ABSTRACT

Social media have been hailed as a significant opportunity for scholarly communications, offering researchers new and effective ways to discover and share knowledge. Tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and Facebook, as well as their underpinning principles such as crowdsourcing and the value of enhanced or networked data, have all been explored to varying extents by academics, librarians and publishers in their attempts to improve the efficiency of scholarly communications and to reach new or wider audiences. This chapter examines such use of social media and suggests that all of these groups use social media only where it mimics or reinforces their existing behaviours. For the most part, they adopt those elements of social media that make tasks easier or more efficient, but reshape tools or the way in which they are used in order to avoid challenging traditional cornerstones of scholarly communications, such as journal articles and peer review.

Introduction

Facebook was founded in 2004: by January 2009 it had 175 million active users; and by December 2011 it had 845 million – around 12% of the world's population. Twitter was launched in July 2006 and signed up its 100 millionth active user in September 2011. In September 2010, the five billionth photograph was added to Flickr's searchable database; the Tate group of four art galleries has a collection of just 65,000 works of art.4

These statistics show how social media have rapidly become a routine part of many people's personal and professional lives. This chapter explores how these new tools, and the behaviours that underpin their use, are being adopted within scholarly communications, and whether they are changing the way in which researchers and others share information and knowledge.

The social media landscape

Social media tools and technologies build upon the principles and practices of Web 2.0. These stress the move from static, proprietary systems to applications which ‘get better the more people use them’.5Web 2.0 focuses on tools which treat the user as a co-developer and on business models which seek to generate revenue not from sales of a product but from services or enhanced data.