Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

Science is rarely, if ever, a solo effort and as research projects become increasingly interdisciplinary, the talent required for a given effort is unlikely to be found in at a single physical location. It would seem that with the ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that this would be a non-issue. Video conferencing, extranets and email should make remote collaboration simple. As anyone who has attempted to schedule meetings across time-zones or share files across firewalls knows, this is not the case. The difficulty of creating and maintaining effective collaborations across geographically dispersed researchers despite the proliferation of collaboration tools, is a recurring theme running through all twenty chapters of "Scientific Collaboration on the Internet" the latest installment of the Acting with Technology series from MIT Press. This book is more or less a status report on the mission of the Science of Collaboratories project. The first two sections, "The Contemporary Collaboratory Vision" and "Perspectives on Distributed, Collaborative Science" frame the discussion and begin to establish a vocabulary for the conversation. Fundamental concepts such as e-science, cyberscience and cyberinfrastructure are discussed in detail in the first few chapters and definitions are proposed, but cannot be said to be definitive. Once the groundwork is established the pertinent concepts are fleshed out into a taxonomy of collaboratories and rolled into a nascent "Theory of Remote Collaboration." The tone of these chapters is very academic and not a particularly fun read but they do provide a structure for evaluating the various projects examined in the remainder of the book. It may be tempting to focus only on the section pertaining to ones own field. (I automatically flipped directly to the Biological and Health Sciences) but to do so would be to miss the true value of this volume. While some of the scenarios may be drawn directly from our day-to-day professional experience, seeing the same fundamental issue in the context of a different discipline can be enlightening. This is particularly true in the section on The Developing World in which scientists from the industrialized world must work with scientists in the third world who face challenges unheard of in the well-funded west. Of course, despite the efforts of Olson, Zimmerman and Bos, their contributors and the greater Science of Collaboration project, the none of the questions surrounding remote scientific collaboration are answered definitively. Rather they serve to frame the various reports and highlight common themes. The main theme that emerges is that facilitating collaboration is not at its heart a technology problem. In a world of increasing competition for scarce research resources, getting scientists to play nicely together is the perennial challenge of fostering collaboration. As each of the case studies demonstrates, technological barries can generally be overcome, but social and professional hurdles persist. As the editors note "even when advanced technologies are available, distance still matters." An extended review is available at www.connected-science.com