charleston 2013: the social side of research
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The Social Side of Research
William Gunn, Ph.D. Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley
@mrgunn
Three perspectives on scholarly communication
•Early career researchers
•Librarians
•Web technology
Social Networks
Opportunities for discovery
Opportunities for building relationships
A historical perspective
• I grew up with the internet
• Chatting over ICQ and Usenet with people anywhere
• Reaching beyond my local environment
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/photophilde/3553606749/
Change and Disruption
• The music industry was first
• futile resistance
• worst fears not confirmed
• providing a project very many people want is in fact quite sustainable
• IF you don’t try to control how they use it.
More Change and Disruption
• Blogging changed how we communicated
– but not as drastically as some predicted
• business models shifted
• A service that gives people what they want is a quite sustainable business model
• IF you don’t try to control the channel through which they receive it.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/5444504633/
Watching the ship sail away
After all this, scholarly publishers were still debating:
– Should we put our work online?
– Should we allow search engines to index us?
– Should we use DRM on PDFs?
– Should we dictate both how content is used and the channel through which they receive it?
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/bea_k63w-wa/2692575219/
Librarian
• We never went into the library
• We did use library services all the time
• I initially blamed the library for my frustrations with scholarly communication
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/emdot/1126963383/
Librarian
• How wrong I was!
–big deals, monopolies, hands tied
• Library technology is empowered by Open Access
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/trucolorsfly/611479605/
From consumer to provider
• Mendeley was neither from libraries nor from publishers.
• Bringing tools and user experience from other parts of the web to scholarly communication.
• People expected to easily share and discover music and photos, why not academic papers?
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/psd/2731067095/
Building an open infrastructure
• Web native tools expect that data has no strings attached.
• Mendeley had to create an open sharing platform to deliver the experience we wanted.
• A free desktop manager got us on desktops around the world.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/211239773/
Instrumenting the Research Workflow
Search
Read Annotate Organize
Write
Import
Instrumenting the research workflow
• 2.6 Million users
• 470 M documents
• 4-700K uploads per day
• 90% coverage of Pubmed
–Long tail
• Accessible alternative to citations
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
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
Becoming embedded in the research workflow
