3.4  The Essays  
The Research Web Essays are the working documents that bear directly on the research effort. Most of the facilities in the RW are dedicated to the support of the production of the essays. They include essays that are organizing documents that link the site's research efforts together, giving an abstract overview of the research topic. The hierarchical nature of the RW demands a cognitive chunking of knowledge.  Essays high in abstraction serve as expositions of the character of the topic, any emergent qualities the topic has, and as introductions to more detailed essays on the component objects of the topic of the essay.

Essays that discuss the detailed research findings are the nascent research papers of the team. After publication of the research papers, the essays may remain on the site and be further refined as research continues. These essays form the canon of the team.

The RW has tools for annotation and criticism available to both the writer and reader of the essays.  The HyperDocument format allows the author to introduce marginal information with popup hypertext windows.  The author may use notes, sidebars, definitions and glosses, and literature citations.  The RW has several methods of commentary and annotation available to the reader: of the text and notes with DocReview, of the vocabulary with the Annotated HyperGlossary, and of the citations either through DocReview or the Annotated HyperBibliography.

3.4.1 Essays as a Communication Genre  
The first duty of an essay is to communicate knowledge.  RW essays are presented in a communication genre called the HyperDocument.  The effectivity of the essay in communicating the knowledge itself is dependent on the writing skills of the author.  The HyperDocument format contributes to the effectivity by allowing collaborators other than the author to contribute to the effectivity of the document by annotation using DocReview.  Efficient communication, on the other hand, depends on the visual presentation of the knowledge.  The essays may be viewed in two media: the screen and in printed hardcopy versions.  Viewed on the screen, the HyperDocument format provides formal hypertextual augmentations, which vastly improve the efficiency of the presentation.  Since hardcopy format is frequently utilized as a communication medium, despite its loss of hypertextuality, it is critical that the hardcopy presentation of the essay is no less efficient than familiar paper-based scholarly documents.  The printed hyperdocuments have appended glossary terms and bibliographic references.

What qualifies the RW essay as a communication genre?  In recent years the communications genre has come to mean a typified social action (Orlikowski and Yates 1998).  The social action that the essay satisfies is that of communication of scientific knowledge.  The existing genre is the scientific research paper.  A design goal for the RW essay as printed in hardcopy is to conform to the scientific research paper genre.  The appearance of the essay as viewed on the computer screen is nearly identical to the hardcopy version.  Any scholar will be quite familiar with the format of the essay. A communication genre must be a stable well-defined but flexible formalism (Orlikowski and Yates 1994).  The HyperDocument format structural definition is presented below.

Hypertext and interactivity make the behavior of the essay a truly different genre.  On the computer screen the user sees two colors of hypertext links: standard blue links are navigational links that allow the reader to jump to different parts of the same document; and gray links call up new "popup" windows with bibliographic information, definitions, footnotes, or "sidebars" which are related web pages, often other RW essays.  The essay may be annotated by clicking a gray link, "Annotations in DocReview" at the top of the essay.  Citations and footnotes have always had the clear meaning, "Go elsewhere for more information."  The HyperDocument format makes the task of obtaining the information a simple mouse click. The HyperDocument qualifies as a communication genre because it is also a genre that takes advantage of the WWW as a "remedial medium" (Levinson 1997) that overcomes some of the limitations of a pre-existing medium.

3.4.2  Essays as Work Objects  
Essays are the textual representation of knowledge in the RW.  As objects in the issue domain are discovered, they are abstracted, analyzed, and expressed as topics of essays.  These topics are contained in a hierarchy of abstraction familiar to all, in texts, as a table of contents.  Perhaps an even more accurate metaphor would be a classification of knowledge as in library cataloging.  Scholars in any specialty are adept at creating such hierarchies. The work of the RW goes forward in large part by identifying essay topics, writing the essays, refining them through criticism, and finally making them into canonical documents.  Essays will also form the basis of professional papers and reports. The essay as work object is a target for the tasks of writing, criticizing, and editing.

Each essay must become a conscription device (Henderson 1991) that attracts a following of authors and critics among the team members.  Once the essay becomes a conscription device, it then becomes a unit of work that can be scheduled and managed.  The essay will have a place and function within the RW.  If an identified essay topic does not attract participation, then there is reason to question the importance of the topic of the essay.  Alternatively, it is possible that the topic is not of interest to, or within the realm of expertise of, the existing team. In that case, the research team needs to be enlarged to include an expert on the topic.

3.4.3  Essays as Canonical Documents  
The destiny of the RW essay is to become a canonical document for the given topic. As canon, it must incorporate the extant knowledge from the scientific community and to that add the new shared knowledge that the research team creates in its collaboration. A document does not become canonical overnight. There is a progression from rough drafts to a professional essay, then on through a successive refinement process that depends on DocReview (see §4.3), the critical apparatus, to collect criticism from collaborators. Each refinement carries the added knowledge from criticism of the previous draft. Commentary from DocReview can be incorporated as new text, as new footnotes or sidebars, as glosses for the HyperGlossary or notes in the HyperBibliography, or may be discarded or folded into existing footnotes.

The RW essays are the principal scientific documents generated by the RW.  They form the basis for scientific papers, the repository of knowledge, and through attached annotation, the consensus and argumentation surrounding the topic.  At any given time the essays hold the latest and presumably best scholarly thinking about the topic.  In other words the essays form the canon of the RW team.

These canonical documents are in the opinion of some the only documents worthy of annotation (Hanna 1991, 178).  The annotator has been designated by the community to perform the annotation.  Annotations of these documents are original scholarship in that they expand, point out shortcomings, provide support, and most of all provide a meeting place for the scholarly community. The very pedantic points of scholarship vis-a-vis annotation such as those made by the authors writing in Annotation and Its Texts (Barney 1991) are important guides but are perhaps a bit too restrictive for an environment as flexible and dynamic as the RW essay.  The path of scholarly endeavor between a good second draft and a canonical document is a long and difficult road!  As the quality of the document rises, so must the quality of the commentary.  While we aspire to produce canon, scientific philosophy demands that our work be shrouded in skepticism and contingency.

3.4.4  The Integrated Structure of Essays  
The Research Web Essay embodies the new knowledge created by the research team.  The design of this document type was directed toward the creation of a strong boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989) and conscription device (Henderson 1991).  To create a boundary object requires that the essay fill these needs: flexibility for the entire team, strength for specialists, and a well-defined media genre.  To become a conscription device, the essay must attract participation and facilitate participation through ease of use.

Flexibility is assured by the hypermedia format of the WWW.  The essay can incorporate any document that is compatible with the WWW.  Specialists can present their interpretations in their own language within sidebars or footnotes.  The HyperDocument format of the essay is defined below.  Participation is encouraged by not only the intellectual content of the essay, but in the ready access to the intellectual provenance of the material through links, sidebars, notes and citations.  Aside from the content, the principal attraction to the essay is in the ability to annotate by using the built-in DocReview of the essay.  Ease of use is assured by the single click navigation characteristic of WWW applications.

