This year has seen a lot of buzz around several online services that make it easier for scientists to share, discover and collaborate. The traditional barriers to communicating - time, cost, volumes of paper – have been removed to the point where researchers can collaborate across vast distances, and in real time.
The Big Three
Giant social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all great tools, but don’t really serve the scientific community in terms of collaboration, and aren’t built to evaluate user 
activity in any meaningful way for researchers or libraries. Facebook is centered on the individual, and his or her likes/dislikes. Twitter is a super-speed information exchange service, but is too rapid and possibly too big to have any meaningful workflow applications for scientists aside from pinging links and comments back and forth. LinkedIn, although professional-focused, is still centered on personal profile raising and again, not hitting the sweet spot of research collaboration.
Various tools and services have entered this arena that have been crafted specifically for academics and researchers, and are building up substantial user bases of connected and engaged communities, self-organizing themselves into their respective fields of expertise.
Social networks for academics - Is there value?
In the research world, networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu are dominating the press with news of new funding from well-known venture capital (Academia.edu raised $4.5M during Series B funding in November, 2011; ResearchGate has not disclosed their Series B total from February 2012, but investment was led by PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek), as well as rapidly expanding numbers of registered users (1.5M and 1.3M respectively).
These two more general services have taken layout styles similar to Facebook or Google+, where a user maintains a profile populated with research interests, authored papers, books and talks, and also offers functionality for group discussions.
However, as a recent article in the Huffington Post from Mark Drapeau argues, tools such as these are “add-ons to "the way things get done" and not replacements for the way scientists work day-to-day or how their careers are judged”. In principle this is true for now, but there needs to be a starting place somewhere. David Bradley also argues in an older post from 2009 that adoption rates among researchers were very low, because the networks weren’t really addressing a problem.
Building a community around workflow
Taking Drapeau's and Bradley’s comments on board, perhaps the problem is being looked at back to front. Perhaps the value really lies in developing a useful tool that integrates common workflows into communication, and therefore will be organized organically by its users. It is this type of crowdsourced network that has allowed SaaS 
(Software as a Service) organizations such as Zotero and Mendeley to gain vast numbers of registrants, and to provide real value to their users.
This is where it seems logical to focus, providing a solution to a logistical problem encountered by nearly all researchers or authors, and almost as a by-product, being able to generate current reporting on what is being used via the network as a whole, right down to subject, group and individual level. The Facebook imitation site has little weight in this context.
At the same time as providing tools for collaboration, the fundamental, and often overlooked, feature of tools like Zotero and Mendeley are that they offer a crowdsourced filter of the literature, which will weed out the weak and low-quality work that abounds on both the internet and in journals and books.
Serving the institution
Most researchers are inextricably linked to their institution, and both have obvious common goals, where libraries provide the support infrastructure to enable researchers to achieve their research targets and in turn realize the objectives of their institution.
As well as providing a workflow solution for end-users, Mendeley has turned its attention to providing a service to these libraries, in the form of insights into what users from their very own faculties are using, sharing and discovering via Mendeley; the Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets. This is not only helpful to see if a library’s holdings match the faculty needs in terms of usage, but librarians can also upload their link resolver into the tool to provide direct access to their subscribed content and network directly with their faculty members from the same tool.
Tapping into the future
With tools like Mendeley and the Mendeley Institutional Edition, it is clear that their future lies in building and elaborating on tools that provide clear workflow benefits to large numbers of people, and employing the reservoir of resultant data to provide insights and add value to those processes. A likely future is one of increased use of open APIs, added meaning applied by further layers of altmetrics or data visualization applications, and deeper integration and seamless linking to multiple media types, not just academic journal content; and we can’t wait.
Socializing for a collaborative workflow
2 jul 2012 Filed under: Research ProductivityThis year has seen a lot of buzz around several online services that make it easier for scientists to share, discover and collaborate. The traditional barriers to communicating - time, cost, volumes of paper – have been removed to the point where researchers can collaborate across vast distances, and in real time.
activity in any meaningful way for researchers or libraries. Facebook is centered on the individual, and his or her likes/dislikes. Twitter is a super-speed information exchange service, but is too rapid and possibly too big to have any meaningful workflow applications for scientists aside from pinging links and comments back and forth. LinkedIn, although professional-focused, is still centered on personal profile raising and again, not hitting the sweet spot of research collaboration.
(Software as a Service) organizations such as Zotero and Mendeley to gain vast numbers of registrants, and to provide real value to their users.
The Big Three
Giant social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all great tools, but don’t really serve the scientific community in terms of collaboration, and aren’t built to evaluate user
Various tools and services have entered this arena that have been crafted specifically for academics and researchers, and are building up substantial user bases of connected and engaged communities, self-organizing themselves into their respective fields of expertise.
Social networks for academics - Is there value?
In the research world, networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu are dominating the press with news of new funding from well-known venture capital (Academia.edu raised $4.5M during Series B funding in November, 2011; ResearchGate has not disclosed their Series B total from February 2012, but investment was led by PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek), as well as rapidly expanding numbers of registered users (1.5M and 1.3M respectively).
These two more general services have taken layout styles similar to Facebook or Google+, where a user maintains a profile populated with research interests, authored papers, books and talks, and also offers functionality for group discussions.
However, as a recent article in the Huffington Post from Mark Drapeau argues, tools such as these are “add-ons to "the way things get done" and not replacements for the way scientists work day-to-day or how their careers are judged”. In principle this is true for now, but there needs to be a starting place somewhere. David Bradley also argues in an older post from 2009 that adoption rates among researchers were very low, because the networks weren’t really addressing a problem.
Building a community around workflow
Taking Drapeau's and Bradley’s comments on board, perhaps the problem is being looked at back to front. Perhaps the value really lies in developing a useful tool that integrates common workflows into communication, and therefore will be organized organically by its users. It is this type of crowdsourced network that has allowed SaaS
This is where it seems logical to focus, providing a solution to a logistical problem encountered by nearly all researchers or authors, and almost as a by-product, being able to generate current reporting on what is being used via the network as a whole, right down to subject, group and individual level. The Facebook imitation site has little weight in this context.
At the same time as providing tools for collaboration, the fundamental, and often overlooked, feature of tools like Zotero and Mendeley are that they offer a crowdsourced filter of the literature, which will weed out the weak and low-quality work that abounds on both the internet and in journals and books.
Serving the institution
Most researchers are inextricably linked to their institution, and both have obvious common goals, where libraries provide the support infrastructure to enable researchers to achieve their research targets and in turn realize the objectives of their institution.
As well as providing a workflow solution for end-users, Mendeley has turned its attention to providing a service to these libraries, in the form of insights into what users from their very own faculties are using, sharing and discovering via Mendeley; the Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets. This is not only helpful to see if a library’s holdings match the faculty needs in terms of usage, but librarians can also upload their link resolver into the tool to provide direct access to their subscribed content and network directly with their faculty members from the same tool.
Tapping into the future
With tools like Mendeley and the Mendeley Institutional Edition, it is clear that their future lies in building and elaborating on tools that provide clear workflow benefits to large numbers of people, and employing the reservoir of resultant data to provide insights and add value to those processes. A likely future is one of increased use of open APIs, added meaning applied by further layers of altmetrics or data visualization applications, and deeper integration and seamless linking to multiple media types, not just academic journal content; and we can’t wait.
Connect met ons
About the Author