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Abstract: "UK public policy makers have a growing interest in collaborative research, where academics work with public, private or third sector partners on a joint project which supports the partner's aims. This paper reports on the findings of five case studies, looking at how information is sourced, managed, used and shared within collaborative research projects. It finds that researchers within collaborative projects have similar information management issues as are known to exist within academia more broadly, but that the specific conditions which govern research collaborations mean that interventions to improve or support information management must be carefully tailored."

from the abstract: "assessing the influence of spatial proximity between scientists is crucial to promote efficient collaboration strategies and, ultimately, to improve the quality of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration streams between cities and countries. By assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors' affiliations, we construct weighted networks of citations and collaborations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws with exponents close to 1. Moreover, for a given number of authors, the diversity of affiliations increases the number of citations, especially when many countries are represented. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than 120,000 US $ per researcher annually. Our results reveal the overall structure of scientific research by showing the correlation between collaboration, citation, geography and funding, and could provide valuable inputs in shaping the future science policies."

This collaborative research project will be composed of two separate, but linked, analyses. It will identify and examine information-related support services throughout the lifecycle of the research process. The project's goal is to discover researchers' needs and desires in a small sample of UK and US universities and to identify the significant patterns, intersections, gaps and issues from researchers' points of view, whatever the source of such services. This study will document the nature and scope of research support services, providing examples of good practice, recommending areas where new practice might emerge, and identifying possible areas and scope for collaboration within and between institutions

What was highly significant, however, was the pace of discussion and analysis, carried out in real time on blogs and a wiki that had been quickly set up for the purpose of collectively analyzing the paper. This kind of collaboration has emerged only in recent years in the math and computer science communities. In the past, intense discussions like the one that surrounded the proof of the Poincaré conjecture were carried about via private e-mail and distribution lists as well as in the pages of traditional paper-based science journals.

highlights a number of initiatives in the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, showing how research data repository infrastructures can be effectively realized through collaboration and sharing of expertise.

eScience refers to new science opportunities that require distributed collaborations and enabled by emerging internet technologies. These technologies include grid computing, distributed data management, and collaborative tools. Many tools are still in the process of rapid development, and in some cases standards are not yet established.

A grant proposal was submitted to build a Facebook for scientists to foster scientific collaboration. Such a social network could connect experts across scientific and geographic borders to promote collaboration on research projects.

Picture post: world map of scientific collaboration - January 27, 2011

A project proposed by Cameron Neylon to convene (funders, publishers and individuals) and developers to develop useful research metrics that encourage more open usage and re-usage of research data.

Digital media and the Internet are transforming how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California-Irvine will provide an international center to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people's learning and its potential for transforming education. Funded through a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Center was announced today at a national forum at Google headquarters that brought together leading thinkers around the challenge of reasserting American global leadership in education.

presentation, an Ohio Libraries perspective

University of Haifa and New Jearsey Institute of Technology collaborate on astudy which shows that "prediction of an online community's survival chances cannot be based on quantitative data relating to the size of the group or even to its growth rate alone. A social predictor, on the other hand, can much better predict its chances,"

"Long-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information are vitally important to future science and scholarship. Scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving disciplinary and interdisciplinary data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities of users. Meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository will help to ensure that today's collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify the additional steps needed for it to become a trustworthy repository. Recommendations include a strategy for collaborative organizational sustainability, a model for submission and workflow to ingest interdisciplinary scientific data into a repository, and a plan for facilitating intra-organizational transfer between repositories."

DZero collaborators perform the data analysis for the experiment using a variety of computational resources, including Open Science Grid and EGEE. "Computing resources are playing a very important role in particle physics with many exciting results, including di-muon charge asymmetry, obtained with heavy use of grid," Denisov said.

"Much turmoil in the scholarly-communication ecosystem appears to revolve around simple ownership of intellectual property. Unpacking that notion, however, produces a fascinating tangle of stakeholders, desires, products and struggles. Some products of the research process, especially novel ones, are difficult to fit into legal concepts of ownership. As collaborative research burgeons, traditional ownership and authorship criteria are stretched to their limits and beyond, with many contributors still feeling short of due credit. The desire for access and impact brings institutions and grant funders into the formerly exclusive relationship between authors and publishers. Librarians, stripped of first-sale rights by electronic licensing, wonder about both access and long-term preservation. Emerging solutions to many of these difficulties threaten to cut publishers out of the picture altogether, perhaps a welcome change to those stakeholders who find publishers' behavior to block progress."

"Digital Media and Learning Competition 4: Badges for Lifelong Learning" supported by the MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with Mozilla and HASTAC, simultaneously in person and online 9/15/11

From a survey of ACRL member libraries, this report examines the scope of library participation in data research services while identifying future opportunities for collaboration, especially in research intensive institutions.

Project from 2012, collaboration of UKOLN, University of Bath and Microsoft Research "to assist institutions, research funders and researchers in growing the capability of their communities to perform data intensive research "

Report from the 2012 Summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE,) which focused particularly on digital scholarship, open educational resources and academic collaboration.