The Social Side of Research

This presentation was given at the 2013 Charleston Conference with Jeffrey Lancaster of Columbia University. We discussed how researchers are using social media, how librarians can connect with them, and what to look for in a scholarly networking tool (openness).

Transcript

1. The Social Side of Research William Gunn, Ph.D. Head of Academic Outreach Mendeley @mrgunn
2. Three perspectives on scholarly communication •Early career researchers •Librarians •Web technology
3. Social Networks Opportunities for discovery Opportunities for building relationships
4. A historical perspective • I grew up with the internet • Chatting over ICQ and Usenet with people anywhere • Reaching beyond my local environment https://secure.flickr.com/photos/photophilde/3553606749/
5. Change and Disruption • The music industry was first • futile resistance • worst fears not confirmed • providing a project very many people want is in fact quite sustainable • IF you don’t try to control how they use it.
6. More Change and Disruption • Blogging changed how we communicated – but not as drastically as some predicted • business models shifted • A service that gives people what they want is a quite sustainable business model • IF you don’t try to control the channel through which they receive it. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/5444504633/
7. Watching the ship sail away After all this, scholarly publishers were still debating: – Should we put our work online? – Should we allow search engines to index us? – Should we use DRM on PDFs? – Should we dictate both how content is used and the channel through which they receive it? https://secure.flickr.com/photos/bea_k63w-wa/2692575219/
8. Librarian • We never went into the library • We did use library services all the time • I initially blamed the library for my frustrations with scholarly communication https://secure.flickr.com/photos/emdot/1126963383/
9. Librarian • How wrong I was! –big deals, monopolies, hands tied • Library technology is empowered by Open Access https://secure.flickr.com/photos/trucolorsfly/611479605/
10. From consumer to provider • Mendeley was neither from libraries nor from publishers. • Bringing tools and user experience from other parts of the web to scholarly communication. • People expected to easily share and discover music and photos, why not academic papers? https://secure.flickr.com/photos/psd/2731067095/
11. Building an open infrastructure • Web native tools expect that data has no strings attached. • Mendeley had to create an open sharing platform to deliver the experience we wanted. • A free desktop manager got us on desktops around the world. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/211239773/
12. Instrumenting the Research Workflow Search Read Annotate Organize Write Import
13. Instrumenting the research workflow • 2.6 Million users • 470 M documents • 4-700K uploads per day • 90% coverage of Pubmed –Long tail • Accessible alternative to citations
14. New forms of discovery • Mendeley Suggest – personalized recommendations based on reading history • related articles – relatedness based on document similarity • recommender frameworks – implement recommendations as a service • third-party recommender services – serve niche audiences
15. What would people build if they could get the data? • Impact Story – get credit for all your work • PLOS ALM – article-level metrics for papers • Plum Analytics – bespoke analytics for libraries • Altmetric.com – altmetrics for publishers. (from Digital Science/NPG) https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2798315677
16. Becoming embedded in the research workflow
17. www.mendeley.com william.gunn@mendeley.com @mrgunn