ABSTRACT myExperiment is an open repository solution for the born-digital items arising in contemporary research practice, in particular scientific workflows and experiment plans. Launched in November 2007, the public repository (myexperiment.org) has established a significant collection of scientific workflows, spanning multiple disciplines and multiple workflow systems, which has been accessed by over 16,000 users worldwide. Built according to Web 2.0 design principles, myExperiment demonstrates the success of blending modern social curation methods with the demands of researchers sharing hard-won intellectual assets and research works within a scholarly communication lifecycle. myExperiment is an important component in the revolution in creating, sharing and publishing scientific results, and has already established itself as a valuable and unique repository with a growing international presence. 1.

With the motivation of developing a system that sup-ports communications of researches in various disci-plines, this paper devotes to analyze requirements for such a system through operation of a prototype system. To develop a desired system, we clarify basic require-ments for the system, discussing what communications of researches are. We have developed a prototype sys-tem, based on a social networking system, that satisfies these requirements, offered it to our faculty members, and obtained some interesting findings which must be useful for the desired system. The findings include im-portance of identifiers which are opaque and can be se-lected by users instead of some centralized or hierarchi-cal organizations. 1