The Internet for research and development

Present

Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, UK, Ireland

The development of new information and communication technologies (ICT) has affected societies and economies worldwide. Their impact on the research and development (R&D) system must be considered as particularly important, as R&D is one of the primary sources of inventions and technical progress and is therefore a major motor of economic growth. The amount of data accessible to researchers in public and private R&D organisations and the opportunities for researchers to communicate has been increased by the Internet to an extent that has few parallels in history. - It has become possible to bridge large distances to collect primary data and processed information from remote instruments and storage resources. - The contents of entire libraries, representing the research results of centuries of intense scientific work, are now only a few mouse-clicks away. Statistical data can be retrieved from on-line databases and pasted into spreadsheets, and the onerous and fault-prone task of re-typing column after column of illegible data is a thing of the past. - Various forms of communication, from the informal exchange of notes to the formalised review process of renowned journals, can now be carried out without having to exchange a single sheet of paper. - Though project partners may be located in countries around the globe, communication and collaboration are ensured with few, seldom insurmountable, difficulties. At the current state of development, we must acknowledge a major shortage of empirical information on the significance of the Internet and its impact on national R&D systems. This shortage of empirical information led to the production of this research project on the Internet for R&D which aims to find valid, reliable, meaningful, and feasible indicators in order to measure the use of the Internet within R&D and to investigate the significance and the impact of the net on R&D at the current point in time. Research approach: Research was focused on the development of indicators to quantify the use of the Internet in R&D and the effects of this. It included a detailed literature review which evaluated the scientific literature, as well as policy and statistical documents. Subsequently an indicator system was developed and "tested" by means of pilot surveys in different European countries. The experiences and results of the pilot surveys were used to improve the indicator system and to undertake a first benchmarking of European countries regarding the Internet for R&D. The indicators can be attributed to three broad sub-topics: - Readiness for computerized and networked science covers indicators on the computer and network infrastructure in science and the computer skills and IT awareness of scientists. Capable computers and networks with sufficient transmission capacities represent the technical preconditions for modern science. Computer skills and an awareness of the capacities of IT for knowledge production are other, somewhat less strict prerequisites. - The Use of Internet tools and applications section includes indicators on a variety of tasks in science for which computer networks are employed. Internet-based applications have become integrated into such diverse activities as data collection and data analysis, information retrieval, communication, collaboration and publishing. Some of the applications are especially useful in a specific phase of a research project, i.e. during planning and definition, implementation or dissemination, whereas others are used during the entire duration of a project. - Indicators on the Impact of the Internet are used to assess the production of new knowledge which may be considered as the main aim of science. We include indicators that cover two outcomes of scientific work, i.e. publications and patents. Furthermore, scientific collaborations can be affected by the use of Internet applications. Therefore we also include indicators on the occurrence of R&D collaborations and the size of collaboration networks. Readiness-related and use-related variables can be regressed on these outcome variables in causal analyses in order to evaluate the impact of the Internet on science. This, however, was not the task of the SIBIS project.

The implementation of the indicator system and the benchmarking of the Internet in science among European countries in general provided valid and interpretable results, despite the limited data available. Due to the particular eEurope emphasis on research networks (RN), it seems appropriate to highlight the country differences in this area: The Netherlands and Sweden perform well for the RN indicators, whereas Greece, Ireland and Portugal lag somewhat behind the other countries. Finland and Denmark had attained a very good position, though their efforts towards further improvement seem to have tailed off somewhat, whereas Spain and Belgium seem to be catching up. It is difficult to rate the larger countries in the survey (Germany, France, UK, Italy) because the available indicators do not yet take different country sizes properly into account. Overall, the differences in Internet access and use in science can be correlated fairly well with the known differences in scientific output among countries. There is no direct linear relationship between these phenomena, but the overall tendency is clear: countries with highly productive science systems have made more advanced use of Internet tools than countries with less productive science systems. However, the differences regarding readiness for, and use of, Internet tools are much more pronounced for the five scientific disciplines of the survey than for the countries. Astronomers and computer scientists have a better infrastructure and higher Internet-related skills levels than scientists from the other disciplines. They are also more experienced in using Internet applications. Chemists, economists and psychologists in general had lower scores for the readiness and use indicators than the two other disciplines. There is one notable exception to this: For economists, working papers are an important means of communicating research results and they use their own homepage(s) and the Internet in general for making these papers available to their peers and the general public. It is almost impossible to compare the outcome of scientific work between the different scientific disciplines as they publish in different media which cannot be compared easily. In regard to R&D collaborations it is notable that nearly all astronomers are involved in collaborations. Their collaboration networks are the largest and they have the most co-authors of all scientists. At the opposite end of the scale, economists and psychologists are a lot less involved in R&D collaborations. Computer scientists and chemists are somewhere in between the extremes. Hence, for the scientific disciplines we can state that there are some parallels for collaboration activities and Internet readiness and use. This is not particularly surprising, as the main benefit of many Internet applications is the lowering of barriers to communication and collaboration.