Twitter for Scientists: an Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come?

an article by Paul Basken published in The Chronicle of Higher Education with grateful thanks to ResearchBuzz Firehose

Tweeting has long posed a dilemma for scientists.

There’s abundant evidence that widely sharing a research finding in just one or two simple sentences greatly increases its use and effectiveness.

But, ugh, that usually means Twitter – in the eyes of many, a low-attention-span cesspool of trolls, political partisans, and amateur comedians known more for braggadocio and snark than reason and facts.

Now, with federal backing, there’s another option.

Known as Polyplexus, meaning “a network of many”, it’s a compilation of 300-character summaries of research findings, created with the idea of driving crossfield discoveries and spawning public and private funding for follow-up studies.

Unlike Twitter, it’s meant to be “a professional environment for research-and-development professionals”, said a Polyplexus developer, John A. Main, a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.

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Is free inevitable in scholarly communication? The economics of open access

an article by Caroline Sutton (President of the Open Access Publishers Association) published in College and Research Libraries News Volume 72 Number 11 (December 2011)

Opening paragraph

In this article I would like to make the case that a change in the delivery of scientific content and in the business models for delivering scholarly communication was inevitable from the moment journals moved online, even if much of this change is yet to come. By applying a thesis put forth by Chris Anderson in his 2009 book Free¹ I will argue that given that scholarly journals are now digital products, they are subject to very different economic principles and social forces than their print ancestors.

¹ Chris Anderson, Free. How today’s smartest businesses profit by giving something for nothing (Hyperion: New York, 2009).

Full text (PDF 4pp (A5))
Contains a useful bibliography

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