The British Library and Microsoft Research have announced that the new open source 'Research Information Centre' (RIC) Framework v1.0 is now available to download for free at http://ric.codeplex.com. The RIC is seen to represent an entirely new way of conducting research by providing an online environment in which to navigate the collection of digital information available to 21st century researchers. It aims to maximise web technology to improve both flexibility and knowledge sharing for researchers, wherever they are in the world.
The British Library and Microsoft Research have worked in partnership to design and develop a 'virtual research environment' that will provide a single easy-to-use interface enabling research teams to work collaboratively. The RIC is projected to provide an environment in which users can create, share, discuss, manage, find and track articles, references, bookmarks, funding proposals, presentations and all the other digital information related to their research.
Built using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Platform, the binaries and source code are being made publicly available. This is aimed to encourage experimentation and use amongst the scientific community to develop the RIC's foundation templates into an application that will offer support at every stage of the research life-cycle. The British Library is developing a RIC template that will incorporate a range of intuitive and customisable tools of relevance to biomedical research.
The British Library is working with a number of partners to understand biomedical research user needs and evolve the functionality of the RIC to meet those needs. The aim is to develop and support an RIC community that focuses on development and sharing of web parts that can be 'plugged in' to the RIC to enable research teams to define their own online environment.
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