Remote collaboration services in Russian academic and research networks

Despite of scarce funding during the last decade Russian science and education have kept the main parameters typical for those of developed countries, national infrastructure providing information support and professional communications being an exception. In 1995 the Inter-Agency Program "Development of the National Computer Network for Science and Higher Education" was launched. As a result the advanced national academic and research network infrastructure was developed and various information systems for science and education started out their operations. At the same time the development of the public communication media has provided a background for new network services and information technologies. Russian telecoms put into service metropolitan and inter-city digital broadband channels and part of this capacity became available for research and academia. Therefore, the main challenge for the Russian Academic and Research community is to develop computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems able to provide services to researchers and educators distributed over numerous scientific and university centres, separated by thousands miles from each other all over the Russian Federation. The paper discusses these remote collaboration services.