Scholarly Communication on the Academic Social Web (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services)

Collaboration among scholars has always been recognized as a fundamental feature in scientific discovery. The ever-increasing diversity among disciplines and complexity of research problems make it more impelling to collaborate in order to keep up with the fast pace of innovation and advance knowledge. Along with the rapidly developing Internet communication technologies and the increasing popularity of social web, we have observed many important developments of scholarly collaboration on the academic social web. In this lecture, we review the rapid transformation of scholarly collaboration on various academic social web platforms, and examine how these platforms have facilitated academics throughout their research life cycle- from forming ideas, collecting data, authoring articles to disseminating findings. We refer to the term academic social web platforms in this lecture as a category of Web 2.0 tools or online platforms (such as CiteULike, Mendeley, academia.edu, and ResearchGate) that enable and facilitate scholarly information exchange and participation. We will also examine scholars' collaboration behaviors include sharing academic resources, exchanging opinions, following each other's research, keeping up with current research trends, and most importantly, building up their professional networks. Inspired by the model developed by G. Olson, Olson, and Venolia (2000) on factors for successful scientific collaboration, our examination of the status of scholarly collaboration on academic social web has four emphases: technology readiness, coupling work, building common ground, and collaboration readiness. Finally, we will talk about the insights and challenges of all these online scholarly collaboration activities imposed to the research communities who are engaging in supporting online scholarly collaboration. This lecture aims to help researchers and practitioners to understand the development of scholarly collaboration on academic social web, and to build up an active community of scholars who are interested in this topic.