At the libraries@Cambridge2011 conference this morning Alex D. Wade, Director of Scholarly communication at Microsoft Research, a branch of Microsoft with offices in the Cambridge West site, spoke on the research his company are doing to support scholars through new free services and open source resources that scholars can work with. They aim to encourage digital libraries similar to Pubmed Central but for other subjects; they are developing new tools (such as the Article Authoring add in for Word and Academic Search which enables disambiguation of authors and such as the development of authorised standards for tagging so that not only papers but data can be accurately ascribed to all the people involved in its creation and their roles shown.) They are also researching new publication models, and encouraging the development of data libraries.
The ethos of the company is very much inspired by the ideas of the late John Gray, who heralded a new paradigm for scientific research (the first three paradigms were, in turn, experimental science, theoretical science, computational science: the new one is in danger of becoming an exaflood of unorganised data. Microsoft have produced a festschrift in memory of Grey, which can be downloaded free. The work they are doing is very much in line with Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web: for instance the Worldwide Telescope project allows users to add integrate data to a walkthrough map of the universe, which should co-ordinate data on a subject where disparate astronomers publish research concerning a tiny segment of space.
I was astonished to learn that the parent Microsoft Company employ a global staff of 100,000, and that they are working on such projects in collaboration with universities. Librarians discussing the matter over tea muttered that the authoring add in was similar to Scopus. Many researchers these days do not use Word, would they be interested in the add in? Microsoft seem to be doing the work that one would expect scientific organisations to undertake: will the scientists commit to these Microsoft led services or prefer to develop their own structures which can be controlled by their organisations? Apparently Microsoft have sometimes developed similar services and pulled the plug on them after a few years. They seem to be investing a huge amount of staff into risky blue sky research that may not be taken up- but isn't that good business practice after all?
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