Both the Chair of the ARC and Australia’s Chief Scientist have spoken recently about e-Science and e-Research. Cram’s (2003) ‘A Roadmap for e-Research’ and Batterham’s (2003) ‘E-Science: A Frontier Technology for Achieving the National Research Priorities’ set the scene for the section on e-Science in the ‘Smart Use of Information Technology Systems’ (SUITS) bid. Both of these sources, from peak government advisors, emphasise the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the way research and innovation will be conducted in the future.
The terms e-Science and e-Research are not well differentiated. E-Science is usually understood to be related to the use of ICT in scientific research, particularly that needing high computing power and vast data sources in a highly distributed grid environment (e.g. the National E-Science Center). Typical domains include astronomy, physics, geology, and so on. The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), Australasian Workshop on Grid Computing and e-Research (AusGrid) and, presumably, National ICT Australia (NICTA), are the kinds of organisations involved in e-Science. The technologies they are developing and promoting include broadband, middleware, repositories of scientific data, sensors and instrumentation, distributed computational power, and so on.
The UK e-Science Grid conceives of:
an e-Scientist’s workbench ... [that] aims to support: the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation; the scientist’s use of the community’s information; and scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems.
E-Research is a broader term that, Cram (2003) says, ‘concerns the ways that Researchers, Research Students, Scholars and Entrepreneurs use and will use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)’ in the context of innovation and knowledge application’. He argues ‘Research is to Innovation as Sunlight is to Photosynthesis’. The first theme of this paper, then, is: recognising research as a systematic, human activity that can make use of the ‘big ICT’ envisaged in e-Science
In a major Australian Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) study, ‘Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment’, released in late 2003, Prof. John W. Horton has reviewed the current and future directions for research. The changing nature of research, who does it, how it is funded, what research practices are in use and the role of ICT are discussed at length, and key findings about the systems needed to underlie research in the future are presented.
To an information systems person, however, Horton is trapped in a traditional view of knowledge. While his study covers knowledge production and its dissemination in documents, it does not cover its use. His view is that ICT can contribute to collaboration between researchers’ access to knowledge as part of the production process and the publishing of knowledge. But what of its deployment and use to achieve human ends? Consequently, the second theme of this paper is: recognising the use of research, not just its production.
For the reasons underlying the two themes of this paper, research is a suitable domain for IS attention. This paper will use the term e-Research to mean IS work in the research domain.