Digital Collaboration Technologies, the Organisation of Scientific Work and the Economics of Knowledge Access

One of three 1999 ESF workshops on Research in the Digital Age

An ESF-IIASA-NSF initiative, 3-5 December 1999, Laxenburg Austria

Introduction

This international Workshop is a sequel to the IIASA-initiated International Workshop on "the Global Science System in Transition," held 23-25 May, 1997, and was organised under the sponsorship of the ESF, International Institute for Applied System Analysis, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The programme for the Workshop was prepared by Paul A. David (Oxford and Stanford), Dominique Foray (University of Paris Dauphine), Gordon MacDonald (Director, IIASA) and W. Edward Steinmueller (SPRU, Sussex).

Themes and objectives

Rapid advances in digital telecommunications are accelerating the global organisation of scientific inquiry. An optimistic view would depict these developments as significant steps towards the creation in virtual form of "Salomon's House," the universal research institute envisaged in the utopia of Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis: a foundation fully equipped and staffed to pursue "the knowledge of Causes, and hidden motions of Nature; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible."

This Workshop afforded an opportunity to examine a range of important opportunities and challenges arising from the present and prospective development, diffusion, and utilisation of electronic collaboration technologies. Of particular interest were the potential and probable consequences for European scientific research networks of the formation of global "virtual laboratories," and the problems surrounding eligibility for participation and access to information that bear crucially upon the future of "open science" and the distribution of the benefits deriving from the advancement of knowledge. Towards this end the Workshop brought together experts from the experimental and observational sciences, the information sciences, the social, behavioural and economic sciences, legal scholars and practitioners, and specialists concerned with science and technology policy formation.

The objectives of the workshop were threefold: first, to identify the main critical issues within this broad area and delineate the interrelationships among them; second, to take stock of the present state of knowledge and of ongoing research concerning collaboration technologies and factors affecting their deployment and use; third, to discuss the opportunity to form a scientific network to further analytical research and comparative case studies of co-evolution of technological, institutional and organisational infrastructures affecting the conduct of collaborative science on a global scale.

The Workshop sessions addressed three substantive themes:

• Theme 1 concerned the characterisation of the "technological opportunities", encapsulated under the rather generic concept of "virtual laboratory" - accepting the definition of the latter as an electronic workspace for distance collaboration and experimentation in research of other creative activity, to generate and deliver results using distributed information and communication technologies. Sessions featured general presentations and case study material on technological and economic factors affecting the formation of digital "collaboratories," and discussed the development of criteria and tools for analysing and evaluating the performance of virtual laboratories.
  
  
• Theme 2 was concerned with the micro-level practicalities of organising and conducting scientific work supported by digital collaboration technologies of varying degrees of sophistication. Among the topics considered were the practical issues encountered in "virtual laboratory life", the ways in which the technology affects the formation and organisation of research teams, and the effects of participation in virtual laboratory projects upon work groups and host institutions. An important matter for discussion was the bearing of these and other factors on the diffusion of "collaboratory technologies" beyond the particular areas of application in which they are first developed.
  
  
• Theme 3 dealt with the interactions between the new digital environments and the evolution of intellectual property laws. The discussion focused on the implications for scientific communities of the ongoing debate as to whether existing international and regional conventions regarding patent and copyright protection should be supplemented by sui generis intellectual property rights protections adapted to digital information media, and what protections for research should be provided. Specific attention was directed to assessing the impact of some of the recent European Union Directives and proposed U.S. legislation dealing with databases, and copyright.
  
  To access papers from the workshop, located at the IIASA web-site, click here.