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101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How

researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of
new tools.
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There has been a surge of new scholarly

communication tools in recent years. But
how are researchers incorporating these
tools into their research workflows? Jeroen
Bosman and Bianca Kramer are
conducting a global survey to investigate the
choices researchers are making and why. Insights from these surveys
will be valuable for libraries, research support, funders, but also for
researchers themselves.
Are we witnessing a major overhaul of scholarly communication rules and
tools? In the last six months alone, this blog has featured posts on all
phases of the research cycle. From Wikipedia (discovery) to replication
(analysis), Chrome extensions for reference management (writing), the
Open Library of Humanities and RIO Journal (publishing), Twitter &
blogging (outreach), altmetrics, R-index and Publons (peer review and
assessment). How to get on grip on the myriad of new tools and
standards? Should researchers drop everything they always took for
granted? Will switching to open tools make research workflows more
efficient? And should that be the goal anyway? Our current research may
help researchers and other stakeholders understand what is going on.

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Avalanche of tools
Almost half of the tools in our database of scholarly communication tools
were created since 2013. The rate at which new tools appear to a certain
degree reflects the relative ease with which one can create online tools.
On the other hand tool creators apparently deem it important to build a tool
that supports a new way of working, or that repairs faults and omissions in
existing tools offered by the major players (be it publishers, tech
companies or venerable societies). The push for new tools comes from
funders (e.g. demanding data archiving of Open Access) but also from
researchers themselves that want to capitalize on the possibilities of the
internet in collaborating. Especially for experimenting / collecting / mining
data, writing, journal selection, publishing and outreach we witness a surge
of new tools.

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Simple model
We use a simple model to get a grip on this abundance and variety of
tools. The G-E-O model looks at whether the tool makes science Good,

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Efficient or Open. Tools that make science more open are for instance
those facilitating open access, open data, open peer review or even open
drafting. Also many outreach tools contribute to openness. For many tools
that work towards openness there are barriers such as copyright and the
business models of the big publishers. Tools that make science efficient
are mostly working on standardization (such as DOI or ORCID),
interoperability and well connected platforms. These are mostly technical
improvements and standards, that few people oppose to. Finally youve got
tools that go for good science, where good mostly implies reproducible,
transparent and fair. This is about reporting, acknowledgment, credit,
assessment and quality checks. They are all part of research governance,
which is the set of rules and norms created by (associations of)
universities, societies and publishers. So far, we see enormous amounts
of efficiency tools, a fair share of openness tools but only a handful of
tools that explicitly aim for reproducible or fair science.

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To investigate the choices researchers themselves make in this respect,

we are currently engaged in a global, multilingual survey asking
researchers across all disciplines, career stages and countries for their
tool usage for 17 research activities in their workflow. Some 5,500
researchers worldwide have responded so far, and we hope to double that
number before the survey ends in February, 2016. The survey uses
self-selected non-probability sampling. The bias issues inherent to this
approach will be addressed with targeted distribution during the runtime of
the survey and afterwards with statistical operations. Some 60 institutions
across the globe have already partnered with us to distribute the survey
within their own organization using custom URLs, allowing us to share
institutionally tagged data with them.

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We think the survey can become one of the largest multilingual surveys
into researcher practices. Insights from these data, which will be made
public in raw, anonymised form, will be valuable for libraries, research
support, funders, but also for researchers themselves. They also get
immediate preliminary feedback from the survey. For the six phases of the
research cycle, a radar chart shows whether someones tool usage is
more traditional or more innovative than the average of their peer group.
The reasons for and implications of changing tool usage are the next step
of our research, and will be the subject of follow-up in-depth studies with a
subset of respondents and with tool creators.

