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Connecting and Collaborating: Issues for the Sciences Table of ContentsExecutive Summary
Connecting and Collaborating: Issues for the Sciences is the title of a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and held at the Walter and Judith Munk Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, June 22-24, 1995. The invited participants (listed at the end of this report) came from many academic disciplines in the sciences. They were united only by their desire to understand the scientific, social, and economic impacts of using advanced communications technology. The results of their work are summarized in this report. The workshop considered actions that can be taken by NSF, other agencies, the scientific societies, and universities seeking to improve the climate in which science is done and to facilitate scientific communication and collaboration. Specific recommendations to NSF are: 1. NSF should conduct research on connectivity and collaboration. Research is needed to monitor and extend access to the net, to expand educational uses of the net, to develop online databases and software for data "mining" and analysis. 2. NSF should conduct an internal review of its data sharing policies with a view to encouraging online sharing. NSF should also do what it can to raise the academic status of work done in this area. 3. NSF should represents the concerns of the academic science community aggressively within the national science policy arena, to improve connectivity and collaboration. This is particularly important now as laws applicable to the net are changing and rulemaking is under consideration. 4. NSF should continue working in the international arena to foster similar policy approaches in other countries. This is particularly important for advancing democratization efforts in many areas. This is a report to the National Science Foundation of a workshop sponsored by NSF and held at the Walter and Judith Munk Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, June 22-24, 1995. Connecting and Collaborating: Issues for the Sciences was convened to explore the new world of opportunities for scientific collaboration opened by the growth of national and global networked communications. Advanced communication technologies have reorganized scientific communities worldwide. Electronic access to collaborators, to ever-growing quantities of information, and to world-class tools of science boost scientific productivity and foster search-and-discover missions of unprecedented power and promise. The new "wired" science covers a vast territory. Scientists connect across geography, time zones, and disciplines via electronic mail, bulletin boards, discussion forums, and newsgroups. The scientific literature is close at hand in a host of new "e-journals," ranging from electronic versions of leading paper journals to all-electronic ventures into the world of hypertext, complete with interactive feedback and audio/video enhancements. Scientists search library catalogs and view items in museum collections worldwide . Biochemists download protein structures; chemists grab IR spectra; physicists post preprints; social scientists conduct surveys. A telescope on a mountain in Chile, a synchrotron in Illinois, a supercomputer in San Diego--all are online, to be programmed or guided by researchers half a world away. This is just the beginning, of course. Soon, the members of scientific communities, in voice and video contact with any number of peers, will access multidimensional data sets simultaneously, acquire masses of experimental data in real or near-real time, "steer" large-scale computations while watching the results in vivid three-dimensional presentations. Collaboration without barriers will ease the undertaking of global-scale experiments. It need not cost the earth to know the earth. The conquest of space and time by computer-mediated communication portends profound social change. As National Academy members Shmuel Winograd and Richard N. Zare write, in a recent editorial in Science, "electronic networks are changing the way scientists communicate and interact with each other--from the casual exchange of gossip and information to the preparation of articles and the dissemination of research results."[1] As the old norms give way to new ones, new issues arise. For example, the advent of electronic publications of greater or lesser formality is raising anew questions about journal practices and peer review. The networked publication of both raw and processed data has brought with it questions of intellectual property, confidentiality, and authorial credit. Institutional allegiances, questions of tenure and promotion, anonymity and privacy: all are challenged by the sudden advent of new "forms of life" (as Wittgenstein called such cultural shifts) enabled by advanced communications technologies. How can NSF and other agencies facilitate the exploitation of every opportunity to use the new forms for collaboration and interaction across the sciences? What barriers must be overcome? These are the questions put to the invited participants in Connecting and Collaborating, a representative group of informed geophysical, biological, library, and social scientists. This report contains their answers, their slate of issues for further research, and their recommendations for policy changes. The second section of this report characterizes some scientific, technical, and structural/cultural barriers to computer-mediated scientific collaboration. What research is required for a full understanding of these barriers? What can be done to overcome them? The third section is an examination of the countervailing forces, the developments that will encourage computer-mediated communication in national and international scientific communities. What must be known about these forces? What can be done to assist them? In