101 Innovations

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Maximising the impact of academic research

101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Howresearchers are getting to grip with the myriad of

new tools.

There has been a surge of new scholarly

communication tools in recent years. But

how are researchers incorporating these

tools into their research workflows? Jeroen

Bosmanand Bianca Kramerare

conducting a global survey to investigate the

choices researchers are making and why. Insights from these surveys

will be valuable for libraries, research support, funders, but also for

researchers themselves.

Are we witnessing a major overhaul of scholarly communication rules and

tools? In the last six months alone, this blog has featured posts on all

phases of the research cycle. From Wikipedia(discovery) to replication

(analysis), Chrome extensions for reference management(writing), the

Open Library of Humanitiesand RIO Journal(publishing), Twitter &

blogging(outreach), altmetrics, R-indexand Publons(peer review and

assessment). How to get on grip on the myriad of new tools and

standards? Should researchers drop everything they always took for

granted? Will switching to open tools make research workflows more

efficient? And should that be the goal anyway? Our current research may

help researchers and other stakeholders understand what is going on.

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November 25th, 2015

Research in the age

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Avalanche of tools

Almost half of the tools in our database of scholarly communication tools

were created since 2013. The rate at which new tools appear to a certain

degree reflects the relative ease with which one can create online tools.

On the other hand tool creators apparently deem it important to build a tool

that supports a new way of working, or that repairs faults and omissions inexisting tools offered by the major players (be it publishers, tech

companies or venerable societies). The push for new tools comes from

funders (e.g. demanding data archiving of Open Access) but also from

researchers themselves that want to capitalize on the possibilities of the

internet in collaborating. Especially for experimenting / collecting / mining

data, writing, journal selection, publishing and outreach we witness a surge

of new tools.

Simple model

We use a simple model to get a grip on this abundance and variety of

tools. The G-E-O model looks at whether the tool makes science Good,

of mass

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Efficient or Open. Tools that make science more open are for instance

those facilitating open access, open data, open peer review or even open

drafting. Also many outreach tools contribute to openness. For many tools

that work towards openness there are barriers such as copyright and the

business models of the big publishers. Tools that make science efficient

are mostly working on standardization (such as DOI or ORCID),

interoperability and well connected platforms. These are mostly technical

improvements and standards, that few people oppose to. Finally youve gottools that go for good science, where good mostly implies reproducible,

transparent and fair. This is about reporting, acknowledgment, credit,

assessment and quality checks. They are all part of research governance,

which is the set of rules and norms created by (associations of)

universities, societies and publishers. So far, we see enormous amounts

of efficiency tools, a fair share of openness tools but only a handful of

tools that explicitly aim for reproducible or fair science.

Global survey

To investigate the choices researchers themselves make in this respect,

we are currently engaged in a global, multilingual surveyasking

researchers across all disciplines, career stages and countries for their

tool usage for 17 research activities in their workflow. Some 5,500

researchers worldwide have responded so far, and we hope to double that

number before the survey ends in February, 2016. The survey uses

self-selected non-probability sampling. The bias issues inherent to this

approach will be addressed with targeted distribution during the runtime of

the survey and afterwards with statistical operations. Some 60 institutions

across the globe have already partnered with us to distribute the survey

within their own organization using custom URLs, allowing us to share

institutionally tagged data with them.

We think the survey can become one of the largest multilingual surveys

into researcher practices. Insights from these data, which will be made

public in raw, anonymised form, will be valuable for libraries, research

support, funders, but also for researchers themselves. They also get

immediate preliminary feedback from the survey. For the six phases of the

research cycle, a radar chart shows whether someones tool usage is

more traditional or more innovative than the average of their peer group.

The reasons for and implications of changing tool usage are the next step

of our research, and will be the subject of follow-up in-depth studies with a

subset of respondents and with tool creators.

