New issue of CTW Quarterly relevant to the Humanities and Social Sciences

It gives us great pleasure to present the August 2007 issue of Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch Quarterly (Vol. 3, No. 3). It focuses well deserved attention on the quiet but remarkable sea change that is taking place in the "nervous system" of the research community worldwide because of the rapid proliferation of cyberinfrastructure technology.

The fundamental message of "The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communication and Cyberinfrastructure" is that established systems of scholarly communication, which have supported research and inquiry communities in a more or less uniform way for more than a century, are undergoing a process of radical change in both substance and structure. The combination of ongoing cyberinfrastructure innovation, a burgeoning culture of Open Access, and the inherent creative drive of the scientific and scholarly community is creating a new paradigm for generating, publishing, accessing, exploring, discussing, and evaluating the ideas and results from every field of intellectual inquiry.

To explain why this new paradigm is emerging now, and what its multiform ramifications will be, guest editors Lee Dirks and Tony Hey of Microsoft Corporation have brought together a group of outstanding and distinguished authors for this issue of CTWatch Quarterly. Taken together, they make it clear that we are living on the leading edge of a revolution in the intellectual life of mankind which was dimly glimpsed a half century ago by visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and JCR Licklider, but is finally coming into full bloom with the help of the software ecosystem that modern cyberinfrastructure now makes possible.

Please visit http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/ at your convenience to get your own copy of this issue of CTWatch Quarterly. In a somewhat self-referential effort to pick up the spirit of the coming revolution in scholarly communication, this issue of CTWatch Quarterly also incorporates a screencast demonstration, available only online, of a software prototype for archiving complex information objects (see the Appendix in the article "Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication").

For our next issue, due in November and available for SC07, guest editor Fred Johnson, of the Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, has assembled a wonderful group of authors from DOE's SciDAC Centers for Enabling Technology to discuss emerging trends and challenges in software cyberinfrastructure for petascale science. The National Science Foundation's recent announcement of funding for two new petascale systems, to be constructed and deployed for the national research community over the next few years, makes this particular topic an extremely timely one. We look forward to another very strong issue with broad appeal for the entire community.

Thank you!
CTWatch Quarterly Editorial staff