the fourth section, the report focuses on questions requiring further research and on ways to accomplish such research. The workshop's findings are summarized in the fifth section, and the report concludes with the formal recommendations of the workshop participants. These recommendations address not only what NSF can do on its own, but also what NSF can do in collaboration with other agencies, universities, and scientific societies to underwrite the ability of computer-mediated communication to benefit the American and worldwide scientific enterprise. Barriers to computer-mediated communication and collaboration are scientific, technical, and structural. Scientific barriers, specific to particular disciplines, affect communication within and across disciplines. Interdisciplinarity and economic constraints operate within the sciences to lower such barriers. Technical barriers reflect the state of a nation's communications infrastructure and of computer and program compatibility and interoperability. These barriers can yield to greater commitment to open and democratic access and to ongoing investment in infrastructure by both the public and private sectors in the United States and abroad. The structural barriers are the most various, arising within the legal, economic, political, social, and cultural contexts of the sciences, all of which are challenged by advanced networked communications. Just as disciplinary boundaries can make communication difficult in face-to-face meetings across disciplines, so can they interfere with smooth computer-mediated communication. The training of biochemists differs from that of ecologists or neuroscientists. All consider themselves biologists, but their universes of discourse differ widely. Precision in astrophysics is one thing; in nuclear physics, it is another. A geologist's view of time is likely to differ from that of even the most longitudinally inclined social scientist. As greater connectivity brings greater interdisciplinarity to research, such differences can lead to misunderstanding and unnecessary contention. In some sciences, notably molecular biology, analysts (historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science) have found national "styles" of research that can be sources of difficulty in international collaboration. Moreover, the academic scientist operates in one context, the scientist in a national laboratory operates in another, and still other contexts can be distinguished in industrial and commercial settings. Finally, it is worth noting that the science that underpins advanced networked communications issues from congeries of specialties distributed across computer science, engineering, library science, and informatics. The distance of these specialties from the main streams of other sciences has resulted in no small amount of duplication of effort. Discipline-specific solutions to problems like data archiving and analysis do not generalize easily; yet quite elegant, nonspecific solutions devised in one field may never find appropriate problems in others. Protocols for acquiring, analyzing, and using data differ from specialty to specialty and, indeed, in some fields, from scientist to scientist. Scientists may not wish to share data with anyone equipped to download them, and this reluctance could impede the studies of others. These issues arise in acute form among social scientists or biologists with human subjects data, when confidentiality may be a paramount concern. The quality of some data already available on the web has been questioned, and some scientists have formed the curious expectation that easily available data are somehow suspect. The usefulness of data in repositories can dissipate with time and distance from the circumstances of collection if the tacit assumptions are not brought to light and expressed in the "metadata"--the data describing the data. Evidence about the scientific barriers to collaboration via computer-mediated communication is largely anecdotal. A well-designed survey of the members of scientific and engineering departments and of scientists and engineers working in national laboratories or in industrial or business settings could pinpoint areas in which such difficulties have in fact impeded collaboration. Nevertheless, strong forces work against the disciplinary and contextual barriers. Multiple interdisciplinarities characterize most larger scientific problems. Questions of regional or global concern in the environmental sciences, medicine and public health, and economics require the kinds of data and information exchange that only modern networks make possible. Economic constraints operate to foster collaboration among university, government, and industrial scientists on projects of mutual interest. Of the technical barriers that impede worldwide computer-mediated scientific collaboration, the first is the barrier to access itself. In the United States, owing to the history of the net, which was developed by and for government and academic researchers, access at a basic (text-based) level is available to university and government scientists from their institutions, usually at little or no cost. Access for industrial scientists is generally more expensive, but nothing other than cost impedes company access to the net. Access within the K-12 educational system, however, is not nearly as broad as it should be to make best use of networked tools for science education. All forms of access rely upon the national telecommunications network, which is, in the United States, a large, dense, highly redundant, and intercompatible set of systems. This is not the case, however, in many other countries. The primary barriers to international network access in less-developed nations are telecommunications infrastructures that are old, sparse, and designed for use by a minority of a country's citizens. Incentives to revamp these systems are coming, however, from