2019 Charleston Library Conference

Scientific cyberinfrastructure (SCI) is the distributed computer, information, and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor (Atkins et al., 2003). For decades, government agencies and funding organizations have made significant investments in the research and development of SCI and the creation of digital content such as data repositories, networked computing, and the tools to interact with the content. Yet, contemporary SCI projects are facing challenges as they attempt to transition from grant funding to a longer-term plan for ongoing growth and development. Regardless of research domain, SCI builders and project managers are now confronted with identifying new ways to fund their activities and sustain their projects.

Most solutions for sustaining SCI are likely to require the coordinated response of multiple stakeholders in the research, library, academic, publishing, funding, and policy communities. However, before we can mobilize community action, we need to better examine the convergent and divergent views among stakeholders, specifically what pieces of SCI are important and who are the key SCI players. Examples of such mapping exercises are the Mellon-funded landscape scan recently completed by John Maxwell of Simon Fraser University with a focus on open source publishing platforms and tools and the recent SCI Summit workshop hosted by DataONE that explored how government agencies, funders, and researchers are approaching SCI.

After quick descriptions of these activities and how the library sits at the nexus of these communities, this Lively Discussion will facilitate an interactive workshop-style conversation and activities to understand a slice of how library and publisher stakeholders view SCI. This session is for all users, builders, researchers, and managers of SCI to share their expertise. By the end of the session, we will have uncovered the list of players and complexities of interactions as we work toward developing a broader SCI stakeholder map.