In the near future, scientific research in many fields will increasingly require the collaboration of groups of researchers around the globe needing access to distributed computing, data resources and support for remote access to multi-national specialized facilities or sensor arrays (such as telescopes, accelerators, etc.) and specialist data archives.
There is also a general belief that an important road to innovation will be provided by multi-disciplinary and collaborative research, facilitated by developments in social networking – fueled by an explosion in the amount of scientific data collected in the next decade.
These requirements of scientific research in the future form the 'e-Science' agenda. Robust middleware services will be widely deployed on top of the academic research networks to constitute the necessary 'cyberinfrastructure' to provide a collaborative research environment for the global academic community. This talk will review the elements of this vision and describe how the scientists and engineers are collaborating with computer scientists and the IT industry to create this cyberinfrastructure. A key part of this cyberinfrastructure will also be services accessing digital repositories containing both scientific data and full-text publications. Open access (in some form) to these repositories is likely to underpin scientific research in the future and this talk will give some examples of open access repositories, speculate on the future of research libraries, and discuss the impact on evaluation and peer review, namely the quality and assessment of scientific research – and the implications for science moving forward – and a deion of the projects Microsoft is engaged to help further these efforts.