the structure of the world economy. Nations with minimal infrastructure that begin to upgrade now might yet pull even with or move ahead of the United States and Western Europe in terms of the average speed, capacity, and cost-per-bit-transferred of the infrastructure as a whole, since there is very little need for downward compatibility. Scientific collaboration and productivity worldwide must overcome barriers beyond those presented by the national telecommunications networks. Most U.S. scientists can communicate via email and send or download short files. But not all have access, as individuals or through their institutions, to the kind of equipment required to access and view the pictures-plus-text files available on the World Wide Web. Extremely powerful "server" machines and rapid modems are required if scientists wish to work effectively at this level, both in the United States and abroad, and while the technology daily becomes less and less expensive, there is a rapid differentiation between and among institutional participants in scientific collaboration who can or cannot afford to keep up with the technology. Beyond today's state-of-the-art web access lies a fresh technical territory that must be explored and occupied. Many large datasets are available to scientists with web access, but most interchange of data (transfers from one computer to another) is at the level of relatively small file sizes. What is needed is the capacity to store petabytes of data, and to analyze, and manipulate terabytes of data at a time. The gigabit-per-second networks under development are still far from wide implementation, yet a dense network of such high-speed optical fiber must be installed to enable scientists to work with large datasets, some of which may themselves be stored in a distributed fashion, on more than one machine. The development of software to access, manipulate, and analyze so much data, and of media on which to store it for rapid access, lie in the future. The development of scientific communication and collaboration on a worldwide scale can be thought of as an enormous extension of the field, laboratory, instrumental, archival, and computational spaces in which scientists work. The architecture of these spaces is not something designed and built by technicians for scientists to occupy at some later date. The designers and builders are scientists themselves. One of the most significant barriers to this activity is presented by the current structure of the reward/status system in universities, and its echoes in government and industrial laboratories. The scientific community is in practice reevaluating the value of data gathering and dissemination efforts, and the new prominence and centrality of such efforts in the contexts of scientific collaboration and interdisciplinary work appears to be going unrecognized by promotion and tenure committees. Research is required to assess the nature of the resistance in several contexts (research universities, affiliated institutions, government laboratories, industrial research units) and to devise means of encouraging the changes in the system that may be needed. State, national, and international legal systems also supply barriers to advanced computer-mediated collaboration. Laws and regulations governing intellectual property, copyright, property rights, privacy, and confidentiality can stifle collaborations before they begin (or, worse, bring them to a halt after much energy has been expended). Legislation pertaining specifically to networked communication is under consideration in the current Congress, and some proposals contain provisions that might hamper scientific interchange. While several ad hoc organizations exist to follow these developments, the representation of the interests of the research communities is not well organized. How should this situation be addressed? Slowing down the pace of change are economic barriers that exist within and across nations. Support for scientific research and technological innovation is well down on the priority list for many nations, including many that are current sites of interest for global projects in biology, ecology, climatic change, and public health. Yet the participation of these nations and their scientists in such projects may be critical for their success. Another economic consideration that militates against communication and collaboration is the potential profitability of new developments in technology and biotechnology. Tendencies to enforce secrecy or the withholding of data from larger research communities are found both within and between nations, in both private and public sectors. Another trend is the commercialization of data in the public domain, where the added value is the software through which the data are accessed. Geophysicists using accurate maps and social scientists using certain kinds of statistics are particularly affected by these practices. Some much more subtle social and cultural barriers, whose influence is difficult to assess and perhaps even more difficult to combat, come from the prevailing norms of thought within the sciences and scholarship generally. A particularly good example is the mixed reception of electronic publication and dissemination of scientific results. As in the world of paper journals, new electronic journals have appeared for a variety of reasons and are no more or less credible (in terms of the reputations of editorial boards, for example) than the spectrum of paper journals. A noticeable difference has been the lower cost barrier to start up a journal, and the consequent expansion of the scientific journal literature is regarded with suspicion by many. How much is a response to the barriers to publication in established paper journals? How many of the new journals represent necessary and reasonable additions to the already crowded field? What is the meaning of "peer review" in such