Scientific social network

Les outils numériques à disposition des chercheurs : des outils de veille aux outils d'optimisation du travail en équipe, en passant par les outils de gestion bibliographique et les plateformes de partage de contenus.

The thinking of academic community is moving fast in the direction that we envision. We expect that, in not too distant future, researchers will post their papers in a web-repository like arxiv.org, write a blog post or two describing it in simple language, and then tweet a small link to those familiar with his work. Also, they will continue to write their daily or weekly thoughts in a blog, so that the paper ‘published’ in arxiv.org will be more like stringing together of many blog posts than all new discoveries. We have not seen any academic researcher go that far yet (except one or two), but a post in Rafael Irizarry’s blog shows that people are starting to think that way.

As social media usage becomes a common feature at conferences, anxieties about authority, control, attribution, originality and privacy are likely to haunt the theory and practice of scholarly social media use for some time to come. But embracing openness and transparency, through Twitter or blogging, can coexist with the existing expectations for academic rigor, ethics and civil behaviour.

Academics who are comfortable with and enthusiastic about social media need to communicate that live-tweeting at conferences is not a threat to scholarly activity but the contrary: an ally.

Internet est devenu l’un des principaux médias de diffusion de la culture scientifique et technique. Avec l’explosion des blogs, en articulation avec les réseaux sociaux, rien n’est devenu plus facile que d’approfondir ses connaissances en science.

Online databases could increase fairness and transparency by fully documenting the role of each contributor to a paper, says Sebastian Frische.

ORCID scheme will give researchers unique identifiers to improve tracking of publications.