New Directions in Scholarly Communication

William Gunn

Head of Academic Outreach

Mendeley

@mrgunn

The internet was designed for scholarly communication!

The purpose of ARPAnet was to share data and computing resources.

usenet and mailing lists were the pre-web networks

Why do people use the web?

• Connecting with a broad audience

• Sharing & discovering pictures, music, video, links, datasets, or just thoughts with a broad audience.

Why not just email?

If you know the expert, you can ask them directly, but if everyone does that it doesn’t work.

In exchange for being open enough to ask publicly, you’re more likely to get a response.

A few examples Stack Exchange

Asking in public is different!

Questions lead to answers lead to more questions

The design of the site made it a success.

Now people use it to show off expertise & even to hire.

Link sharing – Delicious

Like bookmarks, but online, which meant:

Accessible from anywhere

Part of a communal pool of links, which allowed you to go from your collection, to other collections

Sharing in public is different!

People + shared interest = community

Not a community of professional link curators, but people interested in things represented by links.

Twitter

Started as easier way to send multi-recipient text messages

Community grew with the development of the #hashtag, a mechanism invented by twitter users to group tweets about a certain topic – instagram does the same with pictures

Cargo-cult Networks

Social networks?

What fundamental activity do they make so compellingly easy it's worth having another inbox?

Why like, share, or connect instead of reply?

They're personalized content filters

Social interactions arise as a consequence of sharing & discovering on the platform

Research documents

Mendeley

Sharing and discovering PDFs

Not a site for publishers or librarians, but people who have expertise or interest in research topics.

Connecting Scholars in the Cloud

• Research is a social activity, but the tools and the data aren’t.

• Databases have funky proprietary interfaces and incompatible licenses which inhibit discovery

• Capture the latent info in their process!

...and aggregates research data in the cloud

Mendeley extracts research data…

Mendeley is not just a reference manager!

Install Mendeley Desktop

Collecting rich signals from domain experts.

Rich user profile data

Mendeley is leading by example

• Open Access – we show the importance of open access to scholars, publishers, and funders.

• Altmetrics – we’re a leading provider of altmetrics

• Reproducibility – We are working with the Center for Open Science to improve reproducibility in science via the Reproducibility Initiative.

Make it porous & part of the web.

The reason people to put data on the web is to find more of the same.

Communities must be open if they are to thrive.

New data on research impact

Get better data on what's working

Get it faster

Serve all the stakeholders in research

Building a reproducibility dataset

• Mendeley and Science Exchange have started the Reproducibility Initiative

• working with Figshare & PLOS to host data & replication reports

• building open datasets backing high-impact work

• extending the “executable paper” concept to biomedical research

Research is too slow

Google Analytics for research

We’re in this for the long haul

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertjosiah/4519389115

http://www.flickr.com/photos/delfo/153254882/

Personalized Impact

www.mendeley.com

william.gunn@mendeley.com @mrgunn