journals? Are they more likely to be the "house organs" of groups who feel slighted by the editorial policies of established paper journals? Do the e-journals deserve less respect than paper journals? Right now, few all-electronic journals are kept in any form (either as computer files or printed out) by university or public libraries, and the indexing and abstracting services are also hesitant to add the e-journals to their lists. Is there a prejudice in favor of the familiar journal-in-hand or printed book and against the authority of anything seen on the computer monitor screen? These suspicions are being dissipated as major, established journals in all fields begin to appear online, but it is difficult to predict the future. Will paper and electronic journals coexist, like radio and television? Or will the electronic journal inevitably supplant the paper one? Finally, will barriers to advanced, networked communication among scientists be raised by the current erosion of public and political support for science and technology? Or can the ease of communication in a networked society be exploited to lower the barriers by involving a larger public in the projects of the scientific community? In the next section, developments that facilitate changes in favor of collaboration are examined. Those whose activities affect the shape and direction of the sciences can work to good effect against the barriers discussed in Section II. Their efforts will be propelled forward by the momentum of several rather deepgoing changes in the technical, scientific, and social landscapes. The last decade has seen a hundredfold growth in the capacities of computers at all levels. It is possible to buy a personal, laptop computer that has more power, speed, and memory than most university-wide systems in operation ten years ago, for a twentieth of the cost. Instead of supplying "mainframes" or masses of personal computers, many academic computing centers have turned themselves into network experts and purchasing agents for an ever-shifting array of ever-more-powerful workstations, and it is these that occupy the desktops of scientists. The revolution is still accelerating. A new generation of equipment becomes available to the scientific community every two to three years, and there appear to be several orders of magnitude to go in improvements in current technology (magnetic and optical storage media, for example) before a major technological shift will be necessary (to one of the more compact storage and switching systems, some of them biological, that are hinted at in current research). Improvements in hardware have accounted for one or two orders of magnitude in the throughput of equipment. But some improvements in software have been even more spectacular: algorithmic advances can speed processing by three or four orders of magnitude. Such advances are the basis for the stable communication of the compute-intensive data (audio, video, "virtual reality" modes) available on the web. One subject for continuing research is the network itself. As built, it is not instrumented to measure itself and deliver statistics on traffic bursts, loads, alternative routes, or throughput. The theory of networks can tackle many ill-behaved and ill-conditioned problems, but none yet of the size and complexity presented by what is already in place and continually growing. Experience with the electric power grid and the telephone network is not much help because of the inhomogeneity of systems and applications on the net. Gathering proper statistics means solving two problems: (1) devising proper metrics (what should be measured and when), and (2) using them without having a negative impact on throughput itself. NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate now funds a National Laboratory for Applied Network Research, distributed over the several supercomputer centers, which is making a beginning in this area. The disciplinary boundaries established during the rise of the American university system can no longer hold the suburban sprawl of the sciences. The traditional departments of chemistry, physics, biology, sociology, political science, and engineering have been joined by others--first by cautious newcomers (departments of physical chemistry, departments of chemical physics) and then by brasher and brasher upstarts. Among these are computer and information science, various "applied" departments, and, finally (the sign of academic hands thrown up in futility), departments of "X studies," where X can be very nearly anything. Several processes are going on here. One is that the cores of traditional disciplines are dissolving or even vanishing as specialization divides them. The traditional geography curriculum, for example, must in some universities be assembled from bits of earth sciences, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Another is that new cores are replacing older ones, in response to social demands for new combinations of knowledge. The molecular biologist studying the effects of toxic substances on plant enzymes, for example, may have willy-nilly to be an ecologist in her spare time. As old specialties reshape themselves, new ones emerge, and advanced networking plays a role. What seem to be individual lines of research or tiny streams are now sustained through electronic communication as they gather momentum or dissipate. An example is the recent coalescence of neurological and computational researchers in a new branch of cognitive science. The extent to which scientists in these newer fields have relied upon networked communication is a topic for research.
Computer-mediated collaboration is proving ideal also for exploiting the
new fuzziness of the boundaries, and the net supplies a loose culture in
which it is possible to meet and talk with scientists far from one's own
discipline, people one would never see at the usual meetings one attends.
