e-Infrastructure projects

We found that research foundations and councils were the dominant source of funding across the board. The median project was initially funded at just over 335,000 Euros; the median annual budget was just over 122,000 Euros. The projects in continental Europe and the USA are larger than projects in the UK, both with respect to funding and staff. Scholars were more likely to be involved with small projects; these are also the ones with the proportionally highest scientific personnel input. Professionals appear to more involved with application-oriented projects, whereas projects described by researchers and scholars are stronger in

the science dimension. The administrators’ projects seem to integrate both, science orientation and user focus.

The most frequently used e-Infrastructure items included communication and collaboration tools, as well as distributed data, and required high band width. High performance computing, which is a feature of other sciences, was not as important, nor were the innovative data collection methods. Some level of variation was visible by country of the project: learning environments and virtual/3D environments play a larger role in US-based projects. Continental European projects more often contain data repositories, whereas videoconferencing is relatively unimportant – it is used more than twice as often in UK-based projects. The items varied also by project length: virtual/3D environments were of notably higher relevance in long-term projects, lasting for three years or longer. This is consistent with a view that the provision of interfaces for learning and practice becomes more important when the development phase is completed and the actual user involvement gets more and more critical.

Respondents reported a variety of outcomes from their projects, including publications, new methods, new data, follow-on collaborations, and new tools. They also reported a very broad user constituency ranging from 3.8 – 4.8 academic domains. Interestingly, almost all disciplinary constituencies that are reached are reached by a project that includes participants on the team with the same discipline as the user constituency. There are a number of possible interpretations of this intriguing result. It could be that projects are developed by researchers in given disciplines because they have specific disciplinary needs in mind. It could also be that researchers in a project already have a dissemination network in place that is discipline specific, and that knowledge about the project is transmitted through such disciplinary networks. These different possibilities have useful, but differing, implications for the structure of funding and should be explored in a broader scientific study.

With regard to the fields which were one of the specific focuses of the survey, archaeology, economics & business, sociology, social and economic

geography/regional science, and linguistics, we find a couple of remarkable characteristics:

− Archaeology. Projects with archaeology participation are very small in terms of budget (150’000 €) and personnel (14 people) and with the shortest duration. They also need much non-scientific staff. However, they are still output oriented, with three quarters of the projects indicating the existence of a user constituency and the production of publications, new methods, new data, new tools, or follow-on collaborations. When it comes to their technological profile, archaeology projects show some very specific features: high bandwidth, frequent use of virtual/3D environments and innovative data collection methods distinguish these projects from the others.

− Economics and business. The high scientific component – nearly three quarters of the involved personnel are scientists or graduate students – contributes to an average project size of projects with economics and business participation, though the projects are of relatively short duration. Neither the technological profile nor the outcomes of these projects differ in any way remarkably from the overall dataset. However, the respondents stated notably less often that the project already had identified a user constituency.

− Sociology. Sociology projects have larger budgets than archaeology projects, but they also last longer and their annual budget is therefore just about as large as in the latter field. In regard to personnel they are the smallest ones (12 people on average). They use all technological items except for data collection methods less often than projects in other fields.

− Social & economic geography, regional science. Projects in this field are of average size and duration. Particular technological features are difficult to discern. Grid-based video conferencing sticks out as does the more frequent use of high performance computing.

− Linguistics. Projects in these fields are the largest in regard to budget and personnel among the fields considered. They are also the ones with the longest duration. These are their most remarkable features. Neither their technological portfolio nor the outcomes that they produce show any additional patterns. Only – like the considerably smaller archaeology projects – they also rather often said that they address a specified user constituency.

3.6.2 e-Infrastructure adoption

Survey respondents identified a number of key sources of information about e- Infrastructure, notably the importance of other scientists in spreading information about e-Infrastructure. Printed information is of comparatively little importance. Only for scientists who are predominantly collaborating at the non-local, national and international, levels and – supposedly – less integrated in their local

communities printed information on e-Infrastructure plays some role. It might substitute local meetings and workshops from which they less often benefit. Infrastructure and administration people at the respondents’ organizations were less often rated as important in continental Europe than in the UK or the US. Moreover, these services were also less influential for social scientists and humanities researchers than for natural scientists. This could indicate less

interaction between infrastructure and administration services and scientists in the continental European research environment and for humanities and social science researchers in general.

The respondents highlighted a number of factors as key catalysts: seed funding, collaboration, interesting research, and collaboration. Only few differences exist between different respondent and project categories. Seed funding is more important in the US and in other countries than in the UK, and least important in continental Europe. The computational requirements of the research, on the other hand, are more important in the latter regions.

Most notable is the difference between projects involving social scientists: those described by respondents with a local collaboration pattern in particular stress collaboration as a catalyst; those described by respondents with a non-local collaboration pattern (i.e. scientists who also collaborate, but not locally) give a much higher importance to seed funding, the observation of other projects and the prospects of interesting research. How can we interpret this? It seems that e- Infrastructure are more likely to support local than non-local collaboration needs. It is possible that the structure of collaboration differs by whether it is local or non- local: the latter might need a clearer division of labour, and the former might be much more integrated and thus in need of technological support. It is interesting that this particular pattern only manifests itself in projects including social sciences and hence more detailed analyses of the relationship between collaboration and technological support are necessary.

The respondents identified a number of key barriers to e-Infrastructure adoption. Almost uniformly most important, regardless of discipline, length of project, and date of adoption are three factors: lack of funding, costs, and lack of qualified staff. Lacking information on the usefulness of the technology was more often observed by the humanities and confidentiality problems less often.

3.6.3 Positive and negative lessons learned in e-Infrastructure projects