Claudia Koschtial (editor) - e-Science: Open, Social and Virtual Technology for Research Collaboration (Progress in IS)

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This publication, e-science: The enhanced science, is a collection of conference papers, reviewed and selected in a double-blind review process by a distinguished reviewer committee. From the very beginning when John Taylor introduced the term, e-science did not only comprise infrastructure as an enabler of scientific discovery, but also global collaboration in key areas of science (Taylor 1999). As computer technologies and digital tools pervade the academic world, it is time to ask what changes are implied when an e is added to science. What is primarily discussed in Germany and Great Britain under the term e-science corresponds in the USA to the concept of cyber infrastructures and in Australia to the concept of e-research.

More recently the discourse about e-science has been dealing with collaborative research that is based on a comprehensive digital infrastructure. This infrastructure both ultimately integrates all relevant resources for a research domain in a digital format and provides tools for processing such data. In computing-intensive research scenarios, e-science includes distribution of computing capacities, supporting collaborative processes of a rather inter-institutional character, such as (inter)national networks. The open innovation approach creates new platforms for developing and publishing research results. For example the MOVING platform ( http://moving-project.eu/moving-platform/ cf. Vagliano et al. 2018) supports new collaborative research practices and has become a resource for further research.

In this sense and in addition to the technological aspect (virtualization of hardware), e-science also has a social and politics-of-science aspect (cooperative research, reusability of data and interoperability of digital tools). Although there is the will to expand e-science methods into the wider economy and society, this development is occurring slowly. New skill sets are being acquired in the e-humanities, virtual engineering or visual analytics (Redecker and Punie 2017; Khler 2018). Yet e-science also comprises open access, e-learning and grid computing; these changes are enabled by state funding and public interest. As a result, the concept of e-science continues to generate new concepts for particular disciplines such as e-geography, e-humanities, e-medicine or e-engineering.

The 2014 International Conference on Infrastructures and Cooperation in e-Science and e-Humanities reflected the broad ongoing discussion concerning the changes affecting research and teaching in universities nowadays. It addressed current questions and solutions related to technologies or applications as well as their implications for the conduct of science. It investigated digitally enhanced academic initiatives from technological and socio-scientific perspectives.

This volume is subdivided into five sections representing different perspectives on e-science, as seen in the figure below. The first section introduces the book and reviews the literature concerning the definition of e-science. Section 2 provides organizational and socio-technical perspectives, especially the use of web 2.0 tools from an individual viewpoint and the successful implementation of such tools from an organizational viewpoint. As e-science of course relates to information technology, Section 3 covers IT perspectives, and Section 4 presents domain-specific cases and experiences. Finally, the proceedings close with future prospects (Fig. ).