Managing Knowledge in a Changing Scientific Landscape: The Impact of Cyberinfrastructure

Motivating employees to share knowledge has been an ongoing challenge for organizations. In contrast, scientific and academic organizations have built reward systems around knowledge sharing. With the implementation of information and communication technologies and large-scale cyberinfrastructure initiatives, the nature of scientific knowledge sharing is evolving. Technology enables rapid dissemination of knowledge, yet institutions continue to build reward systems based on old models. The current paper describes research-in-progress to examine the skills, cultural shifts, and mindset changes necessary to capitalize on cyberinfrastructure for sharing scientific knowledge. Open-ended interview questions will be used to uncover the factors that are uniquely important in scientific knowledge sharing. While the research is focused on plant scientists who are involved with the iPlant collaborative, an NSF-funded project to build cyberinfrastructure to support research in the plant sciences, the results should be broadly applicable to large-scale technology-enabled science.