Collaboration, Contributed by Organizations or Campuses, and Cyberinfrastructure

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.

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. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid [2], Earth System Grid [3], Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE [4]) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities. Scalability — in resource size, number of member organizations and application diversity — remains a central concern. As a result, many interesting [5] challenges continue to emerge and their resolution requires engaged partners and creative adjustments.