Reconfiguring Access in Research: Information, Expertise, and Experience
Reconfiguring Access in Research: Information, Expertise, and Experience
This chapter examines how choices about the design and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including the telegraph and the Internet, have reconfigured access to information, expertise, and experience through e-Research. It highlights the variety of ways in which emerging research-centered computational networks (RCNs) can enable actors in the research process to reconfigure access, first providing an overview of the scope of RCNs before turning to reconfiguration of access and how it can transform research. The chapter then stresses the need for a new perspective on the impacts of ICTs, discusses the expansion or contraction of the proximity of access, and considers the restructuring of network architecture. It also looks at the creation or elimination of gatekeepers in the dissemination of information, user control over digital content and access, social factors shaping digital choices, the geography of space and place, law and public policy, and the intrinsic social nature of e-Research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cyberinfrastructure, the role of scientometrics and Webometrics in e-Research, and the concept of the “economics of superstars.”
Keywords: ICTs, e-Research, access to information, expertise, computational networks, gatekeepers, user control, cyberinfrastructure, Webometrics, economics of superstars
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