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The aim of this case study is to describe a project created to enhance e‐research support activities within an Australian university. Within the university sector, e‐research support activities are becoming more sophisticated due to increased research activity and funding both nationally and internationally.

The paper case studies a project undertaken within an academic library to increase its capacity to offer e‐research support to the research community. The university's research community and research support staff are key players in this project.

The outcomes of the project have been successfully achieved. However, the project work should continue and ideally become core business in order to keep pace with developments in e‐research. The continual skills development of the university's researchers and research support staff in e‐research is imperative in the university becoming a competitive research institution.

Although a single case study, the work has been contextualised within the national research agenda and benchmarked with other universities conducting similar activities.

The paper describes a project model that can be adapted within an academic library without requiring external or specialist skills. It is also scalable and can be applied at a divisional or broader level.

The paper highlights the current drivers for research investment in Australia and provides a model for how universities can leverage this investment and contribute towards successful e‐research activity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an oft‐neglected aspect of qualitative research practice – conducting a pilot – using the innovative approach of “e‐research” to generate both practical and methodological insights.

Using the authors’ “e‐research” pilot as a reflexive case study, key methodological issues are critically reviewed. This review is set in a broader context of the qualitative methods literature in which piloting appears largely as an implicit practice. Using a new and emerging approach (“e‐research”) provides a prompt to review “autopilot” tendencies and offers a new lens for analysing research practice.

The authors find that despite an initial focus on “practical” aspects of data collection within their “e‐research”, the pilot opened up a range of areas for further consideration. The authors review research ethics, collaborative research practices and data management issues specifically for e‐research but also reflect more broadly on potential implications for piloting within other research designs.

The authors aim to offer both practical and methodological insights for qualitative researchers, whatever their methodological orientation, so that they might develop approaches for piloting that are appropriate to their own research endeavours. More specifically, the authors offer tentative guidance to those venturing into the emerging area of “e‐research”.

This paper offers insight into an oft‐ignored aspect of qualitative research, whilst also engaging in an emerging area of methodological interest.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the evolution of a new e‐research paradigm and to outline key projects and developments in Europe, North America, Canada and Australia. The article also provides a detailed summary of the Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation e‐Research Technology (DART) project.

A review of relevant government reports, documents and general literature was conducted.

Projects currently being conducted in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia are part of an international movement that aims to use modern ICTs to enhance e‐research. The DART project is a significant part of this movement as it has adopted a “whole process” approach to e‐research, and provides a platform for the examination of the technical, legal and policy issues that arise in the new e‐research environment.

Provides an overview of current projects that concern the development of e‐research, with a particular focus on Australian research and the DART project.

The aim of this paper is to explore the way in which e‐research is changing the nature between researchers and libraries, and to suggest how librarians can become more engaged with professional research under an e‐research environment.

This paper takes the example of research into ultrasonic motors to investigate what can be done in current library facilities with regard to collecting and sharing data, and what should be provided in future libraries to facilitate the research of ultrasonic motors under an e‐research environment.

Current libraries can facilitate professional research through retrieval of digital resources such as diverse databases, in which researchers can get information on trends, hot topics, and the main problems in order to conduct further investigations. To completely realize e‐research of professional researches, it is suggested that more extended services such as infrastructures of remote laboratories and virtual research environments are needed in future libraries to facilitate the collaboration of different research groups in different places.

The paper provides methods for professional research into specific topics (such as ultrasonic motors in the present case) under the e‐research environment, with a particular focus on collaboration in a universal infrastructure for sharing computing power and data storage, as well as data and research. The result of this study should also be helpful in shaping future libraries.

The traditional means of pursuing research by having all the parameters and processes under one roof has given way to collaborative mechanisms of performing the same task. Collaborative work increases the quality of research and it is a big contributing factor to augment the growth of the scientific knowledge. This process leads to training of new and well-informed academicians and scientists. e-Research (Electronic Research) has gained significant amount of traction as technology serves as the backbone for undertaking collaborative research. The purpose of this paper is to provide a synoptic view of existing research surrounding e-Research and suggest a data lifecycle model that can improve the outcome of collaborative research.

Systematic literature review methodology has been employed to undertake this study. Using the outcome of the literature review and the analysis of the existing data lifecycle models, an improvised version of the data lifecycle model has been suggested.

This study has brought a conceptual model for data lifecycle for collaborative research. The literature review in the domain of e-Research has shown that the focus of these papers was on the following stages of data lifecycle model: concept and design, data collection, data processing, sharing and distribution of data and data analysis.

In this paper, only journal papers have been considered and conference proceedings have not been included for literature review.

This paper suggests a conceptual model for the data lifecycle for collaborative research. This study can be useful for academic and research institutions to design their data lifecycle model.

The paper aims to explore the way in which the internet and e‐research are changing the nature of scholarly communities and the relationship between researchers and libraries; and to suggest how librarians can become more engaged with the e‐research process.

