For over a decade, the Coalition has led programs to chart, understand, and facilitate the transformation of scholarly practice through the use of digital content and advanced information technology in an area that has come to be shorthanded as e-research (or, in the sciences, as e-science). In the sciences and engineering, CNI has been heavily involved in helping the higher education and library communities understand and frame emerging issues in cyberinfrastructure and e-science, with a primary focus on data sharing and data curation issues. In the arts and humanities, CNI, working with a wide range of partners, has a long record of leadership in computing and the humanities, and of efforts to build collaborations with the museum and archives communities, as well as with libraries.
In the 2012-2013 program year, CNI will continue to engage e-research developments both in the sciences and the humanities, but more selectively than in past years. While there is new urgency in this area in light of the requirements for data management and data sharing plans as part of grant proposals that the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the US National Institutes of Health, and a number of other funders have now put in place, a wide range of organizations, including EDUCAUSE and the Association of Research Libraries, now have aspects of data stewardship issues on their agendas. It is our intention to support these efforts but not to duplicate them. There are specific challenging areas where CNI expects to continue to provide direct leadership, including efforts to understand criteria for retention, re-use practices, issues related to data involving human subjects, aspects of large-scale infrastructure, reproducibility of results, and the effectiveness of funder policies.
Faculty investigators need guidance from both their funders and their home institutions on how best to meet these requirements, and they will be demanding new services at both disciplinary and institutional levels; CNI member institutions are leading the development of a wide variety of such services. The NSF has launched major programs addressing data curation and continues to evolve and reshape these programs, and we have seen the launch of other potentially important efforts like the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) and the Research Data Alliance; we will be highlighting developments from these programs in our membership meetings.
The need to continue to understand evolving scholarly practice in the sciences, social sciences and humanities is vital in informing future planning by our members. We will continue to feature humanities projects such as those supported through the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the multi-sponsor, international Digging into Data initiative, emphasizing computationally intensive research enabled by a robust infrastructure, as well as innovation in the sciences, social sciences and other disciplines.
CNI is concerned with questions about availability of data related to scholarly work, and has been engaged in a number of discussions around open access, open science, and open data as they relate to this question, as well as discussions about disciplinary norms for data sharing. We will also continue to explore and document the ways in which data and computationally intensive scholarship are altering the nature of scholarly communication; the issues here include the legal and technical barriers to large-scale text and data mining; appropriate organizational, policy and technical strategies for linking articles and underlying data; and ways to construct scholarly works that are amenable to various combinations of human and machine use. Critical new developments here include the emergence of virtual research environments as arenas for the interoperation of data and tools from multiple sources, and the need to better understand the complex architectural questions about the relationships among repositories, operational storage systems, e-research workflows, high performance network connectivity and powerful computational resources. We are also tracking the development of a range of scholarly community spaces such as Hubzero instances, Mathoverflow and Stackoverflow, and the MLA Commons that will launch in 2013.
Connecting our work in e-research directly to our program focus on institutional content resources, CNI will continue to examine institutional policy and planning implications of campus cyberinfrastructure initiatives in both the sciences and humanities, and consider how these can complement national or international cyberinfrastructure investments and strategies at disciplinary and cross-disciplinary levels.
