Roadmaps, not blueprints: paving the way to science gateway success

As science today grows ever more digital, it poses exciting challenges and opportunities for researchers. The existence of science gateways---and the advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) tools and resources behind the accessible Web interfaces---can significantly improve the productivity of researchers facing the most difficult challenges, but designing the most effective tools requires an investment of time, effort, and money. Because all gateways cannot be funded in the long term, it is important to identify the characteristics of successful gateways and make early efforts to incorporate whatever strategies will set up new gateways for success. Our research seeks to identify why some gateway projects change the way science is conducted in a given community while other gateways do not. Through a series of five full-day, iterative, multidisciplinary focus groups, we have gathered input and insights from sixty-six participants representing a diverse array of gateways and portals, funding organizations, research institutions, and industrial backgrounds. In this paper, we describe the key factors for success as well as the situational enablers of these factors. These findings are grouped into five main topical areas---the builders, the users, the roadmaps, the gateways, and the support systems---but we find that many of these factors and enablers are intertwined and inseparable, and there is no easy prescription for success.