A Study On The Construction And Running Management Of The Virtual Research Organization

In the information age,information communication technology(ICT)infrastructures with its powerful and rich functionality make it possible for researches to be information-oriented.E-Science has been one of the main forms of research organization and knowledge production.The presentation and delivery of data,information and knowledge are being digitized.Research objects are transformed from reality to virtualization.Plenteous new instruments and environment based on ICT connect researchers and institutions across time and places together,which significantly enhances the collaboration in generation of new knowledge and makes collaborative research based on ICT more mature and more popular.New types of research teams aiming to use powerful ICT platform to support Virtual Research Organization(VRO)for the collaborative research,such as Virtual Laboratory,Virtual Community and Virtual Research are widely established.From late 1990s,numerous international practical and theoretical researches on VRO have been carried out abroad.VRO has become an important choice for innovation in academic organizations in universities.Certain successful practice cases such as CSBI,nanoHUB and CICERO have been proved to be advantageous to certain extent.However,there are fewer studies on VRO in domestic universities,which makes it necessary to obtain in-depth understandings on:1,the building and running of VRO,2,detailed survey on the supporting technology for the operation process and 3,specific strategies on the construction and running of VRO in domestic universities.In this study,by studying typical cases of VRO and Virtual Research Environment(VRE),categorical study on organizational structure of VRO has been conducted,main advantages and limitations of VRO have been analyzed and major functions of VRE have been clarified.By analysis of key factors affecting the running performance of VRO,a conceptual model has been developed on the construction and running of VRO from the the perspective of social capital theory.This study has investigated the operation process of Shanghai E-Institute,major factors restricting VRO development in China and coping strategies of domestic universities has proposed,which is based on interviews with 30 people from developers of collaborative research platform,participants of VRO and subject matter experts.From the above researches,the conclusions have been drawn as following:First,the key to protect the performance of VRO is to promote superficial communication to in-depth communication to build community belongingness of team members.The success of VRO depends on threefold.1,choosing cooperative partners with common goals and complementary abilities and signing cooperation agreement to ensure academic trust in the building stage,then selecting appropriate organizational model from three types of network such as star network,self-organizing network and loose alliance network according to organization's size and participants' resource allocation capabilities.2,building academic mutual trust by using multiple communication methods comprehensively in order to ensure knowledge co-sharing and co-construction.3,VRE should provide high-quality academic resources to attract participants for supporting VRO running and function setting should mainly serve the construction of academic community,which can achieve community belongingness of team members.Second,VRO can form scientific research community to efficiently complete research tasks and promote integration of teaching and research,which should become an important choice for innovation in academic organizations in domestic universities.Due to the current situation of academic organization structure in domestic universities and the influence of Chinese traditional culture,the major factors that restricting development of VRO in China include lack of identification for VRO performance in terms of cognition,excessive dependence on centralized management in structure,absence of unified and reliable instrument support in interactive and collaborative technology,and deficient in mechanism to accumulate and share academic resources.It is required to accelerate diversification in VRO relying on technology platform and eliminate systematic obstacles of separated faculties to collect and integrate academic resources for the development of domestic VRO.At the same time,expectations on VRO need to be realistic as well as distorted data and network risks need to be monitored and avoided.Third,face-to-face communication cannot be replaced by the communication in the virtual world.VRO is not capable to change social stratification of scientists within the organization and it is difficult to break the Matthew Effect that key resources flow towards preponderant subjects and elite scientists,therefore expectations on the functions of VRO should not be too high.In the running process of VRO,researchers should not neglect the realization of the subjects by being indulged in the virtualization of data,information and knowledge.So it is better to make web-based collaborative research be complementary and confluent to traditional research model while building up a new VRO or rebuilding entity research organizations in a virtual way.For researchers,the participation in entity research organization and that in VRO should be equally important.