Design principles for a dedicated web-based collaboration infrastructure for research publications and resources

Due to the very large amount of research resources and materials available through digital libraries, conferences and websites, the search for relevant and focused research materials in a specific topic can be quite difficult and very time consuming because of the large amount of info available from different sources and formats. This issue is even more relevant for research resources in Arabic format, where unstructured libraries and documents are found in many web-based sources. This paper present design principles for the development of a web-based collaboration infrastructure for the collection, organization, storage and dissemination of related research publications and resources in Arabic and English. This work is at its preliminary stage development specifically for Saudi Arabia higher education environment as a model, overall concepts of the infrastructure is presented with the different phases.