Research Web Essays have three major functions to perform; they must function as: a Communication Genre, a Work Object, and a Canonical Document.  In order to fulfill all the functions, there must be a number of features that perform each requirement without interfering with other functional requirements.  Functions of a Communication Genre are fulfilled by having a formalized structure familiar to all members of the team.  Each essay is a WWW page, HTML augmented by JavaScript.  Functions of a Work Object are fulfilled by designing the WWW page to receive additional information in the form of insertions or commentary.  DocReview provides the ability to insert text or commentary at points designated by the author.  The functions of a canonical document are to provide a specialized document that provides the highest quality of information on the topic.  The quality of the content is initially the responsibility of the author, but after initial release the entire team shares responsibility.  Canonical quality will demand documentation of sources (HyperBibliography citations), expansion of some points (notes and footnotes), references to closely related topics (sidebars), and explanation of terms used in the text (Annotated HyperGlossary).  Since canonical documents accrue greater stature through annotation, DocReview serves as a means to incorporate criticism.

3.4.4.1  The HyperDocument Format  
The format of the scientific research paper is by no means standard.  It has varied through time and varies today by discipline and journal.  The common features have been: a reference section and citations to that section; footnotes for amplification of statements, or for citations; cross-references to other parts of the text, especially in dictionaries and encyclopedias; and definitions of terms, usually referring to a footnote or glossary of terms.  The printed hardcopy of the RW essay has citations, numbered footnotes, marked words indicating a glossary entry, and underlined cross-references.  At the end of the essay are Appendices for References, Notes, and a Glossary of terms.  So, in static terms, the RW essay is a familiar genre.  Its dynamic behavior on the computer screen is vastly different.

The electronic representation of the essays may include graphics and even sound as well as text.  Hypertext links to other parts of the same essay may be used to make reading more efficient.  It may be advantageous to provide a graphic image that has "hotspots" which are hypertext links.  Links to return the viewer to the start of the essay are often included (top of page).  If the essay has footnotes or a reference list, then there are "reverse links" which allow the user to jump to the point in the text where the reference is cited, or to the source of the footnote. Cross-references to related RW essays or offsite web pages may be "popped up" in new windows (sidebars). Literature citations can be clicked to obtain annotatable bibliographic information and abstracts (Annotated HyperBibliography). Definitions and glosses of terms can be popped up in new windows (Annotated HyperGlossary).  See Figure IV below for the HyperDocument definition.

Header Title (mandatory) -- Necessary for citation by others. Author byline (if attribution is unclear) Link to Instructions on reading (optional) -- Those unfamiliar with the genre need some help. Link to the DocReview of the essay (mandatory) -- Open annotation is a central principle of the Research Web. DocReview is the critical apparatus for the research team. Links to Appendices (optional) -- People often wish to scan the references before reading the body of the document. Navigation Links (optional) -- Next page in sequence, previous page, table of contents, etc. Body Table of Contents (optional for short essays) -- Very useful for navigation and summarizing. Text (mandatory) Sidebars (if appropriate) -- Popup windows for extensive cross-reference. May be other essays or external web pages. Footnotes (if appropriate) -- Small popup windows with conventional footnote functionality augmented with the multimedia functionality of the WWW. Sticky Notes (if appropriate) -- Small popup windows for ephemeral notes or graphics, generally for collaborative or coordination purposes.  They do not appear in the hardcopy version. Citations (if appropriate) -- Small popup windows with conventional bibliographic citations with further links to abstracts and full text if available.  The bibliographic entry may be annotated.  Full bibliographic information is provided in the References section of the Appendices. Glossary references (if appropriate) -- Small popup windows with definitions and glosses of terms.  The glossary entries may be annotated.  A glossary of terms appears in the Appendices listing the definitions of all terms referenced. Top of page links (optional for short essays) -- Useful for navigation, provides the reader with a path back to the Table of Contents. Footer Information about essay, perhaps including acknowledgements Title (mandatory) URL (mandatory) Date written (mandatory) Last revised (mandatory) E-mail contact address (mandatory) -- This contact is for technical help, reporting of broken hypertext links, etc. References section (if citations are present) -- All works cited are listed in this section with hypertext links back to the text every place they are cited. Glossary of Terms (if glossary is referenced) -- All terms referenced from the glossary are listed. Endnotes (if footnotes are present) -- Endnotes are a listing of the footnotes with hypertext links back to their origin in the text.  Essential for the hardcopy version.

The HyperDocuments utilize only well established capabilities of the WWW.   In order to reach participants who may not have the latest features in their web browsers, only capabilities that have been available for well over a year are utilized.

3.4.4.2  High Performance Scholarship  
Douglas Engelbart has been designing and developing hypertextual documentation systems for decades (Englebart 1995). His work by far predated the Internet and was restrained by the technology of the time. His most successful systems were deployed in the defense industry and were implemented for private networks. Englebart has established the Bootstrap Alliance to develop the concept of the HyperDocument within a much larger system of collaboration that, when used in the scholarly environment, he calls High Performance Scholarship.

Engelbart's Open Hyperdocument System (Englebart 1990) incorporates many of the features of the work described in this dissertation, but is "big-time computing" designed for a much wider (perhaps universal) application and is a work in progress. The Research Web is very tightly targeted on research and is consequently a much smaller system. As currently publicly envisioned, criticism is not integral to the Open Hyperdocument System.

3.5  Web Site Architecture  
The RW web site is the information system for the research team's work: its data repositories, organizing models, social interchange, and research products.  The web site is hypertextual and can thus present information and conclusions in a way that cannot be done in conventional literature.  All pages in the web site are in WWW pages, thus are accessible to the team members through their web browsers.  Since the WWW is a distributed network, the web site may be physically distributed among several servers.  Such distribution may be the result of donated resources, software availability, performance, or need for server access.  The fact that the site is physically distributed will have no effect on the users.

3.5.1  Functional Partitions  
The RW web site may be divided into four logical partitions: an optional public presentation partition, an optional guest partition, the facilitator's work area,  and a private team working area – a work-in-progress site (Eaves 1997).  Each of these partitions has its purpose and corresponding access restrictions.    The public partition corresponds to a standard Internet site; the private team working area to an intranet; and the guest partition to an extranet.  There is a rich literature to consult in each of these areas.

If the team has a need to inform the public, the sponsor, or their institutions about the research, then they should open a public partition.  Its function is to inform the public about the work the team is doing, to advertise the support of the sponsors, and to recruit new members to the collaboration.  While the conveners of the RW will have made an effort to attract scholars known to them, there may be isolated scholars, or scholars in allied disciplines who may wish to contribute (Cronin 1995, 228).  Hypertext links to public resources can be provided to give the users more information about the general research area or about the sponsors.

