e-Research Infrastructure Development and Community Engagement

The UK and wider international e-Research initiatives are entering a critical phase in which they need to move from the development of the basic underlying technology, demonstrators, prototypes and early applications to wider adoption and the development of stable infrastructures. In this paper we will review existing work on studies of infrastructure and community development, requirements elicitation for existing services as well as work within the arts and humanities and the social sciences to establish e-Research in these communities. We then describe two projects recently funded by JISC to study barriers to adoption and responses to them as well as use cases and service usage models.