Success within Virtual Scientific Community Data Systems: The Roles of Structure and Demography

The community data system, a form of scientific collaboratory, represents a virtual community of researchers whose goal is to aggregate and standardize information across a broad domain with the goal of furthering scientific progress. Research has commonly debated the extent to which communities like these tend to achieve success via the resources that specific network structures provide or whether resources simply attract to larger and/or more developed communities. Thus, we examined the relationships between structure (i.e., centrality, defined as the average importance or influence of members of a community), demography (i.e., community age and size), and community success. Using multilevel modeling for change, we analyzed 41 communities that comprise the Open Biological and Biomedical Foundry, a community data system developing standardized ontologies of biological and biomedical terms and relationships to be used by scientists. Supportive of our hypotheses, we found that measures of centrality decrea...