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Collaborative tools

Doing (e-)research usually involves assembling a set of tools and technologies to be used, setting up ways of sharing resources of various kinds and establishing communication and collaboration mechanisms. There's a range of services or tools that researchers may make use of in their work. You might want to

  • authenticate using an authentication service; 
  • communicate and collaborate with colleagues; 
  • transfer data;
  • configure a resource;
  • invoke a computation;
  • re-use data and give credit to the original producer; 
  • archive output data and runtime data; 
  • publish outputs, both informally through blogs or wikis and formally through conference or journal papers;
  • discover what resources are available; 
  • monitor the state of a resource or process; 
  • maintain awareness of who is doing what; 
  • find out where particular data has come from and how it was processed (provenance); and 
  • find out who has access to a resource and what they can do with it (authentication and authorization).

For practically all these aspects of the research cycle collaborative tools are available.

 

  • An extensive list of research tools can be found at Bamboo Digital Research Tools (DiRT): ‘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’.
  • To get an impression of virtual (research) environments available, see, for instance, a list of collaborative software at Wikipedia.
  • SURFfoundation in the Netherlands stimulates ICT development in higher education and research environments, and facilitates the storage and distribution of research data and publications.
  • SURFnet is taking the next step in online collaboration by initiating innovative collaboration Infrastructure projects (SURFconext).
  • A recent research software tool has been developed at Oxford University: the Colwiz (‘collective wizdom’) R&D platform. This beta version manages the entire research lifecycle from an initial idea, through a complex collaboration, to publication of the results.

 

Click here for a selection of publications about virtual research environments.

Course on Online scholarly collaboration 

Online scholarly collaboration in a collaboratory or virtual research environment (VRE) is a relatively new way of working in the social sciences and humanities. How to create your own collaboratory, using Sharepoint software from SURFgroepen as an example. Identify failure and success factors, especially organizational and social factors.