The guest partition is set aside to allow temporary access to interactive materials such as DocReviews.  An interdisciplinary team will, on occasion, want to call on colleagues from the larger research communities for advice or for review of materials.  This partition might also be used for semi-public participation in design of questionnaires or software tools, or for participation in experiments.  The guest partition must be password protected, and should not be indexed for the search engines, as drafts need protection from unauthorized quotation and poaching.  The password should be changed after each period of use.  The guest partition has no links to other partitions, but the private working area may link to the documents in the guest partition. 

The facilitator’s partition is necessary to provide a place for the facilitator to design, develop and test software, particularly the programming that enables the team's interactivity.  The facilitator may need permission to enter several of a web site's servers if the web site is distributed.  This work site is also used to prepare the documents developed by the team for interactive use.  Content contributed by the team members is usually not directly usable on the WWW.  Typically, this material is formatted for a word processor.  It will need to have hypertext links added, and it will be reformatted to take advantage of the many annotation methods available to the RW essays.  Graphics may need to be edited and perhaps converted to a format compatible with the WWW.  All this work needs to be tested in a protected area before it is installed on the web site.  There is little reason for other team members to have access to the facilitator's partition, so it should be protected simply to prevent inadvertent damage.

The private working area is the center of Research Web activity.  All communications are archived here.  All research references are accessed here.  Documents are displayed.  Models are built and presented.  Questions are addressed to the team.  Definitions are offered and debated.  Under the assumption of privacy, team members frequently make tentative statements that cannot be public.  The private working partition contains the intellectual property of the entire research team, and may contain commercially valuable content as well.  Works in progress must be protected for priority claims and poaching.

3.5.2  The Team's Private Working Area  
The Research Web's scholarly activity will take place in the team's private working area.  This partition, an intranet, is designed to serve the needs of the team for their roles as collaborators, contributors, critics, and coordinators.  As much work as possible is to be offloaded to the facilitator so the researchers can concentrate on the intellectual content.  The team members may contribute documents through the facilitator, and may directly contribute annotation to documents through DocReviews of those documents.  Collaborators may also contribute references for the annotated HyperBibliography through the facilitator.  Annotations to the references may be directly contributed through the Annotated HyperBibliography.  Definitions of terms may be contributed for the Annotated HyperGlossary through the facilitator.  Annotations on the definitions may be contributed directly through the Annotated HyperGlossary.

Since the RW is highly interactive, it is vulnerable to the graffiti and abuse of vandals.  While, in general, scholars behave ethically and are far too busy to poach on the team's research, such activity is not unknown.  A team password will be assigned and changed from time to time or whenever unwanted participation is detected.

3.5.2.1  Home Page and Internal Links  
The Home Page is the principal entry point into the private working area.  From that page the user should be presented with several links: to the infrastructural pages; to the public and guest partitions, if present; to a list of indices; to a site search engine; to the models, if present; and to the research web's intellectual content.  In order to provide meaningful content in addition to navigational links, the home page is a good place for a mission statement.  Proficient users will soon develop their own bookmarks to navigate directly to those portions of the web site they use most often.  Nevertheless, the home page is a necessary part of the architecture, a root of the hierarchy of pages, the default connection from the outside world.

3.5.2.2  Infrastructural Pages  
Infrastructural pages are web pages that are designed to introduce the team members to each other, to provide information about team activity, and to provide links to services designed to facilitate individual and group work.  In a large RW web site, there may be a need to have an index page for these pages; but in the beginning these links may be made directly from the home page.

3.5.2.2.1  Introductory Material  
The current sponsors of the research should be identified on a "Sponsor's Page" as a matter of courtesy.  This page will also inform the team members who have supported the RW in the past as well as the present.  Work that has been developed or contributed without support should be featured as well, just to identify the altruism of those members.

The team members always have a need to know about their colleagues: background, publications, and positions (Furuta and Marshall 1996, 184).  Members will likely have personal home pages that can be referenced from a "Team Members" page; if not, the facilitator will be able to help them develop one.  The personal home page needs, at a minimum, the member's CV.  Much of this material may be directly employed in research grant proposals, so it should be kept current.

Of critical importance is a position paper that describes each member's relationship with the RW's issue domain.  Questions that need to be addressed are the expertise that the member brings to the team, the research questions that the member is particularly interested in, and the opinions that the member currently holds in regard to the issue domain.  A discussion of research interests could include a number of suggested essays that the team could build.  These suggestions will help the team develop an overall research plan.  Suggesting an essay is the first step in authoring team formation and turf marking.  Opinions and conjectures are important, as they are the basis for hypothesis formation.  They will of course be heavily qualified by the member and should be read with great latitude by the others.

These position papers will be DocReviewed and will then serve as a basis for initial team interactivity.  Questions may be asked and knowledge and opinions offered.  Certainly, the position papers may be archived and reissued as new editions when the member's positions are refined.

Current associates such as research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and staff members should be introduced with biosketches and personal home page references.  Close interdisciplinary associates that may have contributed to the research products may be mentioned here as well.   Past associates may be remembered for their service in a "Personae Emeriti" page.

3.5.2.2.2  Services  
What's New(see §4.7) is a tool that allows the team member to survey the activity on the web site since a given date.  What's New provides a listing of new documents, RW essays, annotations made by members through DocReview, the Annotated HyperGlossary, and the Annotated HyperBibliography.  The listing is in HTML so the page can be searched in the browser for name of contributor or keyword.

Calendar software may be placed on the site in order to coordinate any synchronous events that the team may take part in.  Periodic all-team meetings may be part of the management plan.  Authoring teams may gather synchronously in person, or on the WWW, in order to discuss issues that cannot be resolved well online.  Conferences that may interest individual team members may be listed on the calendar.  Deadlines for work objects or critical reviews may be entered in the calendar.

MailRoom (see §4.1.2) is a tool designed to capture e-mail that should be shared with the team.  Typically, the sender types in the e-mail addresses of the recipients and sends the e-mail on its way.  Such mail is usually not archived at the RW web site unless the sender includes the e-mail address of the site's archive.  MailRoom is a web-based tool available to the user at a click.  The user can select any member of the team, or any group of addresses that the facilitator has created for MailRoom.  The message may be automatically copied to the sender, and will automatically be sent to the RW site's e-mail archive.  While MailRoom may seem to be unnecessary, experience shows that a great deal of mail traffic is lost when the sender fails to include the site archive as an addressee.

The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is, just as the name implies, a list of questions that users have often asked.  Many of these questions are generic technical questions regarding the use of tools, the installation of software, or navigation of a RW web site.  Other questions may be specific to the issue domain.  An FAQ will often serve as supplemental introductory information to the team members, especially at the beginning of operation.

