A key step for the RCA was to understand campus e-science needs and identify the challenges of engaging with relevant research computing resources and support. As a project of the 2009 President’s Emerging Leaders (PEL) program, our five member team of interdepartmental university staff was commissioned by the RCA to help lead this effort and recommend ways that the RCA university partners might respond.

In 2009 our team conducted an extensive user-needs assessment of 780 university faculty, research staff, and graduate students. The PEL survey assessed the current and future cyberinfrastructure needs in the following areas: data storage, data management, and networking infrastructure; collaboration with other researchers; tools and applications; high performance computing; and learning and workforce development.

The results of our PEL survey reflect a general need for e-science support and training that may affirm and further explain what other science and technology libraries are observing. Our formal recommendations and the resulting strategies toward implementing cyberinfrastructure for 21st century research will be described with emphasis on the opportunities and future roles that university libraries have in this campus-wide partnership.

e-Science also brings opportunities and challenges for the world of scholarly communication: it amplifies the needs of scientists for fast, effective, unrestricted communication of ideas and scientific results, through Open Access; it enables automation of librarianship intelligence, providing new services to the scientific community for the discovery of information; it calls on libraries and information professionals to fill new roles, as evolving actors in the scholarly communication chain.

The field of High-Energy Physics (HEP) has pioneered infrastructures for scholarly communication, with half a century of tradition in Open Access and pre-print dissemination and two decades of experiences in repositories. Scholarly communication in HEP is now moving fast in the e-Science era. This contribution will discuss three main axes of evolution: the INSPIRE project, the SCOAP3 initiative, data preservation in the field.

The INSPIRE project, jointly executed by the four leading laboratories in the field, in the US and Europe, has a unique role in the daily workflow of HEP scientists. It is the successor of the SPIRES platform, and in synergy with arXiv.org and leading publishers in the field is building a next-generation platform for scientific information in HEP. New repository services have been designed and will be presented: discovery of related information, author disambiguation, impact assessment, automated key-wording. These are based on a unique, curated, corpus of 750’000 records, among which 500’000 Open Access full-text documents

The SCOAP3 initiative aims to convert to Open Access the entire volume of the peer-reviewed literature of the field, therefore enabling e-Science applications on this corpus of information. It bears an additional e-Science dimension through its global approach to a new vision of scholarly communication, where libraries worldwide federate to enable a more efficient and economic action at the interface of peer-review, repositories and Open Access.

Data preservation in HEP is in its infancy, and faces enormous challenges. The first findings of DPHEP, the international study group in Digital Preservation for HEP will be presented, focusing on the roles of dedicated “archivists” for the field and the opportunities for specialized repositories/libraries.

The research group in this case study is the Ketterson/Nolan Research Group, a team of avian biologists in the Department of Biology Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. This research team has focused on the ecology, behavior, and physiology of a songbird, the dark-eyed junco. The research output from this group’s long-term (thirty year) study on this single species of songbird has resulted in rich data sets of a variety of subjects (e.g. population demographics, behavioral observations, DNA records, and natural history).

The research group and librarians are working toward more than just the preservation of data, but also the preservation of accompanying descriptive documents that place this large body of work into historical and educational contexts. Described within this case study are preliminary issues that the scientists and librarians have worked through as they have moved to preserve the research output in the library’s institutional repository.

The Australian Government, via the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), is funding institutions to identify and describe their research datasets, to develop and populate data repositories and collaborative infrastructure, and to seed the Australian Research Data Commons. QUT is currently broadening its range of research support services, including those to support the management of research data, in recognition of the value of these datasets as products of the research process, and in order to maximize the potential for reuse. QUT is integrating Library and High Performance Computing (HPC) services to achieve its research support goals.

The Library and HPC released an online survey using Key Survey to 1,700 researchers in September 2009. A comprehensive range of eResearch practices and skills was presented for response, and grouped into areas of scholarly communication and open access publishing, using collaborative technologies, data management, data collection and management, computation and visualization tools. Researchers were asked to rate their skill level on each practice. 254 responses were received over two weeks. Eight focus groups were also held with 35 higher degree research (HDR) students and staff to provide additional qualitative feedback. A similar survey was released to 100 support staff and 73 responses were received.

Preliminary results from the researcher survey and focus groups indicate a gap between current eResearch practices, and the potential for researchers to engage in eResearch practices. Researchers are more likely to seek advice from their peers, than from support staff. HDR students are more positive about eResearch practices and are more willing to learn new ways of conducting research. An account of the survey methodology, the results obtained, and proposed strategies to embed eResearch practices and skills across and within the research disciplines will be provided.