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Yesterday at Microsoft’s Research Faculty Summit, the leaders from Microsoft Research emphasised on how Microsoft can collaborate on research with the academics in order to get more technological breakthrough in the coming years.

While speaking on the occasion, Tony Hey, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s External Research Division, focused on the role of his faction in assisting specific collaborative research projects along with advancing the research process.

Hey also announced a set of free software tools which are meant for allowing researchers to publish, preserve and share data all the way to the complete scholarly communication life cycle.

Regarding scholarly communication, Hey said:

Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers — with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We’re supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs.

On the development of these tools, Microsoft researchers have partnered with academia in order to get the input of their community on the application.

Following are the tools made available by Microsoft:

Add-ins.

The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables metadata to be captured at the authoring stage to preserve document structure and semantic information throughout the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search, discovery and analysis in subsequent stages of the life cycle. The Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 allows authors to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into an Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) by linking to the Creative Commons site via a Web service.

The Microsoft e-Journal Service.

This offering provides a hosted, full-service solution that facilitates easy self-publishing of online-only journals to facilitate the availability of conference proceedings and small and medium-sized journals.

Research Output Repository Platform.

This platform helps capture and leverage semantic relationships among academic objects — such as papers, lectures, presentations and video — to greatly facilitate access to these items in exciting new ways.

The Research Information Centre.

In close partnership with the British Library, this collaborative workspace will be hosted via Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and will allow researchers to collaborate throughout the entire research project workflow, from seeking research funding to searching and collecting information, as well as managing data, papers and other research objects throughout the research process.

Vice president of Outsell Inc., Daniel Pollock, said:

Technology that effectively addresses the increasing need to integrate the research life cycle and provide a holistic end-to-end perspective has the potential to revolutionize the way academics collect data, publish findings and preserve information.

Companies that work closely with academia can understand how their products might benefit the scholarly workflow and so inform their product development. Microsoft is engaged with the academic community and is releasing a series of tools aimed at streamlining the academic workflow.

The newly released tools are available here.