Article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks | Library Connect

" ... Social media added ease and convenience of sharing information among a group of 'friends.' SCNs went a step further offering both convenience and more structured options to share with colleagues and potential new collaborators interested in the article’s subject matter.   SCNs first appeared early in the web era, and their popularity has grown enormously in the last few years. The best known networks are very successful start-ups in terms of the number of users: ResearchGate (6 million members) and Academia.edu (30 million monthly visitors), and Mendeley (5 million members), now owned by Elsevier. These networks solicit researchers to establish collaboration networks and give users capabilities to upload versions of their articles to be shared with user-defined collaboration groups and, in some cases, members of the public.   Given the growing popularity and utility of SCNs, the scholarly publication community needs to support this new venture — but in a way that allows the practice to evolve as a useful tool without undue harm to the enterprise that published the article. Given that the business of scholarly publishing is still dominated by the subscription model, if all publications are made instantly available to anyone on the day of publication, subscription income and the means of sustaining the value of the scholarly publishing enterprise would be at risk. When a majority of the publishing business moves to an author-paid, open access model, this becomes less of a concern. But in my view, this transition will continue incrementally as it has done for the last 10 years, and for certain fields (the humanities, for example) it may never be a viable model ... For the last year and half, I have had the honor of chairing a working group assembled by the International Association of STM Publishers to help establish some general guidelines for the use of such networks by all parties. In February 2015, the working group posted a draft of voluntary principles for article sharing on SCNs and related FAQs concerning the use of these networks. We asked the wider research community to consider the draft principles available on the STM website and actively sought commentary over a two-month consultation period that concluded in April 2015 ..."