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Microsoft External Research collaborates with
the world’s foremost researchers in academia and across countless
industries and governments to move research forward and fuel
innovation. Working hand in hand with researchers is an essential
part of the Microsoft External Research engagement model. The team
serves as a critical link between academia and Microsoft product
groups working on the development and utilization of new
technologies from across the corporation.
Collecting and analyzing data, authoring,
publishing, and preserving information are all essential components
of the everyday work of researchers — with collaboration and search
and discovery augmenting the entire process from end to end. At each
phase, Microsoft technologies play an increasingly fundamental role.
The Microsoft External Research vision is to support the scholarly
communication life cycle with software and services so that data and
information flow in a coordinated and seamless fashion. Rather than
researchers having to switch between tools and methodologies at each
step in the life cycle, technology can enhance and simplify the
process. For example, data collected at the research stage moves
directly into authored documents, which can then be published with
the methodologies, licenses and associated metadata incorporated
into the document so that future researchers building on the
findings can access the original supporting information directly
from an archived document.
By working with members of the research
community, Microsoft External Research is developing a series of
technologies designed for researchers and academics with the
following goals in mind:
- Optimize for data-driven research and science.
- Enable broad community engagement through greater
interoperability.
- Help ensure that data storage is reliable and secure
for the long term.
- Build on existing community protocols, practices and
guidelines.
- Harness collective intelligence through social
networking and semantic knowledge discovery.
To facilitate relationships and to ensure that
individuals and organizations can work together and share their
findings more easily, the end-to-end tools being made available
across the scholarly communication life cycle will help researchers,
government institutions and academic publishers find more relevant
and targeted research, speed production cycles, and distribute and
do their jobs better.
Across multiple projects, researchers from
around the world have provided guidance on the application of
technology; likewise, Microsoft product groups have submitted
feedback on the use of the company’s technology to meet the needs of
the scholarly community. The combined efforts — driven by Microsoft
External Research — have resulted in multiple tools that span the
entire scholarly communication life cycle. The first wave of these
technologies is being introduced at the Microsoft Research Faculty
Summit.
Microsoft
External Research is partnering to develop tools for academics and
researchers that span the entire scholarly communication life cycle.
The first set of
products and tools to be available includes the following:
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Research output repository platform. Research
output repositories are increasingly in use on university campuses
and in research communities worldwide. The platform for building
repositories leverages the strengths of Microsoft SQL Server 2008,
the Microsoft Entity Framework and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
This technology, to be available via a free download, provides
services based on open community protocols, such as the Open
Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) and SWORD,
to ensure that this platform is open to other existing platforms and
technologies for deep integration of services across repositories.
The included toolkit and code samples will allow developers to
present data in novel ways — demonstrating, for example, the
relationships between a published paper and its authors, research
data, associated lectures, presentation slides or PDFs. Currently in
a limited alpha release, an open beta version will be available in
the fall 2008 time frame.
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The Microsoft e-Journal Service. The
Microsoft e-Journal Service provides a hosted, full-service solution
to support scholarly societies and small and medium-sized
publishers in the production of online-only journals.
It is designed to simplify the self-publishing of workshop and
conference proceedings and smaller journals, as well as online
collaboration between authors. An alpha version, available now, is
hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, allowing
organizations to utilize this functionality without building or
maintaining any infrastructure.
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The Research Information
Centre. Developed in close
collaboration with the British Library, the Research Information
Centre is a virtual research environment (VRE) designed to allow research partners to store,
share, discuss, manage, find and track all the components of a
research project—including data, references, papers, bookmarks,
proposals, internal messages, information and findings — within a
simple interface. By operationalizing the research workflow,
this tool can help simplify the process of information search,
facilitate discovery, effectively manage research objects, and
enable versioning and archiving. The
collaboration environment resides within a hosted SharePoint Server
2007 platform, which is accessible from a Web browser. This service
is currently in beta testing. The British Library is planning
to offer this as a hosted service, and Microsoft intends to share
the code widely by the end of the year.
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Creative Commons Add-in
for Microsoft Office 2007. This download for Microsoft
Office Word 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007 and Office Excel 2007 lets
individuals embed a Creative Commons license directly into their
Microsoft Office documents. By linking from the Microsoft Office
document to the Creative Commons Web site (via a Web service), this
add-in allows an author to select the appropriate license and
ensure that it is stored within that specific version of the file.
Available now.
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Article Authoring Add-in
for Microsoft Word 2007. This add-in for Office Word 2007
permits authors and editors to open and save Word files in the
National Library of Medicine’s NLM DTD format, which is used for
publishing and archiving (as well as the NLM Book format). In
addition, the add-in enables more metadata to be captured at the
authoring stage and enables semantic information to be preserved
through the publishing process, which is essential for enabling
search and semantic analysis once the articles are archived at
information repositories. The add-in also aims at simplifying the
authoring, submission and interaction process between authors and
journals. Available now.
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More information is available at
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx
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