A survey and focus groups investigating internet use by academic staff and research students at Curtin University (Western Australia) for e‐research and scholarly communication purposes. The survey questioned respondents on their formal and informal scholarly communication practices and the extent to which these have changed due to internet access. Further questions explored the extent to which respondents' use of the library had been impacted by internet access to services.

The survey and focus groups indicate that research users are positive regarding the usefulness of the internet for research purposes and for expanding their scholarly community, but their attitudes are also marked by ambivalence. In particular they report that the internet may not replace the need for some more traditional forms of scholarly communication. Respondents report making less personal use of the library, but greater use of library services.

The paper concludes with observations about changes to scholarly communities and the opportunity offered for academic librarians to develop the concept of e‐research literacy as a means of enhancing their engagement with scholarly communities.

Opportunities for professional development in online teaching are abundant. However, when the online teacher is geographically and professionally isolated from others with an interest in online teaching, use of insider research to identify areas of good online teaching practice, and those areas that require further development, affords an opportunity for self-directed professional development. Despite a plethora of methodological interpretations of autoethnography, autonetnography has until now remained no more than a methodological ideal. With my background as a registered nurse and teacher of health and social care, shifting from face-to-face teaching towards teaching online, I claim value in developing autonetnography as an insider researcher self-study, to inform my online teacher professional development needs. This chapter has two main aims: (1) to share my theoretical development of analytic autonetnography as an emerging e-research methodology and (2) to evaluate my experience of employing analytic autonetnography to research my recent online teaching practice. I will claim that whilst I have found analytic autonetnography methodologically beneficial to research my online teaching practice, I was also the author who laid the foundations, constructed and evaluated an analytic autonetnography model to test its value. Therefore, the relevance of my findings in the context of the value of analytic autonetnography as an emerging e-research methodology will remain open to debate until other researchers in the digitally mediated field experience, critique, challenge and enhance analytic autonetnography theoretically.

The World Wide Web (Web) is quickly becoming an efficient and preferred medium for business transactions, information, and entertainment. Academic research is also migrating to the Web as the number of persons who have access to cyberspace increases. Tasks previously accomplished by means of traditional mail or by use of personal computers in the laboratory can now be performed at any location subjects have Internet access. The purpose of this paper is to present the issues involved when electronic research (e-research) projects are undertaken. E-research is the use of the Web to disseminate research materials to subjects, manipulate constructs, and capture empirical data. While this approach provides many opportunities for accounting behavioral researchers, certain issues must be understood and addressed before e-research projects are begun.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of the emergence of virtual research environments (VREs) and related e‐research tools for scholarly work and communications processes.

The concepts of VREs and of e‐research more generally are introduced and relevant literature is reviewed. On this basis, the authors discuss the developing role they play in research practices across a number of disciplines and how scholarly communication is beginning to evolve in response to the opportunities these new tools open up and the challenges they raise.

Virtual research environments are beginning to change the ways in which researchers go about their work and how they communicate with each other and with other stakeholders such as publishers and service providers. The changes are driven by the changing landscape of data production, curation and (re‐)use, by new scientific methods, by changes in technology supply and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research in many domains.

The paper is based on observations drawn from a number of projects in which the authors are investigating the uptake of advanced ICT in research. The paper describes the role of VREs as enablers of changing research practices and the ways in which they engender changes in scholarly work and communications.

Librarians and other information professionals need to be aware of how advanced ICTs are being used by researchers to change the ways they work and communicate. Through their experiences with the integration of virtual learning environments within library information services, they are well placed to inform developments that may well change scholarly communications fundamentally.

The paper contributes to emerging discussions about the likely trajectory and impact of advanced ICTs on research and their implications for those, such as librarians and other information professionals, who occupy important support roles.

This paper seeks to discuss the question of “openness” in e‐Science.

The study is based on 12 in‐depth interviews with principal investigators, project managers and developers involved in UK e‐Science projects, together with supporting documentary evidence from project web sites. The approach was to explore the juxtaposition of research governance at the institutional level and local research practices at the project level. Interview questions focused on research inputs, software development processes, access to resources, project documentation, dissemination of outputs and by‐products, licensing issues, and institutional contracts.

The findings suggest that, although there is a widely shared ethos of openness in everyday research practice, there are many uncertainties and yet‐to‐be resolved issues, despite strong policy imperatives towards openly shared resources.

The paper concludes by observing a stratification of openness in practice and the need for more nuanced understanding of openness at the level of policy making. This research was based on interviews within a limited number of e‐Science/Social Science projects and the intention is to address this in future work by scaling the study up to a survey that will reach the entire UK e‐Science/Social Science community.

The fundamental challenge in resolving openness in practice and policy, and thereby moving towards a sustainable infrastructure for e‐Science, is the coordination and integration of goals across e‐Science efforts, rather than one of resolving IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) issues, which has been the central focus of openness debates thus far.

The question of openness has previously been posed on the macro‐level of research policy, e.g. whether science as a whole can be characterized as open science, or in relation to the dissemination of published outputs, e.g. Open Access. Instead, a fine‐grained perspective is taken focusing on individual research projects and the various facets of openness in practice.