3.5.2.2.3  Minutes, Reports and Plans  
Even in a RW experienced in working asynchronously, there will be a constant background flux of synchronous activity: face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, electronic chat sessions or teleconferences.   This activity will be lost to the team unless the dialog is captured.  Face-to-face meetings must be summarized in a good set of minutes.  One very successful application of DocReview has been the review of minutes.  After review and editing, the minutes can be stored and indexed as a web page.  Important telephone calls that bear upon the research effort should be captured in a telecon record that is stored and indexed.  Electronic chat sessions can use tools that produce a transcript, provided that the input is keyboarded.  That transcript may be abridged and edited to produce an excellent record.  If the chat session is audible, then it should be treated as a face-to-face meeting.  Teleconferencing should be treated as a face-to-face meeting.

From time to time team leaders or authoring groups may wish to issue progress reports.  Quarterly or annual reports are often requested by granting agencies.  These reports should be indexed and mounted on the web site.  Publicly circulated reports from other research groups may be mirrored, with permission, or referenced on the web site.

Some tasks may be so complex that they require a plan.  The leadership of the RW should maintain a plan for guiding the efforts of the RW.  This plan will establish the scope of the issue domain, enumerate research topics, and suggest funding proposals.  If a research team follows a methodology similar to VNS (see §2.3), then a research plan is a required document.  The entire team should review the research plan in order to capitalize on the experience of others.  Experimental protocols can benefit from publication, as they can be reviewed by team members in DocReview, and can serve as templates for other protocols.

3.5.2.2.4  Discussion Groups and Discussion Archives  
There are two major discussion tools currently in service: the e-mail listserver and the electronic discussion forum.  The listserver is considered a necessary feature in any RW.  The listserver is a general-purpose group electronic mailing list that allows the team to engage in a dialog on a one-to- many level.  The listserver is an informal tool that works admirably for proposing informal discussions, carrying out those discussions and, importantly, for asking questions of the "Does anyone know about ... ?" variety.  Since there may be a sizable flux of information transfer by this means, it is important to archive the messages and to store them in a searchable archive that is accessible from the WWW.

The electronic discussion forum (see §4.2.5) is a popular tool in some web-based communities.  Most of these tools have built-in archiving facilities that produce searchable, web-based documents.  Should the team choose to use this tool, they should be aware that they seldom are successful because the RW team usually does not have the size to raise a critical mass for this type of tool.  The tree-structured format of these forums may not be intuitive to some users.

3.5.2.3  Searching  
The web site should have the capability of searching every HTML document.  Since archived documents are in HTML, the search engine will find e-mail and DocReview comments.  The search engine will identify the documents containing the keyword(s).  Then the user can go to the document at a click, and go directly to any word or phrase by using the browser's "Edit, Find in Page" feature.

3.5.2.4  Scholarly Content  
The scholarly content of the RW site is contained in models, essays, reports, bibliographies and glossaries.  There will be pages designed to introduce the content and pages designed to help the user navigate among the pages.  While each RW site will be unique, there are several common characteristics.  The first of these is the presence of an organizing model.

The organizing model is a diagram whose purpose is to provide a unifying synoptic view of the entire issue domain.  The diagram may be a map, a hierarchical network, a process diagram, a timeline, or any other visual representation of the issue domain.  It is important to represent all major topics in the issue domain, even if much of the issue domain is unrepresented by intellectual content, as it will be at the beginning.  The organizing diagram's function is to provide a logical organization of the potential topics that may be investigated over the life of the RW.  The diagram is usually prepared as a clickable "image map" that allows the user to link to a submodel of every entity in the diagram.

Another common characteristic of every RW site is the Annotated HyperBibliography (AHB)(see §4.4).  There is no research that exists without an intellectual foundation contained in the literature of the issue domain.  The literature of the issue domain will cross-disciplinary boundaries and will be far more extensive than the literature supporting a single research effort designed to produce a research report for publication.  Team supplied annotations to the references will add value to the references.  The AHB will support all the RW essays and research reports produced within the Research Web.

Each issue domain has its own vocabulary: very specific meanings applied to widely used words.  These special meanings are called glosses, and reside in the Annotated HyperGlossary (AHG)(see §4.5).  The AHG may contain several definitions of important terms.  Each of these terms has its own entry and may be specifically referenced from any document in the RW.

3.5.2.4.1  Models  
At the intellectual heart of the RW lie the models of the issue domain.  These models collectively describe, explain, and demonstrate the theory behind the issue domain that has been synthesized by the research team.  The scholarly content only exists to describe the objects and processes of the issue domain or to explain its operation.  The models are likely to be presented in graphic format in order to show order in a temporal sense or spatial adjacency.  The elements of these graphic presentations may serve as index pointers to subsections of the model, or to textual explanations.  In the WWW environment these links are all "clickable."  It is likely that, within the RW, the ultimate element of the graphic model is fully described in a RW essay.  All models are hierarchical, so a top-level model contains elements that may be further decomposed to any level of specificity necessary.  Every element in the models will eventually be described in a Research Web Essay.  In practice there is a lower limit of size that an essay might be, so there will be more than one level of the modeling hierarchy described in most essays.

There are, in the mature RW, four models that need to be built and represented on the WWW: the descriptive, the explanatory, the simulation and the auxiliary models.  Every element of each of these models must be presented in a DocReview or PicReview in order for the team to review their work.  If criticism uncovers a need for redesign rather than a simple correction, then a team member skilled in model design should analyze the changes and present a proposal for editing every model affected.

If a decision is made to develop simulation models, the informal models must be supplemented with formal models.  The formal models may use a well-developed modeling technique, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) (Booch, Rumbaugh and Jacobsen 1999), or a combination of techniques.  Before the team embarks on construction of formal models the magnitude of the effort must be recognized, and resources will need to be obtained.  Simulation modeling and the formal modeling that precedes it will require technical assistance for model design and for the programming of the simulation model itself.  It is likely that the facilitator may be able to perform some of the modeling work.

The design of a simulation model will generate a considerable amount of documentation, most of which represents a design proposal that the team needs to review.  Much of the design work is based in operationalization of the variable used in the model.  This operationalization forms a parallel model called the auxiliary model (Blalock 1968).  The auxiliary model supports experiment design and simulation modeling.

3.5.2.4.2  Research Web Essays  
RW Essays (see §3.4) are essays about objects and processes in the issue domain; they are presented as highly augmented HTML pages with hypertextual annotation that includes bibliographic references, definitions of terms, reader commentary, marginal notes, images, and cross-references.  The essays serve several purposes: as working documents of the authoring team; as the basis for publications; as the descriptions of models of objects and processes in the issue domain; and finally as "living documents" that allow a continuing incremental refinement of an essay.  All RW essays are annotatable through DocReview; so, through scholarly criticism and occasional editing, the essays may remain the active contemporary authority on a topic.

The RW Essay presents a narrative about part of the issue domain that contains description, theory and the intellectual argumentation backing the theory.  It is a verbal representation of the formal model.  With abundant means of annotation, the narrative can present a scholarly argument that is much more accessible than the paper-based research article.