The existence of open discussion groups on all sorts of topics enables
scientists to find new "colleagues of opportunity" where interests truly
converge. As computer-mediated communication makes physical separation less and less of a barrier to international collaboration, a "globalization" of formerly parochial disciplines occurs. French biochemistry meets American biochemistry, enriching biochemistry as a whole through the contact of scientists from differing traditions. Such interactions are often cast in terms of U.S. scientists assisting scientists from developing nations, but in fact the traffic goes in many directions. All benefit from scientific knowledge or special data formerly available to scientists in only one country. These developments heighten the importance of strengthening international scientific organizations and should have effects on the design, frequency, and organization of scientific congresses and international gatherings. The established international research centers will become even more vital scientific crossroads as globalization progresses. These include resources shared by scientists from many countries (e.g., Fermilab, the Advanced Photon Source under construction at Argonne National Laboratories, CERN in Geneva). Contacts made at congresses or through work at international resource loci can be sustained as remote collaborations, thanks to the net, while the sites themselves benefit from broader participation in planning large-scale experiments. NSF's offices for international programs have much work to do in this area of scientific globalization. The globalization of science under the aegis of technological advances made in Western democracies bodes well for the democratization of science generally. The spread of democratic norms and the values of equity and fairness may be expected to increase as access itself increases, opening up the transmission of knowledge across frontiers. As formerly authoritarian societies have learned, it is impossible to suppress new forms of communication, from xerography to networking, without severely damaging the scientific and technological infrastructure. While the Connecting and Collaborating workshop tried to restrict its concerns to the issue of collaboration within the scientific community, it was clear at every turn that the democratic context of that community is of paramount concern. The pursuit of global problems in science (e.g., climatic change) is dependent on the understanding and participation of many sectors of society. Most important among these is the system of scientific education. Already, the net has been used to organize K-12 grade school projects in ecology that can be essential contributions to ecological and climate research. Just as scientific productivity is increased by access to networked communication, so is the production and training of scientific and technical talent. Thus the tasks ahead include broadening democratic access to the net and its resources in the United States and worldwide, and the network itself is a valuable ally in the cause. In conclusion, it must be acknowledged that the world has become the "global village" of which Marshall McLuhan spoke 30 years ago. Individuals who fear or resist the changes of the computer revolution, interdisciplinarity, globalization, and democratization can expect to be left behind, and may even serve a valuable function as commentators on the new responsibilities that accompany new powers--provided they get on the net and comment where they can be heard. Computer-mediated networking, communication, and collaboration is under way, and it will mean changes in the reward system in the universities and across the sciences, changes in legal systems, international adjustments, and fundamental changes in the balance between individualism and group or communal orientation to life and work. The discussions of barriers in Section 2 and of forces opposing them in this section suggest that there are numerous areas in which research must be undertaken before strategies for improving computer-mediated collaboration can be devised. The questions for research are gathered and ordered in the following section. What can be done to lower the barriers to smooth and productive computer-mediated collaboration among scientists worldwide? NSF should sponsor research to increase our knowledge of the opportunities for collaborative science available on the network. In addition, NSF can use its own policies (perhaps changed to some degree as a result of the research) and its position nationally and internationally as a "bully pulpit" to promote equal access to information and equitable standards for sharing it. There are several areas in which research should be done, discussed below. Vehicles for this research may be as simple as meetings or workshops or as complex as conferences, longitudinal studies, or full-scale curricular or software development projects. Some projects may be best carried out on the basis of new proposal solicitations. In other areas, efforts that have begun within more general programs sponsored by NSF can be aided by extending these programs rather than initiating new ones. Monitoring and Extending Access Since continuously broadening access is fundamental to the democratization of knowledge, the levels of access prevailing in various scientific communities should be monitored. The costs of such access should be examined, and ways should be developed to insure access for sections of the scientific communities that cannot afford it. If electronic means do not exist to gather usage and cost statistics on an ongoing basis, these could be developed under an extension of the current CISE program for applied network research.
Access for U.S. scientists and engineers should be followed at a
representative sample of research universities and other institutions of
higher education. Access for K-12 teachers and students should also be
assessed periodically, if this is not already done by any other agency.
