Guest Editorial Special Issue on e-Social Science

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a worldwide effort has been underway todevelop and deploy a new generation of innovative computer-based technologies that, it is argued, are essential to enable advances across all fields of scientific research. These technologies, known as ‘‘the Grid’ ’ (Foster & Kesselman, 2004) or, increasingly commonly, as ‘‘e-Infrastructure’ ’ (cyberinfrastructure in the United States), comprise networked, inter-operable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate, and manipulate digital data seamlessly across the Internet on a hitherto unrealizable scale. As has been noted by several commentators, more data will be generated in the next 5 years than in the entire history of human endeavor (The E-Science Directors ’ Forum Strat-egy Working Group, 2009). At the same time, the problems faced by society in the 21st century are growing ever more complex and demand research that is bigger in scale, more collaborative, and multidisciplinary. In response to these twin challenges, reports have been commissioned by science policy makers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe to articulate how e-Infrastructure might be harnessed to deliver a new vision for research practice,1 and there are now several ‘‘roadmaps’ ’ describing how this vision might be rea