Research in the information society is undergoing radical change. The new challenges make it necessary to rethink research and the ways of educating researchers so that they can cope with them. We show that research has to be considered as skilled practice, consisting of numerous component skills which have to be trained so that future knowledge workers can successfully deal with unstable, uncertain and complex situations. As a practical application of this argument, we outline a project for an integrated Internet service, called BASER: Basic Support for Efficient Research.