‘Scholarly Networking’ and ‘Open Access’ – Are we asking the right questions?

"Do we need “a Craigslist for the humanities” or a “Facebook for scholars”? Such questions are being discussed on the website of Project Bamboo – a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary project that brings humanities scholars, librarians, and information technologists together to tackle the question: “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?” The project wiki contains a summary of workshop findings from 2008 entitled ‘What do scholars mean by ‘scholarly networking’?’....At first glance, ‘scholarly networking’ appears peripheral to the moral imperatives of the OA movement...[But] Crowd-sourced academic resources, citation management and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platforms such as Mendeley and Academia.edu demonstrate the appeal of the networked scholarly space and promise new terrain in scholarly communications...."