This paper has outlined research directions in the field of open collaboration. The increasing availability of datasets documenting on-line collaborations is making possible to provide answers to many research questions on a quantitative basis. However, just making available such datasets is not enough. We need new net-work models, data transformation techniques, data linkage tech-niques, and novel pattern analysis techniques to make possible to extract meaningful knowledge from such data. Capturing fine-grained and high quality interaction and collaboration data is also another important challenge that needs to be tackled. As part of our future work, we plan to design and prototype novel cyberin-frastructure platforms addressing such needs.