An Integrated Socio-Tehnical Crowdsourcing Platform for Accelerating Returns in eScience

Progress in science relies nowadays on collaborative efforts of large communities. A single human being has no more the capacity to process all the information necessary to fully comprehend the experimental facts and implications of scientific experiments. We claim that this will result in a fundamental phase transition in how scientific results are obtained, represented, used, communicated and attributed. Different to the classical view of how science is performed, important discoveries will be not only the result of exceptional individual efforts and talents, but alternatively an emergent property of a complex community-based socio-technical system. We even speculate that certain discoveries might be of such a complexity that human individuals might no more be able to fully grasp the underlying models and methods. This has fundamental implications on how we perceive the role of technical systems and in particular information processing infrastructures for scientific work: They are no longer a subordinate instrument that facilitates (or makes more miserable) daily work of highly gifted individuals, but become an essential tool and enabler for performing scientific progress, and eventually might be the instrument within which scientific discoveries are made, represented and brought to use.