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Scoping the Online Visibility of e-Research by Means of e-Research Tools

e-Research has generated a number of expectations about increased collaboration between institutions and disciplines and also the organization of research communities around a central infrastructure. In this paper we use dynamic hyperlink network analysis to map the web presence of funded e-Research in the UK (both e-Science and e-Social Science) between 2002 and 2007. While it is too early to identify directions that would point to changes in science policy, there are indications that UK e-Research has undergone some major shifts while it is still uncertain whether the expectation of cohering around a core infrastructure will be met. Origins and Expectations of e-Research in the UK e-Science in the UK can be considered to have started with the introduction of the e-Science Core Programme in 2001. The programme was initiated with joint funding from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the Department for Trade and Industry to the sum of £250 million. Each of the seven UK Research Councils at that time were responsible for selecting pilot projects under the e-Science Core Programme, which resulted in eleven initial pilot projects across a range of disciplines. There have been a variety of follow-ups to the Core Programme, with the EPSRC continuing to fund a dedicated eScience Programme, the establishment of the National Centre for e-Social Science funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) in 2004, and several initiatives in the humanities by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, such as the JISC funded Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre. As UK e-Science has matured and transitioned from developing proof of concept for gridenabled tools and infrastructure, a number of expectations have emerged amongst the organizations that govern academic and scientific research. These include increased collaboration between developers of e-Research tools and technologies towards interoperability, increased collaboration between different disciplinary communities, the development of a sustainable infrastructure through interoperability, standardisation and the appropriation of tools and infrastructure beyond initial funding programmes for e-Research, and finally the diffusion of tools, technologies and approaches developed in the UK e-Science Core Programme to the social sciences and the humanities. Put differently, it has been thought that research communities would adopt grid-enabled tools and come to organize their work around a central e-infrastructure. The extent to which these expectations might be fulfilled or are currently being fulfilled is unclear. Partly this is due to the lack of a systematic approach to evaluate the outcomes and impact of e-Science within and across research communities, but it may also be that new forms of knowledge are difficult to gauge by the standards of conventional research outputs. In this paper we attempt to address this lacuna by presenting a network perspective of how eResearch in the UK has evolved over time – taking the hyperlink structure to indicate influence and impact on development, collaboration and diffusion. An e-Research Methodology for Mapping e-Research Our approach for collecting and analysing e-Science and e-Social Science project web data extends methods for researching web networks outlined in Ackland and Gibson (2006) and Ackland and O’Neil (2007) using the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) e-Research software tool (see http://voson.anu.edu.au). First, we used the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) and National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) websites to identify projects that were recipients of UK e-Research funding. Our sample consists of 51 projects: 42 projects identified from the NeSC website, 7 projects from the NCeSS website (the NCeSS nodes), and NeSC and NCeSS themselves are also included. For each known project, we tried to identify a project website. However some projects are not represented by a single project site, and in such cases we searched for websites that (in our view) best represent the project (in some cases, this included academic homepages of the researchers most closely identified with the project). In what follows, we refer to the 51 projects as “seed sites” or “seed URLs”, but it is important to note that our approach allows for a given project to be represented by any number of websites. We then used the Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), which has been archiving the web since 1996, to collect historical data on hyperlinks and text content for our sample of e-Science and e-Social Science project web sites. For each project, we collected data at yearly intervals (we attempted to collect the data for the middle of each year, although the exact date of data collection was dependent on the date of the IA crawl). The archived pages had to be manually accessed using web browsers (the IA currently does not allow web crawler access) and in order to limit the data collection process we only accessed the archived top-level (or index) pages from the websites, and those (internal) pages linked to directly from the top-level pages. The data collection resulted in a time series of web networks (from 2002 to 2007) where the nodes represent websites (the projects in our sample and the websites that they hyperlink to) and the edges or arcs represent hyperlinks. Note that not all projects in our sample were present in the web network for each of the 6 years of our study: the first year of inclusion was the year the project was first funded (or 2002, if that was later), while the last year of inclusion was determined using information on duration of grants and also by checking for project activity on the websites.