities such as specialized niche, discipline-wide, or generic infrastructures. In presenting six initial cases, we discuss some general features that distinguish between different types of infrastructures across different fields of research. Previous analyses of e-Infrastructures have focused on the parallels between these infrastructures and the major infrastructures in society that support national populations. What our cases highlight instead is that e-Infrastructures consist of multiple types of overlapping and intersecting socio-technical configurations that serve quite diverse needs and groups of users. Indeed, the very term ‘infrastructures’ may be misleading insofar as it connotes support of whole communities of researchers on a large scale, which is currently still premature. The paper derives implications of this heterogeneity for the future outlook on e-Infrastructures.