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Research funding decisions and research evaluation are currently almost exclusively based on peer-review. Peer-review is well suited to ensure quality, but helps little to achieve impact. ParticipatoryResearch adds the stakeholder dimension to research funding and evaluation. In an ideal world those research projects should get funded which will ultimately benefit its stakeholders most. Individuals (such as peer reviewers) can often hardly realistically access the potential benefit of a certain research proposal. Better results can be achieved by relying on the intelligence of a whole community by employing prediction markets (being the best general institutions we know for aggregating information). In such a prediction market for research ideas stakeholders bet or vote about which research results will benefit them most. The highest-ranked research ideas according to the stakeholder benefit should ultimately get funded.

Invariant study is fundamental to any scientific research, especially when the research domain is as complex as World Wide Web. Invariants are supposed to be constant within the specified research scope. By well understanding the invariants we may effectively improve the knowledge over many complicated issues. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly for us to see the discussion of invariant study in the new Web Science Research Initiative.

CollabRx applies collaborative science to slash the time, cost and risk of therapy development. CollabRx builds and operates Virtual Biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. Working with these foundations and research institutions, CollabRx * builds teams of top researchers * facilitates planning of a strategic road map * brings best practices to therapy development * manages the execution of the plan The CollabRx research platform connects researchers to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

The aims of clinical and translational research are to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. Biomedical informatics can play an important role in supporting this research by facilitating the management, integration, analysis and exchange of data derived from and related to the research problems being studied. A key aspect of this support is to bring clarity, rigor and formalism to the representation of 1. disease initiation, progression, pathogenesis, signs, symptoms, assessments, clinical and laboratory findings, disease diagnosis, treatment, treatment response and outcome, and 2. the interrelations between these distinct entities both in patient management and in clinical research, thus allowing the data to be more readily retrievable and shareable, and more able to serve in the support of algorithmic reasoning.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The participants represented many points of view, many academic disciplines, and many nations, and had experience with many of the ongoing initiatives that make up the open access movement. In Budapest they explored how the separate initiatives could work together to achieve broader, deeper, and faster success. They explored the most effective and affordable strategies for serving the interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research. Finally, they explored how OSI and other foundations could use their resources most productively to aid the transition to open access and to make open-access publishing economically self-sustaining. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment.

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

iLeonardo is an impressive site for those interested in research. It's a social utility that connects people and their notebooks which are collections of information from the Web. iLeonardo combines search methodologies, social bookmarks and social networks to produce relevant search results and ranking determined by people - not bots or publishers.The name of the service is obviously an homage to the legendary renaissance man, Leonardo Da Vinci, who was famous for his notebook collection of research information, thoughts and ideas. ILeonardo and its notebook collection technology strives to help the Leonardo's of the digital age. see: http://mashable.com/2008/09/01/research-tools/

Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRES) project is an open collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation. The group is led by Tandy Warnow and involves researchers (biologists, computer scientists, statisticians, and mathematicians) at sixteen institutions. The goal of the CIPRES project is to enable large-scale phylogenetic reconstructions on a scale that will enable analyses of huge data sets containing hundreds of thousands of bio molecular sequences. To achieve this goal we have brought together a group of researchers involved in phylogeny estimation, statistics, and computer science to create new solutions for the difficult computational problems that arise in inferring evolutionary relationships.

Narrative techniques both provide a complementary form of what we will call pre-hypothesis research, but further that the use of narrative research techniques produces, through a single intervention, quantitative conclusions supported by narrative context, fragmented knowledge databases, and a mechanism for measuring impact and more complex issues such as mapping ideation cultures.

Snowden again... Looks like a fairly interesting book is on its way, as well...?

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

The Web Science Research Initiative brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs and decision makers from around the world. These people will create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design.

(from slashdot) "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. We identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers, and develop technology to make research data and materials easier to find and use.

The Lemur Toolkit is a open-source toolkit designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval. Lemur supports a wide range of industrial and research language applications such as ad-hoc retrieval, site-search, and text mining. The toolkit supports indexing of large-scale text databases, the construction of simple language models for documents, queries, or subcollections, and the implementation of retrieval systems based on language models as well as a variety of other retrieval models. The system is written in the C and C++ languages, and is designed as a research system to run under Unix operating systems, although it can also run under Windows.

DiGRA is the association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena. It encourages high-quality research on games, and promotes collaboration and dissemination of work by its members

The Lemur Toolkit is a open-source toolkit designed to facilitate research in language modeling and information retrieval. Lemur supports a wide range of industrial and research language applications such as ad-hoc retrieval, site-search, and text mining. The toolkit supports indexing of large-scale text databases, the construction of simple language models for documents, queries, or subcollections, and the implementation of retrieval systems based on language models as well as a variety of other retrieval models. The system is written in the C and C++ languages, and is designed as a research system to run under Unix operating systems, although it can also run under Windows.

"This research is grounded in the anthropological understanding that each individual is a unique 'energy source' (Bateson 1972) responsible for acting upon their socially and culturally inflected interpretations in an equally particular way. These indexes capture the actual moments of interaction, of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange (Rapport and Overing 2000). The indexes in this research focus on the socio-cultural field (rather than physical, archaeological or linguistic sub-disciplines), which has been a key element of the discipline since its establishment in the 19th century. Above all, this report highlights how this Cultural Mapping project will offer unparalleled global access into anthropology's own minimal definition: that is, a means to see the Other as Self, and the Self as Other."

Interesting work, based in anthropology