From the abstract:

This article addresses the role of digital libraries in knowledge infrastructures for science, presenting evidence from long-term studies of four research sites. Findings are based on interviews (n=208), ethnographic fieldwork, document analysis, and historical archival research about scientific data practices, conducted over the course of more than a decade.

This is kind of the key point in this piece: reputation matters hugely to scientists, but only with regards to the number of papers you publish (which is why people steal authorship) or (in the best case) how good the research is. However, we don’t care whether a scientist has a reputation for being honest or rigorous because it gets you nowhere in the current model of academia. And yet honesty and rigour is what science is all about.

The interdisciplinary research alliance awarded prices for the most innovative projects in the Digital Humanities. This year’s winner is Stefan Dumont with his project correspSearch.

A massive citizen science project, involving more than 850,000 volunteers, has expanded its reach to include projects across the entire UK.

A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results – an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication.

This paper makes the strong, fact-based case for a large-scale transformation of the current corpus of scientific subscription journals to an open access business model. The existing journals, with their well-tested functionalities, should be retained and developed to meet the demands of 21st century research, while the underlying payment streams undergo a major restructuring.

In 2013, when Victor Henning announced that his six-year-old startup Mendeley would be acquired by one of the world’s biggest media companies, he knew there would be blowback. He just couldn’t have anticipated how bad it would get.

“Seeing that some of our most vocal advocates thought we had sold them out felt awful,” Henning said recently over a tea in Amsterdam, where Elsevier, Mendeley’s parent company, is headquartered.

Launched in 2007 by Henning and two friends at graduate school, Mendeley built an unlikely but very useful piece of software—think a variation on Evernote combined with Facebook—aimed at helping researchers organize their papers, annotate them, and share them with each other.

The first conclusion I want to share with you is that I do not understand why there are so many papers about open access being hidden behind paywalls.

We cordially invite you to submit your research projects on one of the following topics:


1. Research and knowledge in a digital age

2. Internet and public governance

3. Interdisciplinary research on information privacy, surveillance, and data protection

4. Algorithmic governance

5. Digital communication and value creation b etween companies and the crowd

Please feel invited to submit theoretical, practical or experimental research work.

For more information see: HIIG – Call for Papers

Developing and implementing a robust solution to Research Data Management needs to draw upon policies, processes and resources and must be relevant to disciplinary requirements with as few barriers as possible for researchers. Rachel Bruce reflects on the skillset required to improve long-term research management strategies. As each university grapples with this landscape, a shift towards shared services and infrastructure may be the next step needed.

The Internet offers fundamentally new premises for how knowledge is created and disseminated. Research in particular is facing massive changes in the way it produces and conveys knowledge. Scientific blogs allow communicating at a faster pace, data sharing platforms enable collaboration at an intermediate stage in the research process, and new models of participation, as for example citizen science, allow volunteers to take part in the discovery process. In this stream we welcome entries from areas such as communication science, information science, economics, and science and technology studies that cover changes and emerging practices in scholarly communication, research collaboration and access to scholarly output. We also welcome entries from related fields that cover changes in knowledge creation and dissemination.

At this year’s SXSW Interactive, we had an opportunity to talk with [Charles Fracchia], a renaissance hacker at the MIT Media Lab. Reinforcing the Media Lab’s “eclectic genius” stereotype, [Charles]’s background spans an impressive range of fields—from Synthetic Biology to Biomedical Engineering and beyond. A biologist by training, he is also a self-taught hardware hacker and, these days, is spending most of his time building “hybrid” systems at the intersection of Biology, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. True to the hacker spirit of open collaboration and sharing, he is also a big proponent of Open Science and is committed to making it a reality in the field of Biomedical Research.

Citizen science describes research activities (e.g., data collection) that are conducted by people who are not professional scientists. Thanks to the internet, citizen science has gained a new dimension: digital technologies offer possibilities to reach out to volunteer researchers, to pool together efforts and to make the results visible. Moreover, the collective power of the crowd provides scientists with data that they could not have collected on their own. Integrating citizens into research projects is apparently a valuable strategy for scientists. Motivating volunteers to invest time in citizen science projects appears challenging.

Researchers all want to contribute to the global pot of knowledge, that’s why we do what we do. Let us return to and embrace this principle of open research, and make our data open – who knows what might be achieved, and who knows what might be lost by restricting access to it.


Jon Tennant

Data sharing has the potential to facilitate wider collaboration and foster scientific progress. But while 88% of researchers in a recent study confirmed they would like to use shared data, only 13% had actually made their own data publicly available.

ResearchGate a social networking site for researchers, is perhaps making the biggest splash in linking research and our evolving social context. Utilized by over six million researchers, ResearchGate just released their new RG Format in mid-February which creates real-time social dialogue within the research document. By using two columns of information display, comments, concerns, or related citations and graphs are always in sync with the information retrieved. This makes for a more streamlined information transfer, and one that elaborates on the author’s views by harnessing knowledge by the collective crowd.

Internet-enabled forms of scientific collaboration, popularly referred to as open science, have not automatically translated into innovation. We must adapt by inventing new types of institutions, says Henry Chesbrough, father of open innovation.