Updated Figures on the Scale and Nature of Researchers’ Use of Scholarly Collaboration Networks - The Scholarly Kitchen

"My last post was about institutional conservatism in relation to research evaluation and reward. I illustrated it with a brick wall bearing the words 'insert head here' because so many wicked problems in scholarly communications today can be traced back to this underlying cause, and its immutability is therefore so frustrating to those trying to tackle its symptoms.

One of the many symptoms is that publishers and researchers are inextricably linked, mutually dependent, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Evaluation processes — even those that are evolving away from simplistic publication counts or Impact Factor-based points systems — still mean that publication in an established journal is important for researchers, much as quality submissions are important for publishers. It is into this stasis that 'scholarly collaboration networks' (SCNs) have emerged, originally as places for researchers to form connections (à la LinkedIn) but increasingly used for 'content swapping' and / or 'quasi-legal downloading of research papers'.

Quite what SCNs are used for, and by whom, and what threats / opportunities they represent, has been a topic of conversation both on and off the agenda at pretty much every meeting I’ve attended recently. It is a commonly held belief that SCNs have become more focused on content sharing than on other kinds of collaboration between researchers, but evidence to support this assertion has been limited. José Luis Ortega’s interpretation of over 1 million records from scholarly collaboration networks was that SCNs are being used not, primarily, for collaboration, but for posting and accessing work; however, the most recent large scale survey, Nature’s 2014 study of 'online collaboration: scientists and the social network', showed only 35% of ResearchGate users (for example) selecting 'post content' as one of the activities carried out on the site, with 33% using it to discover content — whereas 68% were on the site for a much more passive purpose, 'in case contacted'."