The Brokering Approach for Enabling Collaborative Scientific Research

Collaborative research poses important challenges and opportunities to scientific communities, such as the realization of effective interactions between different groups and organizations. Data sharing is growing increasingly important, as repositories are growing in size, number, and variety in the different domains. The underlying challenge is interoperability: between data, services, applications, models, and ultimately people. Abstraction and standardization (e.g. of data and services) have historically played an essential role in enabling interoperability. However, they proved not to be sufficient alone to let large-scale collaborative research thrive. For different spheres (e.g. social/economic realms), intermediation approaches were successfully applied to pursue similar goals in the so-called brokering approach. This chapter argues that brokering is useful to enable collaborative research as well, both by addressing technological interoperability and supporting socio-organizational challenges. A technological brokering framework, implemented to help the earth system science collaborative research, is finally presented, along with success stories.