How Internet-Mediated Research Changes Science
Ulf‐Dietrich Reips · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2008
Introduction Science and the Internet: Its most appealing, usable, and integrating component, the World Wide Web, came from its laboratories. Fifteen years after the invention of the web, it has become such an integral part of the infrastructure of modern societies that young people cannot imagine a world without it. It has become even easier to imagine a world without roads and cars than a world without the World Wide Web. Time to ask in what ways the Internet had and is having an impact on science. How is what once came from the laboratory influencing that laboratory's structure and the researchers working in it? In particular, how is it influencing the way research is conducted? Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, wrote in 1998: The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.