Clifford Lynch from CNI sent the following along on CNI-Announce, CNI's always-useful announcement list.

[CNI-ANNOUNCE] 2020 Science -- Microsoft Report and Nature Issue

Microsoft Research has issued a report on the practice of science in 2020 that emphasizes the growing role of information technology, e-science and related developments. You can find information about the report here

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/background_overview.htm

and the report itself is available for downloading here

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/downloads.htm

In conjunction with this, the journal Nature has done a special issue on computing and science in 2020. All of the articles in the issue appear to be open access; the table of contents can be found at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/futurecomputing/index.html

Much good reading here. Don't miss the Nature piece by Alex Szalay and Jim Gray.