JISC

This theme is taken up in Solutions in hands, an article by Peter Halfpenny and Rob Procter from the National Centre for e-Social Science and David Robey, director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ICT programme.  Researchers in these disciplines are turning to e-Science to “address their own versions of the data deluge,” they write.  The sources and types of data available to social science researchers are changing and expanding and a greater array of data is becoming available to arts and humanities researchers: “. . . there can be no doubt about the potentially transforming impact of e-Science on these disciplines,” they say.

e-Science allows organisations to collaborate and share their work, writes Malcolm Atkinson UK e-Science envoy, in Open your hearts. “It also aims to democratise science by making resources – instruments, dataset, facilities and tools – available to those who could not afford their own investment, but could benefit from a collective one.”  His article, which outlines the successes and future challenges of the UK e-Science Programme, argues that e-Science should be embedded in education.

In Fire up the little Einsteins, Olga Wojtas of the THES outlines JISC and Research Council funded projects to introduce e-Science to schoolchildren: “... technology developed to meet the computational needs of big science is being successfully used to bring the ‘wow’ factor to school science,” she writes.

In a series of short articles, Judy Redfearn, e-Science/e-Research communications officer at JISC and the e-Science Core Programme, describes some of the facilities needed to do e-Science and the plans for JISC and the Research Councils to develop the e-infrastructure. In To ubiquity and beyond she quotesMatthew Dovey, JISC research director: “The UK e-Science Programme produced many proofs of concept for e-infrastructure and demonstrated its potential. The challenge now is to realise that promise . . . “.

  One short article describes the National Grid Service, one of the key elements of an e-infrastructure and others give examples of its use in the social sciences, to understand drug resistance in HIV and to predict stable forms of drug molecules.  The use of Access Grid videoconferencing technology in a project to study performance is the subject of another article.

Other articles in the e-supplement feature the Archival Sound Recordings resource from JISC and the British Library, and the JISCPAS plagiarism roadmap.

For further information, please go to: www.thes.co.uk