SIEPR Policy
paper No. 07-023
Designing Instutional Infrastructure for E-Science
Paul A. David and Michael Spence
December 2007
A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. Emerging programmatic visions of this genre reflect an expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate has committed itself in 2005 toa major research funding initiative designed to implement key elements of its “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at the enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers to enable the formation of ‘virtual organizations’ for global research collaboration. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standards middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research.
This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged for these undertakings. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science – through the collaborative activities supported by the “cyberinfrastructure,” if it is to be achieved, will be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legaland technical transformations. But the socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting research collaborations are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures and constraints created by existing legal and administrative regimes that tend to impede, or render it costly to arrange inter- organizational collaboration in problem-solving and co-creation among publicly funded universities and research institutes. Intellectual property rights issues are only one among the sources of transactions costs in arriving at such agreements, particular where institutions in different legal and administrative jurisdictions are involved. The paper’s purpose is to examine the nature and sources of these difficulties and to propose “solution modalities” that feature a modular contractual approach to the flexible design of research collaboration agreements. The basic principles and the institutional mode of implementation that are presented will be seen to be sufficiently general that they also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcend organizational boundaries.