ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science: Call for Research Nodes

In 2001, the Office of Science and Technology1 launched the UK e-Science programme, an initiative involving all the research councils2. John Taylor, then Director General of the Research Councils, explained that: ‘e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it’. This infrastructure, known as ‘the Grid’ or increasingly commonly as ‘e-Infrastructure’, comprises networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate and manipulate digitised data seamlessly across the Internet on a hitherto unrealisable scale, thereby enabling advances in scientific research that would not otherwise have been possible.