Research challenges
e-Infrastructures are commonly conceived in layers, from the networks up through grid integration to data, applications and users. All these layers are essential to achieving a pay-off in research communities, however, each brings with it specific issues to be taken into account in policy. High-speed networks are essential to bridging distance in a way that data transport is quasi instantaneous for many applications. A key issue is the major investment needed to create these networks, and the charges or cost-attribution for their use. Grid technologies are essential to remove the costs associated with adapting research applications to varying specific sets of underlying throughput and capability resources, masking the fact that computational and storage resources are usually not local to the researcher. Some important grid technologies are in proprietary hands, again raising issues of cost to public research.
Access to, sharing of, and curation of data (in a broad sense) over the longer term is a major issue for e-Infrastructures that will deserve special consideration in its impact on research communities . e-Infrastructure requirements differ between disciplines dealing with sensitive data about human participants and population data, as against researchers who share data without human participants (i.e. astronomy, environmental data, artistic works) or where issues of intellectual credit, curation, and copyright arise. It is also important to expose problems of timing or temporal fit between ever more rapid ability to achieve research results and the relatively slow approval and publication process and to ask if these processes can also be speeded up.