Call for Papers: Special Issue on Digital Libraries and eScience

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.