Collaboration and Contributed by Organizations or Campuses

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

As research collaborations grow in size, scope, and time horizon, they increasingly resemble organizations in and of themselves. The traditional institutional structure of science, however, is fundamentally focused on individual scientists. Reconciling these novel research organizations with traditional structures has proven a difficult challenge for the high energy physics community, which has a longstanding tradition of large collaborations. In this paper I draw on interview data gathered in this community to explore the issues of authorship and credit attribution, with an eye toward extrapolating lessons for those in other disciplines. Results suggest that authorship practices in physics are fundamentally problematic in several respects, and that this stems in part from a need to recognize multiple types of contributions.

Over 100 librarians, administrators, faculty, and other members of the academic community concerned about issues relating to graduate education convened in Washington DC on October 12, 2007, to participate in the forum "Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement."2 Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the event promoted engagement in conceptualizing the library's evolving role in graduate education, and it encouraged academic libraries to begin considering new ways to partner with the broader graduate studies community. The forum was inspired by the Council of Graduate Schools 2007 report, Graduate Education: The Backbone of American Competitiveness and Innovation,3 which examines the current state of graduate education and how it influences the positioning of the United States in the global economy.

"Over the last several years, there has been an emerging interest in the development of wide-area data collection and analysis centers to help identify, track, and formulate responses to the ever-growing number of coordinated attacks and malware infections that plague computer networks worldwide. As large-scale network threats continue to evolve in sophistication and extend to widely deployed applications, we expect that interest in collaborative security monitoring infrastructures will continue to grow, because such attacks may not be easily diagnosed from a single point in the network. The intent of this position paper is not to argue the necessity of Internet-scale security data sharing infrastructures, as there is ample research [13, 48, 51, 54, 41, 47, 42] and operational examples [43, 17, 32, 53] that already make this case. Instead, we observe that these well-intended activities raise a unique set of risks and challenges.

"Two weeks ago, we described a report from the National Research Council on the challenges of balancing an open academic research environment with the risks that the fruits of the research could be adopted by terrorists. One of the report's recommendations was the formation of a standing committee comprised of academics and members of the national security agencies. It turns out that the FBI had already heeded similar advice—back in 2005."

A professor and a technology specialist discuss their attempt to bring term papers out into the open with the resource many faculty members abhor.

Collaborative software creates new options for students and educators.

Technologists and librarians are discovering that intelligent organizational overlap is the route to the digital library of the future.

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics.

Many small, undergraduate colleges aspire to similar curricular goals yet lack opportunities to share resources in ways that could help them meet these common goals. These campuses go it alone by choice or for lack of information about others' solutions to their common challenges. Consortia have made progress in sharing administrative services; curricular collaboration is much more difficult in a context where faculty members work independently and are evaluated as individuals. Curricular wheels are reinvented when faculty on neighboring campuses develop similar course materials. Less commonly taught languages remain out of the reach of many small campuses. Students compromise on electives when faculty members take sabbatical leaves. Opportunities to enhance learning are often missed.

On the other hand, technologies that facilitate communication and collaboration, many of which are basic and reliable, allow our faculties to work more closely on curricular projects to the benefit of our students.