Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets. The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies. In The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, the collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized.

BioTorrents is a website that allows open access sharing of scientific data. It uses the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology to allow rapid file transferring.

Mission: • To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic • stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives • To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. • To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Doesn’t peer review offer some guarantee of quality?, suggests Harford. “Peer review is of minimal value” is the response to this, “…checkability is what really guarantees quality”. Senn goes on to suggest that scientists sign an undertaking to provide raw original data to anyone who requests it.

Sharing data is good. But sharing your own data? That can get complicated. As two research communities who held meetings in May on the issue report their proposals to promote data sharing in biology, a special issue of Nature examines the cultural and technical hurdles that can get in the way of good intentions.

Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data" (STD-DOI) is a project funded by the German Science Foundation. Its aim is to make primary scientific data citeable as publications. In this system, a data set would be attributed to its investigators as authors like it would be done for a work in the conventional scientific literature. Thus, scientific primary data should not exclusively understood as part of a scientific publication, but may have its own identity

The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) is a software toolkit to establish web-based virtual team organizations for researchers in biomedicine. It enables researchers to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives, and to provide shared semantic context for this content using established scientific vocabularies and automated text mining.