aaas 2014: how the web changes collaboration

Social Tools for Serious Science

William Gunn, Ph.D.Head of Academic OutreachMendeley

@mrgunn

Enabling Collaboration in a Networked World

• The Web is transformative• Modern research requires collaboration

• Networks, not destinations

A historical perspective

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/photophilde/3553606749/

Change and Disruption

• The music industry was first• futile resistance• worst fears not confirmed• providing a product very many

people want is in fact quite sustainable

• The Web changed discovery and delivery

More Change and Disruption

• Blogging changed how we communicated

• Professional media organizations still exist

• A service that gives people what they want is a quite sustainable business model

• The Web changed engagement

Pochoda, Phil. "The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing." new media & society 15.3 (2013): 359-378.

Authors Publishers

Printers

Shippers

Booksellers

Readers

Pochoda, Phil. "The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing." new media & society 15.3 (2013): 359-378.

Authors Publishers

Printers

Shippers

Booksellers

Readers

1770

AuthorsReaders Internet

Social Networks

Opportunities for discoveryOpportunities for building relationships

Adams, Jonathan. "Collaborations: the fourth age of research." Nature 497.7451 (2013): 557-560.

King, Christopher (2012) Thomson Reuters Annual Reporthttp://ar.thomsonreuters.com/_files/pdf/MultiauthorPapers_ChrisKing.pdf

• The Web is being underutilized in research

• research increasingly requires more collaboration.

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/211239773/

From consumer to provider

• Can we bring tools and user experience from other parts of the web to scholarly communication?

• People expect to easily share and discover music and photos, why not academic papers?

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/psd/2731067095/

Leveraging the Web requires an open infrastructure

• HTML: open standard• TCP/IP: open standard• Wordpress: open source, open API• Twitter: open source, open API• Google Scholar: Not open• Facebook: Not open

Networks, not destinations

• Not a website for scientists• Scientists, on the web

...and aggregates research

data in the cloud

Mendeley extracts research data…

Install Mendeley Desktop

Collecting rich signals from domain experts.

Read papers + keep track of notes

470M documents

Connecting researchers

Search

ReadAnnotateOrganize

Write

Import

2.7M researchers

300K collaborative groups

New forms of discovery

• Mendeley Suggest– personalized recommendations based

on reading history• related articles

– relatedness based on document similarity

• recommender frameworks– implement recommendations as a

service• third-party recommender services

– serve niche audiences

We are publishing this data to the LOD cloud

http://code-research.eu/

What would people build if they could get the data?

• Impact Story – get credit for all your work

• PLOS ALM – article-level metrics for papers

• Plum Analytics – bespoke analytics for libraries

• Altmetric.com – altmetrics for publishers. (from Digital Science/NPG)

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2798315677

www.mendeley.com

william.gunn@mendeley.com@mrgunn