Scientific Collaboration on the Internet - Hardcover

Gary M. Olson is Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Professor in both the School of Information and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Ann Zimmerman is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Nathan Bos is a Senior Research Scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. Gary M. Olson is Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Professor in both the School of Information and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Nathan Bos is a Senior Research Scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. Ann Zimmerman is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Sara Kiesler is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been elected into the CHI Academy by The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) in recognition of her outstanding leadership and service in the field of computer-human interaction. Mark Ackerman is Associate Professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Edward J. Hackett is Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and Director of the Division of Social and Economic Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Diana Rhoten is Director of the Knowledge Institutions program and the Digital Media and Learning project at the Social Science Research Council and leader of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Learning Networks project in New York City. Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press. Ian Foster is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory.

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location - the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. "Scientific Collaboration on the Internet" provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.The projects described range from the development of a national virtual observatory for astronomical research to a National Institutes of Health funding program for major multi-laboratory medical research; from the deployment of a cyberinfrastructure to connect experts in earthquake engineering to partnerships between developed and developing countries in AIDS research.

The chapter authors speak frankly about the problems these projects encountered as well as the successes they achieved. The book strikes a useful balance between presenting the real stories of collaborations and developing a scientific approach to conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating such projects. It points to a future of scientific collaborations that build successfully on aspects from multiple disciplines.