This study is aimed at understanding the patterns and motivations of scientific collaboration in online settings, and creating new tools for scientists’ online collaboration. Our goal is to develop QScience - a distributed platform for scientists allowing them to locate or form new communities and transparent, quality-promoting reviewing mechanisms.
This study is part of the FP7 funded research project QLectives – Socially Intelligent ICT Systems for Quality. QLectives is a project bringing together social modelers, peer-to-peer engineers and physicists to design and deploy next generation self-organising socially intelligent information systems. The project aims to combine three recent trends within information systems:
• Social networks - in which people link to others over the Internet to gain value and facilitate collaboration
• Peer production - in which people collectively produce informational products and experiences without traditional hierarchies or market incentives
• Peer-to-Peer systems - in which software clients running on user machines distribute media and other information without a central server or administrative control
QLectives aims to bring these together to form Quality Collectives, i.e. functional decentralised communities that self-organise and self-maintain for the benefit of the people who comprise them. For more information, see our website www.qlectives.eu
Researchers:
Dr Terhi Nokkala (t.nokkala@surrey.ac.uk)
Dr Alastair Gill (a.gill@surrey.ac.uk)
http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk
The questionnaire will take approximately 20 minutes to complete and is being conducted anonymously and confidentially.
As a thank you to those who take part in our study, we are offering a prize draw for 5 x £20 Amazon gift vouchers. Please leave your email address on the final page of the questionnaire to be entered into the prize draw (expected to take place after the 14 November 2009). Winners will be notified by email. Please do not fill in this questionnaire if you have previously submitted a paper version.