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
   

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2. Three perspectives on scholarly
   communication
   •Early career researchers
   •Librarians
   •Web technology
   

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3. Social Networks
   Opportunities for
   discovery
   Opportunities for building
   relationships
   

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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/
   

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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.
   

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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/
   

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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/
   

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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/
   

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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/
   

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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/
    

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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/
    

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12. Instrumenting the Research
    Workflow
    Search
    Read
    Annotate
    Organize
    Write
    Import
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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
    

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16. Becoming embedded in the
    research workflow
    

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17. www.mendeley.com
    william.gunn@mendeley.com
    @mrgunn
    

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