Social networking is profoundly changing the way that people communicate and interact on a daily basis. As eScience is inherently collaborative, social networks can serve as a vital means for supporting information and resource sharing, aiding discovery of connected researchers, improving communication between globally dispersed individuals, and even measuring scientific impact. Consequently, eScience systems are increasingly integrating social networking concepts to improve collaboration. For example, researcher profiles and groups exist in publication networks, such as Google scholar and Mendeley, and eScience infrastructures, such as MyExperiment, NanoHUB and GlobusOnline all utilize social networking principles to enhance scientific collaboration. In addition to incorporating explicit social networks, eScience infrastructures can also leverage implicit social networks extracted from relationships expressed in collaborative activities (e.g. publication authorship or citation networks).

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from a diverse range of areas to establish a new community focused on the application of social networking to analyze and improve scientific collaboration. There are two complementary areas of focus for this workshop 1) how to efficiently share information, infrastructure and software resources, such as data and tools through social networks, and 2) how to analyze and enhance scientific collaboration through implicit and explicit social networks, for example analyzing scientific impact through citation networks or improving collaboration by associating data and tools with networks of publications and researchers.

Co-Located with eScience 2012, October 8-12, Chicago IL, USA

Submission Deadline for Workshop: August 17, 2012, Submission Details