CFP: Special Issue on Digital Libraries and eScience - International Journal on Digital Libraries
Special Issue Editors:
Tamara Sumner (sumner@colorado.edu)
Traugott Koch (t.koch@ukoln.ac.uk)
Michael Wright (mwright@ucar.edu)
Background and Significance
There is an increasing number of initiatives in several countries targeted at supporting research into new forms of computational infrastructure intended to transform the conduct of scientific research in areas such as chemistry, atmospheric science, and earth science. These initiatives, which go under a variety of names including eScience, eResearch, and cyberinfrastructure, are a response to the changing nature of scientific research, particularly in the natural and physical sciences, which is increasingly dependent upon large data sets and high-end analysis and visualization tools. eScience approaches and techniques are also beginning to appear in other disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences. Research issues being addressed in these initiatives include information retrieval, information modeling, ontologies, systems interoperability, and policy issues associated with providing transparent access to complex data sets. As such, these initiatives are concerned with many of the same research issues that the international digital library community has been grappling with for the past decade. The purpose of this special issue is to critically examine the role that digital libraries can and should play in this emerging eScience computational infrastructure. Bringing the digital library and the emerging scientific infrastructure worlds together can lay the foundation for providing truly integrated support for the entire process of science, from formulation of research questions to the publication of the outcomes.
Papers are invited on the technical, social, and policy dimensions of eScience and digital libraries. Topics to be considered include, but are not limited to:
-The design, use, and evaluation of innovative digital library technologies in eScience
-Critical examinations of eScience practices using these technologies
-How eScience and digital libraries are transforming education
-Critical examination of the role of policies and scientific cultures on data sharing, open access and differences across scientific disciplines
-Interdisciplinary aspects; international cooperation
-Metadata and information modeling for eScience
-Knowledge organization systems and subject access for eScience; e.g., thesauri, ontologies, and other terminologies
-Semantic interoperability, and data integration
-Indexing, retrieval, and discovery of data and related science and education materials
-Automatic data analysis techniques and data mining across a collection of resources
-Intersection of scientific workflows with metadata generation and other digital library information management issues
-Encoding systems and mark-up languages for integrating scientific data and other intellectual products
-Persistent identifiers, citation, and linking between data, publications, and other science and education products
-Data storage management
-Digital curation, provenance, repository, and preservation issues associated with eScience
-User needs and user interfaces for creating, managing, customizing, annotating, and collaborating
Due to the emerging nature of this field, we welcome a broad variety of lengths and publication types. All submissions need to relate to the field of eScience, however. Please contact one of the editors for feedback and guidance.
Important dates
Submissions are due: May 1, 2006
Acceptance notifications: Aug 1, 2006
Anticipated publication of the special issue: Early 2007
Submissions
Papers must be submitted via the web site: http://www.softconf.com/start/IJDL_escience
Manuscripts must be written in English and should include a cover page with title, name and address (including email address) of author(s), an abstract, and a list of keywords.
Authors are encouraged to follow the formatting instructions at: http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~ijdl/submission_index.htm
More information about the journal can be found at: http://www.dljournal.org/
