The NSF has released an important new report, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyber-infrastructure. The report's major recommendation is to create an ambitious Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program (ACP) with significant annual funding ($1 billion/year) in order "to achieve critical mass and to leverage the coordinated co-investment from other federal agencies, universities, industry, and international sources necessary to empower a revolution. The cost of not acting quickly or at a subcritical level could be high, both in opportunities lost and in increased fragmentation and balkanization of the research communities."
Will this revolution include open access to scientific research literature and data? It's not clear, but here's a clue: "A central goal of ACP is to define and build cyberinfrastructure that...allows applications to interoperate across institutions and disciplines, [and] insures that data and software acquired at great expense are preserved and easily available....The individual disciplines must take the lead in defining specialized software and hardware environments for their fields based on common cyberinfrastructure, but in a way that encourages them to give back results for the general good of the research enterprise." Moreover, about 66% of the requested funds should be devoted to "computational centers, data repositories, digital libraries, networking, and application support".
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
