VOSS: Collaborative Research: Towards Collaboration Strength in Virtual Research Organizations

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Technology has made possible virtual research organizations involving researchers from different institutions. Virtual research organizations are expected to improve the speed of innovations and the creativity of scientists by bringing expertise to projects that would otherwise be unavailable. This project contributes to the scientific study of this new way of organizing scientific work and examines the problem of collaborating in virtual research organizations at the level of the collaboration and collaborators. The purpose of the research is to better understand how dispersed, interdisciplinary projects succeed, and to explore how virtual organizations might best use new tools and infrastructure. This research builds on the investigators? prior work in understanding the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative, which included close to 500 interdisciplinary technology research projects supported by the NSF. The proposed work entails an archival analysis of ITR final reports to discern the longer-term impact of the ITR projects and a longitudinal follow-up survey of ITR investigators. This research will contribute to organization science and social network theory, and to a better understanding of science and technology. The results will be useful for social scientists interested in organizations, computer scientists and technologists interested in tools and infrastructure that work, and decision and policy makers who invest in research. Virtual research organizations in science and engineering are essential to the nation?s future and to solving global problems. This research will aid policy understanding of requirements of distributed interdisciplinary collaboration, improve metrics and approaches for evaluating the direct and indirect outcomes of research programs, suggest policies for future programs in innovative scientific research and education, and provide information to organizations, particularly departments and universities, about the institutional policies and practices that best support distributed interdisciplinary research.