Social Media and Open Science

A special issue of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2018) | Viewed by 26366

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Trademetrics Research Group, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
Interests: webmetrics; altmetrics; research evaluation; measure models; web indicators design; social network analysis

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Guest Editor
Research Unit for the Sociology of Education, University of Turku, Finland
Interests: open science; social media; scholarly communication; altmetrics; social network analysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Open Science is the idea of openly sharing scientific knowledge as early as possible in the discovery process. Social media enable users to create and share content with a worldwide audience, thus also providing a platform for researchers to openly share scientific knowledge to their peers and to audiences beyond academia. Social media is changing scholarly communication by enabling rapid dissemination of scientific ideas and discoveries and allowing a broader audience to participate in scholarly communication and even in the research process. On the other hand, monitoring how scientific knowledge is being shared and consumed online can also provide a broader understanding of the impact or influence that science has had on the society (e.g., what research is being shared and discussed online, how often, by whom, and in what context). Understanding where and how one’s research is being discussed and seeing how it may have had some influence could be incentivizing for researchers to share their ideas and research outputs more openly. Social media may thus have the power to push for a more rapid adoption of open science. However, there are many unanswered questions about the connection between social media and open science; how is social media changing scholarly communication, how could social media be advancing open science, how could monitoring online events around scientific outputs contribute to a broader understanding of the impact research has had on the society?

We welcome a variety of submissions that will examine these questions and others related to the connection between social media and open science. Topics of interest include various combinations of the listed keywords below.

Dr. Enrique Orduña Malea
Dr. Kim Holmberg
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Publications is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • social media and open science
  • social media and changing scholarly communication
  • social media advancing open science
  • altmetrics and open science

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 1184 KiB  
Article
Opening and Reusing Transparent Peer Reviews with Automatic Article Annotation
by Afshin Sadeghi, Sarven Capadisli, Johannes Wilm, Christoph Lange and Philipp Mayr
Publications 2019, 7(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010013 - 03 Feb 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 5544
Abstract
An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final [...] Read more.
An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these. Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers, and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed. This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews. While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce. We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of interest. The fine-grained article structure is not only exposed to authors and reviewers but also preserved in the published version. We publish articles and their reviews in a Linked Data representation and thus maximise their reusability by third party applications. We demonstrate this reusability by running quality-related queries against the structured representation of articles and their reviews. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Social Media and Open Science)
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22 pages, 3829 KiB  
Article
Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media
by Núria Bautista-Puig, Daniela De Filippo, Elba Mauleón and Elías Sanz-Casado
Publications 2019, 7(1), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010012 - 01 Feb 2019
Cited by 33 | Viewed by 8131
Abstract
Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence. It is both an aim and [...] Read more.
Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence. It is both an aim and an enabler of open science (OS), to which it contributes by involving citizens in research and encouraging participation in the generation of new knowledge. This study analyses scientific output on CS using bibliometric techniques and Web of Science (WoS) data. Co-occurrence maps are formulated to define subject clusters as background for an analysis of the impact of each on social media. Four clusters are identified: HEALTH, BIO, GEO and PUBLIC. The profiles for the four clusters are observed to be fairly similar, although BIO and HEALTH are mentioned more frequently in blogposts and tweets and BIO and PUBLIC in Facebook and newsfeeds. The findings also show that output in the area has grown since 2010, with a larger proportion of papers (66%) mentioned in social media than reported in other studies. The percentage of open access documents (30.7%) is likewise higher than the overall mean for all areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Social Media and Open Science)
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9 pages, 187 KiB  
Article
Citizen-Scholars: Social Media and the Changing Nature of Scholarship
by Amy L. Chapman and Christine Greenhow
Publications 2019, 7(1), 11; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010011 - 01 Feb 2019
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 6297
Abstract
Research is rarely created for private use; researchers publish their work so that others can read and use it, to advance the collective understanding of a field and impact people’s lives. Yet traditional approaches to scholarship, which emphasize publication in subscription-based rather than [...] Read more.
Research is rarely created for private use; researchers publish their work so that others can read and use it, to advance the collective understanding of a field and impact people’s lives. Yet traditional approaches to scholarship, which emphasize publication in subscription-based rather than open access journals, inhibit not only the dissemination of research but also its usefulness, particularly outside of academia. Across all fields, scholars, educators, and members of the public benefit from scholarship which is easily accessible. Open science and public, social scholarship can break down these barriers to accessibility and utility. In this age which calls for a more informed citizenry, the use of social media to share and promote discussion of research could change not only the nature of scholarly communication but also the nature of scholarship and scholars’ roles. In this conceptual article, we argue that practicing public, social scholarship and increasing the use of social media to promote scholarship are the civic responsibility of citizen-scholars, so that research becomes more widely accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Social Media and Open Science)
17 pages, 893 KiB  
Article
Is There a Social Life in Open Data? The Case of Open Data Practices in Educational Technology Research
by Juliana E. Raffaghelli and Stefania Manca
Publications 2019, 7(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010009 - 28 Jan 2019
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5249
Abstract
In the landscape of Open Science, Open Data (OD) plays a crucial role as data are one of the most basic components of research, despite their diverse formats across scientific disciplines. Opening up data is a recent concern for policy makers and researchers, [...] Read more.
In the landscape of Open Science, Open Data (OD) plays a crucial role as data are one of the most basic components of research, despite their diverse formats across scientific disciplines. Opening up data is a recent concern for policy makers and researchers, as the basis for good Open Science practices. The common factor underlying these new practices—the relevance of promoting Open Data circulation and reuse—is mostly a social form of knowledge sharing and construction. However, while data sharing is being strongly promoted by policy making and is becoming a frequent practice in some disciplinary fields, Open Data sharing is much less developed in Social Sciences and in educational research. In this study, practices of OD publication and sharing in the field of Educational Technology are explored. The aim is to investigate Open Data sharing in a selection of Open Data repositories, as well as in the academic social network site ResearchGate. The 23 Open Datasets selected across five OD platforms were analysed in terms of (a) the metrics offered by the platforms and the affordances for social activity; (b) the type of OD published; (c) the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) data principles compliance; and (d) the extent of presence and related social activity on ResearchGate. The results show a very low social activity in the platforms and very few correspondences in ResearchGate that highlight a limited social life surrounding Open Datasets. Future research perspectives as well as limitations of the study are interpreted in the discussion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Social Media and Open Science)
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