Understanding Conditions for the Emergence of Virtual Organizations in Long-Tail Sciences

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The potential of advanced cyberinfrastructure to facilitate new collaborative paradigms and new forms of virtual organizations in science is compelling. However, development of appropriate cyberinfrastructure must consider the diversity of the target scientific communities, their cultures and practices, and how social and technical issues interact in the context of a specific user community. Some highly collaborative fields have been pioneers in the development and adoption of cyberinfrastructure. Others (termed "long-tail sciences") follow an organizational model of independent small research groups. Researchers in these fields would have to overcome significant epistemic, cultural, and institutional hurdles to achieve their collaborative potential and adopt enabling cyberinfrastructure. This project investigates the potential of long-tail sciences to benefit from a range of different types of virtual organizations. Employing an innovative methodology that integrates quantitative (network analysis) and qualitative (ethnographic) techniques, it systematically investigates the differential epistemic and cultural propensity of research fields to adopt into their research practices virtual organizations and the technology that supports them.This project investigates so-called 'long-tail' sciences, where collaborations are generally small, and studies the social and cultural conditions that enable scientific communities in those fields to benefit from investments into new technologies to support their collaborations. Thus, this project complements current cyberinfrastructure research directed at large-scale collaborations and is distinguished by conducting a systematic, comparative study of scientific fields. There are few such studies that seek to understand how field differences shape the uptake of new technologies supporting research collaboration and scientific communication. It is not clear yet what the relevant distinguishing characteristics of research fields are, nor how to reliably identify or construct the appropriate unit of analysis for such comparisons. By systematically exploring field-specific differences this project contributes to a deeper understanding of what cyberinfrastructures and the virtual organizations they support have to offer the long-tail sciences, and what field-specific challenges need to be overcome if they are to be adopted. The results will be relevant to understanding the use of cyberinfrastructure across the disciplinary spectrum to guide funding decisions and development efforts.