New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science offers a distinctive understanding of new infrastructures for knowledge production based in science and technology studies. This field offers a unique potential to assess systematically the prospects for new modes of science enabled by information and communication technologies. The authors use varied methodological approaches, reviewing the origins of initiatives to develop e-science infrastructures, exploring the diversity of the various solutions and the scientific cultures, which use them, and assessing the prospects for wholesale change in scientific structures and practices. The book contains practical advice for the design of appropriate technological solutions, and long range assessments of the prospects for change useful both to policy makers and those implementing institutional infrastructures. Readers interested in understanding contemporary science will gain a rich picture of the practices and the technologies that are shaping the knowledge production of the future.