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Workflows and interoperability

For researchers it is important to know whether using a new tool will

reduce time needed to get desired results or even get results that were

hitherto impossible to get. Assessing this is not straightforward, because

the use of tools, platforms and websites is tied together over the entire

research cycle. Ideas, information, data, publications and assessment

move through this cycle and researchers need transitions from one tool or

platform to the other to be smooth. Interoperability of tools is key. In

addition, researchers actions and options are not isolated and individual,

but linked to the entire ecosystem of tools. Researchers like an eff icient

workflow, but big players are also taking a workflow/ecosystem view to

developing their portfolio of tools. That is the strategic reason for Elsevier

to buy and expand Mendeley and for SpringerNature to work with Digital

Science within Holtzbrinck. Alternatively you can envision Google and

Wikimedia scholarly ecosystems.

Towards a scholarly commons?

In order for science to proceed unhindered by (proprietary) company

ecosystems or the idiosyncrasies of individual researcher workflows, it is

increasingly important that we define a set of protocols, principles, APIs,

formats and IDs to enable any kind of research object to move freely

between researchers wanting to add, reuse, comment, and any action and

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November 11th, 2015 | Academic communication,Academic writing,

Essential 'how-to' Guides, Evidence-based Research, Resources, Social

Media | 10 Comments

actor to be defined and easily referenced. It is good to know that Force11,

the network of forward thinking people in scholarly communication, will

organise a number of workshopsnext year to imagine what exactly is

needed for a future with a scholarly commons.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of

the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of

Economics. Please review our Comments Policyif you have anyconcerns on posting a comment below.

About the Authors

Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramerwork at Utrecht University Library,

as geosciences librarian and librarian for biomedical sciences,

respectively. They are charting the changing landscape of scholarly

communication in their project Innovations in Scholarly Communication

and are members of the steering group of the Force11 Scholarly

Commons initiative. They can be found on Twitter as @jeroenbosmanand @MsPhelps.

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101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to gripwith the myriad of new tools | bluesyemre November 11, 2015 at 12:35 pm- Reply

[] in recent years. But how are researchers incorporating these tools

into their research workflows? Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer areconducting a global survey to investigate the choices researchers are

making []

101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to gripwith the myriad of new tools. | Veille juridique November 11, 2015 at 8:02 pm- Reply

[] Sourced through Scoop.it from: blogs.lse.ac.uk []

151112 Finds | Clyde Street November 12, 2015 at 3:22 am- Reply

[] 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication []

Heather doran November 12, 2015 at 9:03 am- Reply

This is really interesting. There are a lot more tools available for scholarly

communication. Its a more flexible approach where content can be shared

in different ways for new audiences. Its exciting too because it meansresearch doesnt need to be in a text form all the time.

I see you classified social media (Twitter) and blogging as outreach.

Many people do use these networks for those purposes but there is also a

significant amount of peer to peer sharing and discussion that takes place

on these too (possibly more than outreach)

innovations in scholarly communication | arfeuse November 12, 2015 at 2:25 pm-Reply

[] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101-

innovations-in-scholarly-communication/[]


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Leave A Comment

Open access & publishing | Copyright Toolkit November 18, 2015 at 8:37 pm- Reply

[] 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are

getting to grip with the myriad of n (J. Bosman & B. Kramer, 11

November 2015) nicely outlines the OA publication workflow as an

enriching, iterative process of discovery, analysis, writing (and/or

creation), publication, outreach, and assessment. []

Enqute sur les outils de communication scientifique -Bibliothqueinteruniversitaire de Sant Paris November 19, 2015 at 9:50 am- Reply

[] Billet de blog dtaillant le projet (en anglais) []

Surge of new scholarly communication tools November 19, 2015 at 10:37 am- Reply

[] blog article was originally published on The Impact Blog and is licensed

under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Minorgrammatical changes []

Impact of Social Sciences Standing on the shoulders of the Google giant: Is itdesirable that Google plays such an important role in the scholarly workflow?November 19, 2015 at 11:10 am- Reply

[] JSTOR was a close second, used by 85%, although it was used less

often. In a recent survey on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication,

a preliminary finding from the first 1,000 responses was that 92% used

Google Scholar. Here Web of []

Los investigadores incorporan cada vez ms herramientas para mejorar el impactode su investigacin | Universo Abierto November 25, 2015 at 9:50 am- Reply

[] Bosman and Bianca Kramer 101 Innovations in Scholarly

Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of

n []


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