Scholarly communication’s only going to get better. Here’s how. | Altmetric.com

" ... Quite simply, scholarly communication has gotten greater: that is, it’s seeing greater openness, diversity, and engagement ... Increasingly, authors are choosing to publish their articles in Open Access journals, as well as in traditional journals that offer an Open Access publication option (also known as ‘hybrid OA’ publishing). One author survey even found that, in a single year, the number of researchers who published their work Open Access nearly doubled! Journals are making the move to OA, as well. More and more traditional, 'toll access' publications areexperimenting with hybrid OA options, allowing authors to pay a fee to make their article open access in journals that would otherwise require a subscription in order to read. And 254 new titles were added to the Directory of Open Access Journals in the first quarter of 2015 alone. This move is, in part, due to a number of funding agencies recently enacting 'public access' mandates in the United States, UK, and elsewhere in the world ... Another sea change in scholarship comes in the form of diversity: namely, the increased diversity of research outputs (in particular, software and data) that are recognized as important as (and distinct from) journal articles and books. We’ve also seen calls to recognize the diverse “flavors of impact” that research can have, beyond what’s traditionally thought of as meaningful (lots of citations for work published in high impact journals or books published with prestigious university presses). Research software has seen a boost in importance from the 'code as research object' project, which allows programmers to archive their open source software on sites like Zenodo and Figshare, which then issue a DOI for the code (thereby making it possible for other scholars to more easily cite it). And research data has seen many similar initiatives (including DataCite, RDA’s work on data citation, and PLOS’s work on altmetrics for data) ... Engagement is another important area in which scholarship has changed recently, particularly in the areas of engagement with members of the public and with other scholars, including those from other disciplines.  Researchers and their universities are increasingly looking to social media for opportunities for one-on-one engagement with members of the public, whether to broaden the public’s understanding of complex scienceor to share research with the community.  Scholars are also turning to social media daily to engage with each other. Nearly 50% of respondents to a recent Nature survey said they use Twitter to follow discussions related to research, and sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate are popular venues to share one’s papers with peers. Recent studies even found that the number of scholars active on Twitter has risen from 1 in 40 in 2011 to nearly 1 in 3 in 2014 ..."