Finally, acccess for scientists and their students to their opposite
numbers in foreign research institutions should be maintained and
broadened as much as possible. Research should be undertaken with a
view to widening access by achieving economies of scale, negotiating
advantageous terms for educational uses of software for access and data
analysis, and similar measures. Expanding Educational Uses of the Net Advanced communications technologies have been used to make new curriculum development and project designs much more widely available to the community of science educators. What is missing is a centralized means for science educators to learn what curriculum development is taking place where, and what training is being offered in use of the resources of the net, on a regular basis. A national conference should be convened for science educators to share and consolidate information and recommend continuing programs for science curriculum development at all levels in the educational system. Scientific and Technical Online Databases and Data-handling Software This topic is at once the most technical and the most critical for the future of collaboration in advanced scientific research in the United States and around the world. Research is needed on the available scientific and technical data resources of the network, both academic and commercial. A full taxonomy should be developed to classify these and the salient differences among them.
Appropriate demonstration projects in this area might be sponsored by CISE or the disciplinary directorates, and cross-disciplinary research should be undertaken to produce both model agreements and technical developments (e.g., software) to insure that confidentiality and privacy are preserved for human research subjects. Evaluating the Role of Electronic Publications Electronic publications exist at the moment in what has been called "a netherworld of gray literature." What spectrum of e-journals exists in the sciences? How fast are established paper journals developing electronic counterparts? How can editorial boards function to improve the speed of scientific communications while maintaining quality control? Who uses the e-journals, and how are they cited? Should e-journals be separately indexed and abstracted or should statistics be combined with those for paper journals? A vast repository of scientific and historical information is represented by the occasional publications of institutions. Newsletters are a category not kept in most research libraries, for example. How are information sources online regarded for library purposes? NSF should initiate research in conjunction with the major national scientific societies and commercial journal publishers, as well as with library organizations, to stay abreast of the changing place of electronic journals and newsletters in the world of scientific information. Increasing Scientific Productivity It is necessary to find means to estimate the effects of rapid electronic communication and data dissemination on scientific productivity generally. The existing measures of such productivity--e.g., number of papers published by research groups in peer-reviewed journals, patents issued--do not take into account the new modes of production represented by the development of digital archives, preprint repositories, and other unique formats available on the net. NSF should conduct research in this area, perhaps in an interagency environment, to find new measures of productivity that consider both peer-reviewed publication and contributions of data or software as products of scientific activity. It would be wise to involve in this research representatives of the programs and institutions that have developed or enforced productivity measures now in use. A shift is being sought in the recognition accorded scientific workers by departmental tenure committees, indexers, and abstractors, to name just a few of the powers concerned. NSF should conduct research to find ways of promoting the significant change in the view of productivity measures that is called for by the advent of computer-mediated communication and collaboration. Most of these issues are part of a highly coupled and interconnected set of influences affecting collaboration. They may not be fully addressed by individual projects, or even by somewhat broader research initiatives. But NSF has created various national centers where expertise of this sort is assembled, and NSF can require the necessary research as a condition of funding. Such centers can conduct broadly focused, long-term, self-evaluating research on the agenda above. In carrying the results of this research into the international arena, NSF can take advantage of the fact that many of these centers have counterpart centers in other nations (e.g., the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis funded by NSF has a counterpart in the European Science Foundation's GISDATA Programme). Finally, the technology is subject to rapid and sweeping changes. The length and periodicity of funded research should be reconsidered frequently in the light of new techniques. Some short-term programs might bear repetition, and consideration of the pace of change should be built into longer term research. Faster review cycles for programs in this area may be warranted. Connecting and Collaborating: Issues for the Sciences brought together scientists from a range of fields--biology, geophysics, sociology, and library and archival sciences--and from several countries. The participants discussed the state of advanced networking technologies as seen from their various vantage points, seeking a common framework for considering ways to improve communication and collaboration among scientists in the United States and internationally. The participants found scientific, technical, and structural barriers to connectivity. The scientific barriers arise mainly from difficulties of communication across disciplines. Technical barriers are in the main barriers to access to the network related to the capacity of telecommunications systems in various countries. Structural barriers include the reward/status system in the sciences, legal barriers, economic barriers, and social and cultural barriers (opposition