3.5.2.4.3  Data Resources  
Many RWs will be able to draw from data sources on the WWW.  Typical data would be: census data, maps, physical constants, chemical characteristics, dictionaries, gazetteers, classic works of literature and history, encyclopedias, and many others.  Team members are likely to be aware of these public sources, and may also know of private sources that are available by request.  Bibliographies, even annotated bibliographies, are rather common.  These data sources can be made available through a "jump page" that assembles the team's collective knowledge.

Data developed by the research team should be displayed in raw and reduced forms on the web site as part of the RW Essay that reports an experiment.  Experienced statisticians may be able to contribute observations through a DocReview of the data.  If the conditions of a research grant require public disclosure of data, these data may be mounted in the public presentation partition, and referenced in the team's private working area.

Links to related sites are a fairly standard but na‹ve feature of web sites.  The Research Web should occupy a unique position in the WWW, the only site dedicated to scholarly research into the issue domain.  If the RW does not soon surpass every related site in quality, it was founded in territory perhaps too well investigated.  In general, only very specialized high quality sites should be referenced.  Care should be taken to link to such external sites through new windows, as in the "sidebar" feature of the Research Web Essay.  This strategy reduces the likelihood of digression as the RW's web site remains displayed.

3.5.2.4.4  Authoring Partitions  
A team that is authoring a research web essay, especially one that is destined for publication in the scholarly literature, is likely to feel a need for privacy even within the research team.  There are three fears driving the need for privacy: the first is the necessity of presenting a quality product to one's peers; the second  is premature quotation; and the third is recognition of the existence of competition and its fortunately rare agent—poaching.  A special partition for the purpose of authoring can shield the authoring team from unwelcome and premature access.

When a team is formed to build a RW essay, that essay topic is already known to the team and most likely the majority of scholars within the discipline.  The authoring team has little to fear from publishing an outline of the paper within the RW itself.  That outline could benefit from the criticism and encouragement of the entire team.  A DocReview of the outline might improve the scope of the essay,  find holes in the proposed research plan, and offer fresh ideas and examples.  Once that DocReview has served its purpose, the authoring team might have the facilitator set up a passworded partition within the RW working area.  That partition would then be doubly passworded from the outside world, and the team could work in private until the essay has progressed to a polished draft.  The draft may be registered with a digital notary site (Menkus 1995) in order to establish priority.  The draft may then be moved to the working area, and perhaps the guest partition, for a final presubmission DocReview of the RW team peers, and invited peers.

3.5.3  Information Design  
As in all design, one must focus on the user first, and often almost exclusively.  There are several overall design issues that apply exclusively to the "look and feel" of the site.  First, remember that the audience is at the site for information, not entertainment.  There is a laissez faire attitude about the WWW, and its tools allow anything to go.  You can do anything, so start by remembering your customer.  Follow good design practices; apply the advice of Nielsen (Nielsen 2000) for page design, Strunk and White (Strunk and White 1979, 66) for composition and Tufte (Tufte 1983) for graphics.  Keeping it simple is best.  Never use gratuitous graphics!  Do not use animation unless it contributes intellectual content.  Never use frames!  Never use backgrounds where not essential!  Never use web site building tools that restrict typefaces and sizes; let the visually impaired user select the face and size in the browser!  Design for operation with browsers that are at least two years old so even users with older browsers can use the site (Nielsen 2000, 36).  Do not require browser plug-ins that are not absolutely necessary.

3.6  The Research Team  
Research Web team members fill fluid roles.  Members of a team that is operating well help each other by not only fulfilling their roles, but also helping others fill their own roles.  Roles may be shared, be vacant, or be transferred from member to member.  Members may operate in several roles every day.  There are several specific functional roles, discussed below, for members within the Research Web and four abstract styles (Parker 1990, 63) common to team members in general.  In addition to the roles discussed in this section, all team members must participate actively.  The participative behavior is discussed in §2.2.4.

There may be people who are connected to the team without being a part of it.  Those people may be overseers or employed staff.  Overseers are those who have an interest in seeing the team succeed; they may be part of the granting agency, host organizations, or stakeholders.  Staff members are those that support the team in maintaining the team's environment.  Staff members may be on contract to the team, or they may be employees of cooperating institutions.  Both overseers and staff should operate in the role of cooperator, people who assist the team without joining the scholarly effort.

3.6.1  Abstract Roles (Styles)  
The literature in organizational behavior and small group behavior abounds with descriptions of team membership style and recipes for success.  Parker (Parker 1990) lists four that are used by Austin and Baldwin (Austin and Baldwin 1991, 54) as a framework for discussion of the characteristics of effective team members.  Most team members will exhibit, from time to time, all of these styles: contributor, collaborator, communicator and challenger.

The contributor (Parker 1990, 64) is primarily a content provider who shares information with other members.  In the RW, all team members should exhibit this style.  The contributor will provide input to RW Essays and models, and will contribute content by annotating other's essays and commenting on resources and the vocabulary of the enterprise (see §2.2.4.6.1).

The collaborator (Parker 1990, 69) is a goal-directed, group-oriented team member.  Collaborators are willing to forgo some individual rewards for the benefit of the team and other team members.  The collaborator sees the goals of RW team as having validity in the long term, as opposed to more competitive members who will focus on authoring project tasks that will guarantee authorship rewards shared by a small number of authors.  Role-sharing and collective honors were described in a research group that collaborated on 34 articles with every team member, as well as a consulting editor, listed as author (Shreeve et. al. 1986).  An extreme example of collaboration was Bourbaki (Halmos 1957), a collaboration of from 10 to 20 mathematicians who published anonymously and collectively for several decades under the name Nicolas Bourbaki. 

The communicator (Parker 1990, 75) is a person who works to support the team's work processes by helping to integrate new members, or to get the initial team to function as a team.  Conflict settlement, consensus-building, encouragement and recognition are important functions of the communicator.  Groups tend to have two leaders, one a task specialist and the other the maintenance specialist who specializes in conflict resolution (Weinberg 1971, 85).  The maintenance leader, a communicator, has been described as a "team mother" and is often a woman.  Austin and Baldwin point out several gender differences in research and professional behavior that support that observation (Austin and Baldwin 1991, 74).  Communicators need to work on both the RW level and at the authoring project level.

The challenger (Parker 1990, 80) is the conscience of the team.  The challenger is not afraid to question authority, or the state goals of the team.  In the RW, this person can also operate on the project level within an authoring team.  Fortunately, most researchers are well trained in critical thinking!  To a great extent the challenger style is satisfied by members filling the critic functional role (see §2.2.4.6.7).

3.6.2  Functional Roles  
The Research Web has a number of functional roles that are called into existence by the implementation of the concept.  The RW will have conveners who start the activities that eventually result in a functioning RW.  The RW must have a scientific coordinator to manage the business of research.  A facilitator is required to run the technologically intensive environment, and to take as much unproductive load of the team members as possible.  Lead authors will direct the research efforts of their teams, generating not only professional papers, but also feeding the knowledge generated into the models, essays, glossary, and bibliography.  The collaborator is the central universal role, helping others on the team through criticism, questioning, and providing knowledge and information.

