Background

The term “scholarly communication” describes the process of sharing and publishing research works and outcomes (Borgman and Furner, 2002). Through scholarly communication this is available to a wider academic community and beyond (Halliday, 2001). The scholarly communication process can be divided into three main stages: the communication in informal networks like social media, the initial public dissemination in conferences and preprints, and the formal publication of research in scientific journals (Graham, 2000).

  Web2.0 was the technological innovation-based applications and also the application-oriented technological innovation. The main manifestations are: personal publication and information integration, such as Blog, RSS; community collaboration, such as the Wiki; user-dominant participation, such as Tag, SNS, Social Bookmark; the better user experience, such as Ajax. It helped to apply the kinds of resources.

The social and interactive web brings additional challenges as well as possible advantages for scholarly communication. With the establishment of the new kind of network society (Dahlgren, 2005; Katz et al., 2001), researchers meet an evolution in scholarly communication, requiring more knowledge from all kinds of communication processes, even when they work alone (Thorin, 2006).

  Blog as one of the communicating platform affects scholarly communication. Blog is a self-publishing tool that was similar to online journals where an owner could publish messages. Readers could subscribe, link, share links, comment in an interactive mode and indicate their social relationship to other bloggers who read the particular blog. Blog provides function for users with blog space and help users form user communities (Li, 2007). Blog supports individuals to create their information as a kind of online diary, to form an archive, to converse with like-minded persons, and to form a democratic discussion (Godwin, 2007).

This project is an exploratory study focusing on whether the information practices in scientific blog affect the modes of scholarly communication. In this study the basic concept “Scholarly communication” is deliberately limited to a particular group of people, and a particular kind of goal-oriented activity. Therefore, I have chosen the biggest online forum among Chinese scientists 'ScienceNet.cn' (http://www.sciencenet.cn/) to open a personal blog. In this blog, I have practiced of posting small pieces of text, pictures, links, short videos related to our current course 'the Social Web'. The aim of these blog posts is to offer a new mode of scholarly communication and share useful resources with others of similar interests. In addition, I also wish to find new possibilities for this type of communication to brainstorm my current ideas, leading to novel discoveries and philosophies in this research field. Therefore, I am expecting comments from other scientists for further discussions.

Scientific blog is the platform also in the environment of social media which is built on Web 2.0 technologies. In this mini-project, “blog-readers” strictly refer to people directly engaged in the scientific community. This study is trying to gain some insights into changes of scholarly communication for researchers in the context of social web.

From my personal practice, researchers seem to be more interested in consuming social media rather than producing their own items online (from my personal observation of the blog events: much less comments than reading clicks). In addition, although some online information is regarded as novel and interesting, the validity and credibility of this information is worry-some due to no scientific checkup system. For instance, the references in the blog entries are not necessarily logic and related to the content in the posts, which could mislead the readers to some extent. Another concern is that bloggers can reserve part of the critical information for themselves and would like to get more important data from others, making the information flow incomplete and unequal. Finally, bloggers have to sacrifice time and energy to dig into reference materials and reply to readers' comments, and therefore certain motivation and dedication are required in this practice.

In summary, content, form, efficiency, speed, and amount of scientific information have grown rapidly in social web but the essence of communication has not changed. The emergence and growth of Blog gives the ability to build new ways of communication with new features: interactions, virtualization, multi-dimension, acuteness, and variety. Bloggers with good quality do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers. It also brings many challenges and problems, for example misinformation, insignificance information, and the copyright of information.

Reference:

Borgman, C. L., and Furner, J. (2002). Scholarly communication and bibliometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 36, 2-72.

Dahlgren, P. (2005). The Internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation. Polit Commun 22, 147-162.

Godwin, P. (2007). The Web 2.0 challenge to information literacy.

Graham, T. W. (2000). Scholarly Communication. Serials 13, 3-11.

Halliday, L. (2001). Scholarly communication, scholarly publication and the status of emerging formats. Paper presented at: Information Research.

Katz, J. E., Rice, R. E., and Aspden, P. (2001). The Internet, 1995-2000 - Access, civic involvement, and social interaction. Am Behav Sci 45, 405-419.

Li, R. (2007). the Comparison of the modes of information communication of Blog and Wiki. Researchs in Library Science, 19-22.

Thorin, S. E. (2006). Global changes in scholarly communication Springer Netherlands).

Yan, E., Ding, Y., and Sugimoto, C. R. (2011). P-Rank: An Indicator Measuring Prestige in Heterogeneous Scholarly Networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, 467-477.