Research evaluation should take into account the intended scholarly and non-scholarly audiences of the research output. This holds too for research infrastructures, which often aim at serving a large variety of audiences. With research and research infrastructures moving to the web, new possibilities are emerging for evaluation metrics. This paper proposes a feasible indicator for measuring the scope of audiences who use web-based e-infrastructures, as well as the frequency of use. In order to apply this indicator, a method is needed for classifying visitors to e-infrastructures into relevant user categories. The paper proposes such a method, based on an inductive logic program and a Bayesian classifier. The method is tested, showing that the visitors are efficiently classified with 90% accuracy into the selected categories. Consequently, the method can be used to evaluate the use of the e-infrastructure within and outside academia.

Most natural history institutions in Europe have been scientific publishers sincetheir foundation and have a long scholarly publishing tradition. Nowadays, they areconfronted with rapid technological developments and face complex strategic andtechnical questions related to visibility, access, format, and the financial structure oftheir titles. These issues require a common vision and an international strategy toensure that the community acts in a consistent and coordinated way. A consortiumof institutions is thus launching the European Journal of Taxonomy to provide analternative public open-access business model, where neither authors nor readers haveto pay fees for subscriptions or publication. This paper focuses on the benefits for theinstitutions on taking greater control over their communication process.

Support systems play an important role for the communication between users and developers of software. We studied two support systems, an issues tracker and an email service available for Scratchpads, a Web 2.0 social networking tool that enables communities to build, share, manage and publish biodiversity information on the Web. Our aim was to identify co-learning opportunities between users and developers of the Scratchpad system by asking which support system was used by whom and for what type of questions. Our results show that issues tracker and emails cater to different user mentalities as well as different kind of questions and suggest ways to improve the support system as part of the development under the EU funded ViBRANT programme.

No Abstrac

The research environment of scholars is increasingly web-based. This makes it urgent to study the effects of moving to the Web on research practices, scholarly output and innovation. We propose a theoretical framework and a methodology to study these effects. In a pilot study, we apply theory and method on an online community in biodiversity research, to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. We also indicate the practical relevance of this kind of analysis for improving the quality of virtual research environments. In the last section, directions for further research are suggested.