3.6.2.1  Convener  
The conveners of the RW are scholars that are almost always well known to each other prior to the establishment of collaboration (Finholt and Olson 1997, 35).  The functions of the conveners are to begin to define the issue domain, begin recruitment of additional members, write funding proposals, and to start building the RW's web site.  The conveners must also bear the costs associated with those activities (Marwell and Oliver 1993, 34).  The conveners almost always become the PIs for the original projects within the RW, as a natural result of their professional status, and as an appropriate reward for their investment.

Wood and Gray, in discussing interorganizational problem-solving collaborations, have identified a number of characteristics that conveners need (Wood and Gray 1991).  In their list, for our context, assume that stakeholder is defined as "an interested and qualified scholar."  Qualities that the conveners collectively should have include:

1. "convening power, that is, the ability to induce stakeholders to participate." (ibid., 71)
2. legitimacy among the stakeholders, who must perceive that the convener has the "authority to organize the domain" (ibid., 71)
3. an unbiased, even-handed approach to the problem domain, to prevent the convener from losing credibility in the eyes of the stakeholders (ibid., 72)
4. appreciative, envisioning, and processual skills, meaning that the convener must appreciate the potential value of collaborating," and must be able to "envision a purpose to organizing the domain: and establish a collaborative process and context (ibid., 72-73)
5. the ability to identify all relevant stakeholders, who must have legitimacy and thus "be perceived by others to have the right and the capacity to participate" in the collaboration (ibid., 121-122).

(Wood and Gray (Wood and Gray 1991, 150) -- page references to Gray 1989)

The convener also must be a technology champion.  The Research Web is a technological environment that is quite foreign to most researchers.  While few scholars would suggest that they are not in favor of collaboration, many are not aware of collaboration beyond cooperation of institutions or writing a research paper.  Few are willing to pay the overhead in collaboration around an issue domain larger than the topic of a single research paper.

Being a technology champion requires a unique blend of personality characteristics, leadership behaviors, and influence tactics (Howell and Higgins 1991).  Of the characteristics describing technology champions, only two are likely to be possessed by young or unknown researchers: risk-taking and innovativeness.  The other defining characteristics of political astuteness and charisma, and the ability to introduce innovations by "the articulation of a compelling vision of the innovation's potential" are seen more often in older researchers and administrators.

Since a small group is unlikely to harbor such a talented being, it would seem that a shared leadership that borrows abilities from those that possess them might have the needed characteristics.  Those leaders in supporting roles, such as stakeholders, host department chairs, resource managers, sponsors, and attentive team members can contribute to the success of a collective technology champion.  A team member who does not agree with any concept of the Research Web should raise the problematic issues in order to improve the concept.  If all attempts to reconcile the member, then he or she should withdraw, or have the grace to suppress obstructive behavior. They [technology champions] need information to evaluate, choose and sell an innovation; material resources to obtain the necessary information and to test and make transitions; and political support to guarantee both the availability of the material resources and, eventually rewards for successful innovations (or protection from sanctions, in case of failure).

3.6.2.2  Scientific Coordinator  
The scientific coordinator is responsible for managing the conduct of research in the Research Web, defining the scope of the issue domain and determining the structure of the organizing model.  MacArthur Research Network Chairs have referred to the position have referred to the position as the "key primary obligation" and a "second religion" (Kahn 1993, 20).  The position of Scientific Coordinator has no way to be rewarded except by grant support.  The Scientific Coordinator is responsible for maintaining the models and coordinating research, not writing papers.  Unless the models themselves lead to research papers, there is no scholarly reward.  The Scientific Coordinator's position is a collaborative and supportive role.

The research team cannot operate well without a leader.  Since most of the team will be involved with the production of science in the form of specialized research papers, someone has to have an overall vision of where the team is going at any given time, someone who has "a knack for observing interconnectivity among the work of seemingly diverse scholars" (Poole 1994, 26 quoting Hirokawa).  This capability may result in much better collaboration among the team members, and occasionally from scholars from the outside who are known to the scientific coordinator.

The scientific coordinator may also act as an arbitrator to the authoring teams, especially when issues of authorship arise.  As the models of the RW are developed, objects and processes that may become the topic of RW Essays and subsequent research publications.  When these components of the issue domain are identified, scholars will immediately begin to lay claim to these pieces of turf.  The scientific coordinator may be called upon to settle the makeup of authoring teams.

The Scientific Coordinator must be supported by the PIs and must support and direct the work of the facilitator.  The scientific coordinator is also likely to be a project leader and lead author.  By virtue of the oversight function of the position, the scientific coordinator is also likely to be one of the strongest critics on the team.  Recruiting new members, both temporary and permanent is an activity that naturally falls on the scientific coordinator, though some of that duty is shared by the project leaders.  Obtaining grant support is a duty that falls on the project leaders as well as the scientific coordinator, who fills the role of grantsmaster (Poole 1994, 26).  In the MacArthur Research Networks, the scientific coordinator (Network Chair) is also responsible for linking the team to the Foundation staff by integrating the Foundation appointed Network Administrator into the team (Kahn 1993, 22).

3.6.2.3  Project Leader  
The Project Leader is a principal investigator (PI) responsible for a research project within the issue domain.  There may be several authoring teams within a project, and the lead authors must work closely with the project leader.  The project leader must develop the model of the domain of the research project in order to illustrate the interdependencies of the work of the authoring teams.  The project leader may be called upon to settle conflicts within authoring teams.  The project leader is perhaps equivalent to the first line of management, while the scientific coordinator is the general manager, and the lead authors are supervisors.

The project leader will need to collaborate with those responsible for the development of the project's models that will merge with the models of the issue domain.  There may be some reluctance from the project leader, and even more from the authoring teams, to engage in the modeling effort.  Modeling may be seen to be a distraction from the main issue, which is, to the authoring team, to write scholarly content, first the essay and then the research report.  Modeling should not be a retrospective activity; there should be co-evolution with the essay.  The model should first inform the essay, and then the research for the essay will inform the model.  If the conveners who wrote the grant proposal had the foresight to budget for staff personnel to develop models and to facilitate the collaboration, then the problems involved with modeling and technical support would vanish.

3.6.2.4  The Collaborator  
The collaborator is one who engages in collaboration with the team members.  While a collaborator may also engage in communication, coordination or cooperation, we consider here only the nature of the person engaged in collaboration, the role of collaborator.  Thagard defines four kinds of collaborative relationships: employer/employee, teacher/apprentice, peer similar and peer different (Thagard 1997).  In the RW's research team, peer similar relationships dominate, but it is very important to support and encourage all kinds collaboration.

The employer/employee relationship is occasionally played by research assistants who are engaged in routine assignments.  The facilitator, when managing technical matters, falls into an employer/employee relationship with the team members, especially with the scientific leader.  An understanding of the necessary subordination and at least respectful deference marks the character of this relationship.  While this is the weakest form of collaboration, it is true collaboration as both members realize that they are collectively contributing to the work of the research team.

