The infrastructure school is founded on the assumption that "efficient" research depends on the availability of tools and applications. Therefore, the "goal" of the school is to promote the creation of openly available platforms, tools, and services for scientists. Hence, the infrastructure school is concerned with the technical infrastructure that promotes the development of emerging and developing research practices through the use of the internet, including the use of software and applications, in addition to conventional computing networks. In that sense, the infrastructure school regards open science as a technological challenge. The infrastructure school is tied closely with the notion of "cyberscience", which describes the trend of applying information and communication technologies to scientific research, which has led to an amicable development of the infrastructure school. Specific elements of this prosperity include increasing collaboration and interaction between scientists, as well as the development of "open-source science" practices. The sociologists discuss two central trends in the Infrastructure school:
1. Distributed computing: This trend encapsulates practices that outsource complex, process-heavy scientific computing to a network of volunteer computers around the world. The examples that the sociologists cite in their paper is that of the Open Science Grid, which enables the development of large-scale projects that require high-volume data management and processing, which is accomplished through a distributed computer network. Moreover, the grid provides the necessary tools that the scientists can use to facilitate this process.[ ]
2. Social and Collaboration Networks or Scientists: This trend encapsulates the development of software that makes interaction with other researchers and scientific collaborations much easier than traditional, non-digital practices. Specifically, the trend is focused on implementing newer Web 2.0 tools to facilitate research related activities on the internet. De Roure and colleagues (2008) list a series of four key capabilities which they believe composes A Social Virtual Research Environment (SVRE):
* The SVRE should primarily aid the management and sharing of research objects. The authors define these to be a variety of digital commodities that are used repeatedly by researchers. * Second, the SVRE should have inbuilt incentives for researchers to make their research objects available on the online platform. * Third, the SVRE should be "open" as well as "extensible", implying that different types of digital artifacts composing the SVRE can be easily integrated. * Fourth, the authors propose that the SVRE is more than a simple storage tool for research information. Instead, the researchers propose that the platform should be "actionable". That is, the platform should be built in such a way that research objects can be used in the conduct of research as opposed to simply being stored.
# See also - Open science - Open Science Group - Problem of Peer Review - Replication crisis - Research and development