to electronic publication, resistance to change generally, declining public support for science, and proprietary competition). Against these barriers, the workshop found, were strong forces that improve the opportunities for collaboration. The ongoing revolution in computing puts tremendous power into the hands of individual users. The social and political urgency of finding solutions to global scientific problems promotes the emergence of new disciplines in the sciences, and of a new interdisciplinarity. The connection and collaboration already under way gives impetus to a globalization of the sciences and momentum to the democratization of science and the spread of democratic norms generally. The workshop constructed a list of areas in which research could aid in the development of policies that will encourage global connectivity and national and international scientific collaboration. These span monitoring and extending access to full connectivity, expanding educational uses of the net, gathering information about databases available on line and software to analyze the data, evaluating the changing role of electronic publications in the sciences, and studying ways to improve scientific productivity using the technology and changing the cultural systems within which it is used. The next section contains the workshop's formal recommendations for NSF and discussions of what other agencies, universities, and scientific societies can do to facilitate both research and policy developments. NSF has a very long tradition of supporting the development of advanced computing resources for the American scientific community.[2] Thus NSF is in an excellent position to continue to exert leadership in this area. In addition to the work NSF can do directly, the agency can involve the other science agencies, scientific societies, and universities. It can also work within the international arena to encourage policy development that fosters scientific collaboration. 1. NSF should conduct research on connectivity and collaboration. As discussed in Section 5, research is needed in the areas of (1) monitoring and extending access to the net at the levels required for the highest scientific productivity, (2) expanding educational uses of the net, (3) online databases and software for data analysis and data "mining," (4) evaluating the role of electronic publications, and (5) using the net to increase scientific productivity. The current edition of NSF's Grant Proposal Guide states that NSF "expects investigators to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost, and within a reasonable time, the data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of the work." An internal review of the way in which this policy has been administered should now be conducted, with a view to sharpening the requirements in particular contexts and raising the academic status of the data-sharing activity. NSF is one of many Federal agencies concerned with the sciences that are taking action on these issues. NSF is a smaller agency, but because of its stature within the scientific community and beyond, it can have a very loud voice. Aggressive support of full exploitation of the technological possibilities of advanced networking can carry along not only other Federal agencies, but also the rest of the scientific infrastructure. This includes scientific societies, journal publishers, NAS and NRC committees, various ad hoc boards and study groups, university substructures of all kinds, and science journalists and their organizations. NSF can advocate in all these venues for both policy changes and changes in attitudes:
4. NSF should continue working in the international arena to foster similar policy approaches. NSF should use its ability to represent American science in the international arena to foster similar broad policy approaches to facilitating connectivity. Wider access, more education, valorization of data gathering and dissemination, enforcement of standards of data exchange, and development of compatible policies on privacy and confidentiality are the concerns of all nations with scientific programs. Special attention should be given to encouraging developing nations to end restraints on the free exchange of data and information and to build anew or rebuild the telecommunications infrastructure to support these efforts. Such policy initiatives can be carried to the International Council of Scientific Unions, to NATO and UNESCO scientific bodies, to OECD, and to bilateral and multilateral bodies concerned with scientific collaboration. Interagency collaboration in high-performance computing and communication has already been established. The focus on scientific collaboration in practice has not been made explicit, however, and the other agencies can productively follow NSF's lead in this area. The national laboratories are already important players in these fields, and care should be taken to maintain these capabilities through shifts and changes in lab support and missions. University leaders in science have a responsibility to work to change the reward/status system in the sciences in a way that will encourage the modes of connection and collaboration that are in the process of becoming established. It is important to raise these values in the face of objections that may come from older segments of the scientific community that may resist the investment in such changes. Scientific societies and journal publishers can contribute to the value of online communication by establishing online presences and becoming familiar with new needs for methods of submission, peer review, data deposition, and other community/society interactions that make best use of the net. Finally, the workshop participants want to emphasize that what looks today like an anarchic sprawl of chatter, gossip, data, preprints, discussions, and bibliographies is actually the newest source of strength and coherence in the worldwide scientific enterprise. Given conscious and determined policy leadership, the world's scientific communities can raise productivity to new heights and advance the capacities of humanity to understand and, if necessary, alter the facts of nature.
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