Teacher/apprentice relationships arises when there exists an opportunity for an expert to pass knowledge on to a team member who is actively learning.  This form of collaboration is especially valuable in the socialization of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and interdisciplinary colleagues.  The principal mechanism of this socialization is legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger 1991).  The collaborator who is "teacher" has the responsibility to not only instruct, but to encourage the participation of the "apprentice."  Both teacher and apprentice must be aware of the psychological and sociological barriers to collaboration presented by status differences.  Collaborators must practice either courage or forbearance in this relationship.

Peer similar collaboration is the most common and productive form of collaboration.  While the training of all peers will have been similar, it will by no means be identical, and indeed, among strongly specialized fields, may only overlap at the fundamental level.  Those collaborating at this level have a responsibility to suppress competitive interdisciplinary tendencies when the topics are important to the research team.  Collaboration among students has been observed to exhibit a full range of professional socialization (Weedman 1998).

Peer different collaboration is generally a teacher/teacher relationship.  When trained scholars from different disciplines come together in a collaboration, they are expected to inform the team about the understanding of the research topic within their discipline.  In the RW, collaborators from specialties outside the principal discipline of the research topic are likely to be encouraged to make their implicit knowledge explicit (Crow, Levine and Nager 1992).  They might provide an essay that outlines their discipline-specific knowledge about the team's research topic.  The collaborator should also contribute references to pertinent literature from her discipline.  Peer different collaboration is often the most innovative collaboration since new perspectives are presented.  Peers from other disciplines should contribute commentary on differences in vocabulary.

Jane Maienschein describes another collaborative relationship, helping hands, where a technical specialist may be asked to participate in order to perform duties the team cannot (Maienschein 1993, 173).  I view a helping hands collaborator as a specialized facilitator.  Of course this category could also include an employee.

In dealings with the RW, each collaborator fills one or more of several identifiable roles: in dealing with RW content as a contributor or critic; in social promotion roles such as advocate, supporter, protector; and in structuring roles within discussions as moderator, facilitator, delimiter, synthesizer, interpreter, arbitrator, and reporter.

3.6.2.4.1  Responsibility for personal participation  
Every collaborator must be aware that participation is necessary.  Regardless of the status and role of the collaborator, some contributions are expected.  The collaborator will have been informed of those expectations when invited to participate.  Participation can take many forms: contribution of content, criticism, dialogue, or support and encouragement.  Contributions can be made directly in the RW as contributions of essays or critical annotation in DocReviews, the Annotated HyperBibliography, and the Annotated HyperGlossary. Dialog in the form of e-mail or discussion forums is also a very important contribution. Rewards are of course contingent on participation.  Free-riding is considered to be very poor form in the RW.

3.6.2.4.2  Team member  
How does one become a team member?  The conveners are certainly members, and are likely to occupy the positions of power and reward.  As first on the scene, the conveners will likely include the scientific coordinator and the coordinators of the first papers to be produced.  High stature peers are likely to be invited to join the team in order to strengthen its scientific knowledgebase.  Other scholars are likely to be invited on the basis of their specialized knowledge, or known ability to collaborate.  Each candidate must be given the expectations of the group, especially the understanding that some of the rewards must devolve from the individual to the group.

Every team needs to have the ability to select its members.  The bases of selection include professional status, personality, apparent willingness to participate, and a statement of their intent.  The statement of intent is essentially a position paper stating the goals the scholar has in dealing with the research team.  These statements of intent should be posted in a section of the RW that introduces the team to the reader.

As a team member, one has access to all areas of the RW.  There are two major exceptions to access, the first is the flux of inter-member e-mail that occurs outside the team listserver; and the second is access to drafts and DocReviews of works-in-progress that might be passworded by authoring teams.  In any group there is always a necessary undercurrent of communication that best remains private.  The need for protection of works-in-progress is sometimes made necessary due to the competitive aspects of scientific practice.  In any case, the early drafts of papers are simply not suited to local peer review by DocReview: premature exposure to a draft of a paper can lead to "review fatigue" -- there are only a very limited number of times a reviewer is willing to study a paper.

Occasionally a member chooses to move on to other interests, or retires.  It is clear to the scientific coordinator when a member's participation drops or vanishes.  A short private communication will establish whether the member wants to remain active.  If not, the member should be thanked for past contributions and removed from the distribution lists.  If the dissolution of the relationship was acrimonious, then the password for the site might need to be changed.

3.6.2.4.3  Invited peer  
Often a scholar will be invited to join the collaboration in order to provide learned criticism.  Critics are always acknowledged, and occasionally invited to become authors.  The question of authorship is intensely debated among the team, but should never include eminent scholars or administrator who do not directly contribute significant content.  Peers may be invited to review a single paper by mounting the DocReview in the guest partition.

3.6.2.4.4  Member of scientific community (literature)
The scientific literature is the knowledgebase for any scientific work.  A passive form of collaboration exists in the form of citation of published works. Citation is itself a considerable reward, as citation analysis is frequently used to measure the impact of a scientist's body of research.  The references cited in a draft may contain peers who might consent to review the work. Being invited to review work that builds on your own is a pleasure, though not a responsibility.  An invitation to review may be a scholar's first exposure to the RW, and might grow to a more fruitful relationship.

3.6.2.5  Lead Author  
The lead author is responsible for directing the research leading to the production of a set of Research Web Essays on a topic identified by the team as part of the issue domain.  There may be several essays involved, most leading to publications.  At the beginning of the research project, the lead author will be responsible for managing the development of a model of the objects and processes involved.  After the model has been established the lead author will supervise the incremental elaboration of the models as research progresses.  The lead author is usually the project leader for a section of the RW and may also be a convener.  Almost certainly he or she will be supported by a grant.

3.6.2.6  Facilitator  
The Research Web Facilitator has many duties, but only one role. That role is to be the conscience of the team, monitoring quality of presentation and the degree of participation.  While the facilitator is not an expert in the content of the research, s/he is facile in the process of collaboration (Schuman 1996, 126). The facilitator takes as his desired that which is desirable for the community; this includes the quality of the Web Site.  There is not a perfect coincidence of desired and desirable within the community (Hofstede 1991); indeed there is a considerable tension corresponding to the conflict in the interests of the individual and those of the community.  The facilitator serves the team directly by taking responsibility for transforming intellectual content into RW Essays and models.  Technical training is another service that the facilitator provides (Orlikowski 1993), (Bullen and Bennett 1990, 298).

The facilitator works with the team, but for the leader.

The literature on facilitators is dominated by meeting facilitation rather than mediation and facilitation for a long-term largely asynchronous group.  In a work examining the facilitator of computer-supported  meetings, Clawson, et.al. identify 16 dimensions (Clawson, et.al. 1993, 556).  Seven of these dimensions may be used for evaluating the effectivity of the RW's facilitator:

• Promotes ownership and encourages group responsibility.

• Demonstrates self-awareness and self-expression.