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Workflows and interoperability
For researchers it is important to know whether using a new tool will
reduce time needed to get desired results or even get results that were
hitherto impossible to get. Assessing this is not straightforward, because
the use of tools, platforms and websites is tied together over the entire
research cycle. Ideas, information, data, publications and assessment
move through this cycle and researchers need transitions from one tool or
platform to the other to be smooth. Interoperability of tools is key. In
addition, researchers actions and options are not isolated and individual,
but linked to the entire ecosystem of tools. Researchers like an efficient
workflow, but big players are also taking a workflow/ecosystem view to
developing their portfolio of tools. That is the strategic reason for Elsevier
to buy and expand Mendeley and for SpringerNature to work with Digital
Science within Holtzbrinck. Alternatively you can envision Google and
Wikimedia scholarly ecosystems.

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Towards a scholarly commons?

In order for science to proceed unhindered by (proprietary) company
ecosystems or the idiosyncrasies of individual researcher workflows, it is
increasingly important that we define a set of protocols, principles, APIs,
formats and IDs to enable any kind of research object to move freely
between researchers wanting to add, reuse, comment, and any action and

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actor to be defined and easily referenced. It is good to know that Force11,

the network of forward thinking people in scholarly communication, will
organise a number of workshops next year to imagine what exactly is
needed for a future with a scholarly commons.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of
the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of
Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any
concerns on posting a comment below.
About the Authors
Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer work at Utrecht University Library,
as geosciences librarian and librarian for biomedical sciences,
respectively. They are charting the changing landscape of scholarly
communication in their project Innovations in Scholarly Communication
and are members of the steering group of the Force11 Scholarly
Commons initiative. They can be found on Twitter as @jeroenbosman
and @MsPhelps.

443

174

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November 11th, 2015 | Academic communication, Academic writing,

Essential 'how-to' Guides, Evidence-based Research, Resources, Social
Media | 10 Comments

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10 Comments
101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip
with the myriad of new tools | bluesyemre November 11, 2015 at 12:35 pm - Reply

[] in recent years. But how are researchers incorporating these tools

into their research workflows? Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer are
conducting a global survey to investigate the choices researchers are
making []

101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip

with the myriad of new tools. | Veille juridique November 11, 2015 at 8:02 pm - Reply

[] Sourced through Scoop.it from: blogs.lse.ac.uk []

151112 Finds | Clyde Street November 12, 2015 at 3:22 am - Reply

[] 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication []

Heather doran November 12, 2015 at 9:03 am - Reply

This is really interesting. There are a lot more tools available for scholarly
communication. Its a more flexible approach where content can be shared
in different ways for new audiences. Its exciting too because it means
research doesnt need to be in a text form all the time.
I see you classified social media (Twitter) and blogging as outreach.
Many people do use these networks for those purposes but there is also a
significant amount of peer to peer sharing and discussion that takes place
on these too (possibly more than outreach)

innovations in scholarly communication | arfeuse November 12, 2015 at 2:25 pm Reply

[] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101innovations-in-scholarly-communication/ []

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Open access & publishing | Copyright Toolkit November 18, 2015 at 8:37 pm - Reply

[] 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are

getting to grip with the myriad of n (J. Bosman & B. Kramer, 11
November 2015) nicely outlines the OA publication workflow as an
enriching, iterative process of discovery, analysis, writing (and/or
creation), publication, outreach, and assessment. []

Enqute sur les outils de communication scientifique -Bibliothque

interuniversitaire de Sant Paris November 19, 2015 at 9:50 am - Reply

[] Billet de blog dtaillant le projet (en anglais) []

Surge of new scholarly communication tools November 19, 2015 at 10:37 am - Reply

[] blog article was originally published on The Impact Blog and is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Minor
grammatical changes []

Impact of Social Sciences Standing on the shoulders of the Google giant: Is it

desirable that Google plays such an important role in the scholarly workflow?
November 19, 2015 at 11:10 am - Reply

[] JSTOR was a close second, used by 85%, although it was used less
often. In a recent survey on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication,
a preliminary finding from the first 1,000 responses was that 92% used
Google Scholar. Here Web of []

Los investigadores incorporan cada vez ms herramientas para mejorar el impacto

de su investigacin | Universo Abierto November 25, 2015 at 9:50 am - Reply

[] Bosman and Bianca Kramer 101 Innovations in Scholarly

Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of
n []

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