• Appropriately selects and prepares technology.

• Listens to, clarifies, and integrates information.

• Creates comfort with and promotes understanding of the technology and technology outputs.

• Creates and reinforces and open, positive, and participative environment.

• Understands technology and its capabilities.

3.6.3  Potential Rewards  
RWs offer some opportunities to develop an enhanced reward system. These rewards are rewards designed to encourage collaborative activity.  Some of them attempt to remediate some of the disincentives that are part of the existing academic environment. 

2. Career enhancement
Authoring teams will be rewarded in the usual way.  The scientific coordinator and facilitator have a new claim to make on their CV: management of a team of collaborators.  The scientific coordinator can point to the management of a model of the issue domain that necessarily includes both determination of the boundaries of the issue domain with definition of adjacencies of other issues and a hierarchical decomposition of the issue domain itself.  Of course the skills of recruitment, decision-making and coordination of authoring teams will demonstrate the ability to manage as well as contribute.

The facilitator will be able to point to the ability to work closely with a senior scientist, and the technical skills to design, acquire, and use software necessary to support a collaborative team of scholars.  Since the facilitator is not initially likely to be familiar with the issue domain, great adaptability and learning skills must be applied simply to be able to engage in planning the RW web site and conversing with the team members.

3. Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)
Graduate students and non-professional staff members can be socialized into the research team and can be introduced to scholarly research through the mechanism of  LPP.  Being asked to serve on a research team is a great event in the lives of most committed students.  Learning how research is done is a necessary element in the education of anyone aspiring to a life in science.

4. Credit in tenure reviews
Scholars on a tenure or promotion track need to be able to convince a committee that they are worthy of appointment or promotion.  The literature is replete with examples of lack of credit being given to any activity other than conventional scholarship, service and teaching.  In a RW, one of the duties of the Scientific Coordinator is to inform every team member's academic department of the contributions that the member is making to the team's efforts.  This is especially true when one considers that a member may contribute enormously to a modeling task or a literature review that does not directly produce a publication.

5. Acknowledgments
As a matter of policy in RWs, every contributor to a RW essay and any professional paper that results from such work will be acknowledged.  In conventional scholarship acknowledgments have almost no standing at all, indeed some publishers refuse to publish acknowledgments.  In the now-ascendant electronic journals and in self-published web pages, there is no such restriction.  It will hopefully come to pass that acknowledgments will be given some greater status in the world of scholarship.

6. Awards or bonuses for exemplary service
This reward offers management to codify the desired collaborative behavior.  Rewards of this nature have not only a conventional positive reinforcement component, but implied penalties as well.  If awards are presented to half the team members, then it is obvious that the other half didn't perform well.  There may be difficulties in applying grant money to such a program, though in an industrial or government setting it could be applied.

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Auxiliary model -- A model designed to test a theoretical model. The assumptions of the auxiliary model operationalize the theoretical model. The incommensurability of the two models are bridged by explanation of the assumptions made in operationalization. --- (Hendricksen - from Blalock 1968 The Measurement Problem: A Gap between the Languages of Theory and Research )

Boundary object -- Objects that are plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. Four types are: repositories, ideal types, terrain with coincident boundaries, and forms. --- (S.L. Star, 1989. The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving)

Canonical document -- An authoritative document. In the context of Research Webs, the canonical document is an essay that incorporates or references the accumulated knowledge about a topic as interpreted or synthesized by the research team. --- (C. Hendricksen)

Collaboration -- v. intr. To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. In the context of the Research Web, the creation of new shared knowledge. --- (American Heritage Dictionary, Michael Schrage)

Communication Genre -- Socially recognized types of communicative actions -- such as memos, meetings, expense forms, training seminars -- that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social purposes. --- (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992. (Genres of Organizational Communication))

Conscription device -- Documents, including drawings diagrams and sketches, which enlist the participation of those who would employ them in the knowledge-building process, since they must engage in the generation, editing and correction of those documents if knowledge-building is to proceed. --- (after Kathryn Henderson (Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases, 1991 p452))

Convenor -- A founding member of the Research Web team. Generally convenors are all principal investigators. --- (Charlie Hendricksen)

Cooperation -- The act of enabling collaboration. Institutions cooperate, they cannot collaborate. Individuals can collaborate or cooperate. Cooperation usually involves the contribution of resources to a joint project. --- (Hendricksen)

Coordination -- A task-oriented activity designed to optimize the temporal sequencing of activities. --- (Hendricksen)

Critical apparatus -- The means by which scholars criticize the works of others. In the context of Research Webs, DocReview provides the critical apparatus. --- (C. Hendricksen)

Criticism -- The action, process, or result of passing judgement, evaluating or analysing documents. In the Research Web, criticism is taken to be constructive and is considered new scholarship, itself subject to criticism. --- (Charlie Hendricksen)

Descriptive Model -- A model that organizes selected elements of information from the source model. The selected elements are filtered for an adequate truth value, that is, errors are removed and myths are investigated before inclusion, and the elements possess validity in the context of the issue domain. --- (Charlie Hendricksen)

Explanatory model -- A description of a hypothetical generative mechanism that produces the phenomenon seen in the corresponding descriptive model. --- (Hendricksen, from Aronson, Harre and Way)

Facilitator -- In a Research Web, a person who is charged with the duties of creating and maintaining the RW's web site, training team members in the operation of software tools, and actively searching for ways to take unproductive cognitive load from the team members. --- (Charlie Hendricksen)

Free rider -- A person who benefits from commonly held knowledge, but never contributes to that body of knowledge. --- (Hendricksen)

Issue domain -- The topic for a research effort. The issue domain is comprehensive and defines the scope of the research effort. --- (unattributed)

Legitimate peripheral participation -- A process that provides access to the research activity for students, stakeholders, practitioners and other sub-professionals. LPP provides enculturation, learning, and bonding for the team, and mentoring opportunities for the research scientists. --- (Charlie Hendricksen)

Model -- Real or imagined representations and analogues of naturally occurring entities, structures and processes. --- (Aronson, Harré and Way, 1995, Realism Rescued, p3.)

Operationalization -- The process of creating procedures to measure real properties based on abstractions from a theoretical model. For example, how does one measure argumentativeness? --- (Hendricksen - See Blalock 1968 The Measurement Problem: A Gap between the Languages of Theory and Research )

Simulation model -- A computer program, usually very complex, that when given a set of initial conditions and a script of actions (scenario), will produce an outcome that a real system would produce given the same scenario. --- (Hendricksen)

Synchronous -- Existing or happening at the same time; coincident in time; belonging to the same period, or occuring at the same moment, of time; contemporary; simultaneous. cf. asynchronous. In the context of computer-mediated communication, communication by personal contact (face-to-face) or telephone. --- (Oxford English Dictionary)

VNS -- An acronym for the Validity Network Schema. See Brinberg, David and McGrath, Joseph E. 1985. Validity and the Research Process. --- (C. Hendricksen)