2015-02-13 19-15-46 online collaboration- scientists and the social network - nature news & comment

NATURE | NEWS FEATURE

Online collaboration: Scientists and the social networkGiant academic social networks have taken off to a degree that no one expected even a few years ago.A Nature survey explores why.

13 August 2014 Corrected: 15 August 2014

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Richard Van Noorden

Interactive: Why scholars use social media

In Nature's survey, a subset of scholars who said they 'regularly visited' social media sites werequizzed in detail about their activities.

Twitter (330 regular visitors) Facebook (340 regular visitors)

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Share links toauthored content

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Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network : Nature News &... http://www.nature.com/news/online-collaboration-scientists-and-the-soci...

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drug-resistant fungal pathogens. A PhD student studying microbiology in Nigeria, he did not have theexpertise and equipment he needed. So he turned to ResearchGate, a free social-networking site for

LinkedIn (389 regular visitors)ResearchGate (1,589 regular visitors)

Academia.edu (283 regular visitors)Mendeley (198 regular visitors)

Voices from the surveyMarketing and promoting own visibility.FACEBOOK USER, AGE 3544, UGANDA, LECTURER


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academics, and fired off a few e-mails. When he got a reply from Italian geneticist Orazio Romeo, an inter-national collaboration was born. Over the past three years, the two scientists have worked together on fungalinfections in Africa, with Nnadi, now at Plateau State University in Bokkos, shipping his samples to Romeo atthe University of Messina for analysis. It has been a fruitful relationship, says Nnadi and they have nevereven met.

Ijad Madisch, a Berlin-based former physician and virologist, tells this story as justone example of the successes of ResearchGate, which he founded with twofriends six years ago. Essentially a scholarly version of Facebook or LinkedIn, thesite gives members a place to create profile pages, share papers, track views anddownloads, and discuss research. Nnadi has uploaded all his papers to the site,for instance, and Romeo uses it to keep in touch with hundreds of scientists, someof whom helped him to assemble his first fungal genome.

More than 4.5 million researchers have signed up for ResearchGate, and another10,000 arrive every day, says Madisch. That is a pittance compared withFacebooks 1.3 billion active users, but astonishing for a network that onlyresearchers can join. And Madisch has grand goals for the site: he hopes that itwill become a key venue for scientists wanting to engage in collaborativediscussion, peer review papers, share negative results that might never otherwisebe published, and even upload raw data sets. With ResearchGate were changing science in a way thats notentirely foreseeable, he says, telling investors and the media that his aim for the site is to win a Nobel prize.

The company now employs 120 people, and last June it announced that it had secured US$35 million frominvestors including the worlds richest individual, Bill Gates cash that came on top of two earlier rounds ofundisclosed investment. It was really a head-scratcher when we saw that, says Leslie Yuan, who heads ateam working on networking and innovation software for scientists at the University of California, SanFrancisco. We thought who are these guys? How are they getting so much money?

Yuan is not the only one who has been taken aback. A few years ago, the idea that millions of scholars wouldrush to join one giant academic social network seemed dead in the water. The list of failed efforts to launch aFacebook for science included Scientist Solutions, SciLinks, Epernicus, 2collab and Nature Network (run bythe company that publishes Nature). Some observers speculated that this was because scientists were waryof sharing data, papers and comments online or if they did want to share, they would prefer do it on theirown terms, rather than through a privately owned site.

But it seems that those earlier efforts were ahead of their time or maybe they were simply doing it wrong.Today, ResearchGate is just one of several academic social networks going viral. San Francisco-basedcompetitor Academia.edu says that it has 11 million users. The goal of the company is to rebuild sciencepublishing from the ground up, declares chief executive Richard Price, who studied philosophy at the

Moot punishments forJapanese STAPscientistsIce ages made Earth'socean crust thickerUS governmentabandons carbon-capturedemonstration


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University of Oxford, UK, before he founded Academia.edu in 2008, and has already raised $17.7 million fromventure capitalists. A third site, London-based Mendeley, claims 3.1 million members. It was originallylaunched as software for managing and storing documents, but it encourages private and public socialnetworking. The firm was snapped up in 2013 by Amsterdam-based publishing giant Elsevier for a reported45 million (US$76 million).

Winning formulaDespite the excitement and investment, it is far from clear how much of the activity on these sites involvesproductive engagement, and how much is just passing curiosity or a desire to access papers shared byother users that they might otherwise have to pay for. Ive met basically no academics in my field with afavourable view of ResearchGate, says Daniel MacArthur, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital inBoston.

In an effort to get past the hype and explore what is really happening, Nature e-mailed tens of thousands ofresearchers in May to ask how they use social networks and other popular profile-hosting or search services,and received more than 3,500 responses from 95 different countries.


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The results confirm that ResearchGate is certainly well-known (see Remarkable reach, and full results onlineat go.nature.com/jvx7pl). More than 88% of scientists and engineers said that they were aware of it slightlymore than had heard of Google+ and Twitter with little difference between countries. Just under half saidthat they visit regularly, putting the site second only to Google Scholar, and ahead of Facebook and LinkedIn.Almost 29% of regular visitors had signed up for a profile on ResearchGate in the past year.

This does not surprise Billie Swalla, an evolutionary biologist and director of the University of WashingtonsFriday Harbor Laboratories. Swalla says that she and most of her colleagues are on ResearchGate, whereshe finds the latest relevant papers much more easily than by following marine-biology journals. They dosend you a lot of spam, she says, but in the past few months, Ive found that every important paper I thoughtI should read has come through ResearchGate. Swalla admits to comparing herself to others using the sitesRG Score its metric of social engagement. I think it taps into some basic human instinct, she adds.

Tactical breakdownSome irritated scientists say that the site taps into human instincts only too well by regularly sending outautomated e-mails that profess to come from colleagues active on the site, thus luring others to join on falsepretences. (Indeed, 35% of regular ResearchGate users in Natures survey said that they joined the sitebecause they received an e-mail.) Lars Arvestad, a computer scientist at Stockholm University, is fed up withthe tactic. I think it is a disgraceful kind of marketing and I am choosing not to use their service because ofthat, he says. Some of the apparent profiles on the site are not owned by real people, but are createdautomatically and incompletely by scraping details of peoples affiliations, publication records and PDFs,if available, from around the web. That annoys researchers who do not want to be on the site, and who feelthat the pages misrepresent them especially when they discover that ResearchGate will not take down thepages when asked. Madisch is unruffled by these complaints. The pages are marked for what they are, andare not counted among the sites real users, he says, adding: We changed many things based on thefeedback we got. But the criticism is relatively small, relative to the number of people who like the service.

Academia.edu seems less well-known than ResearchGate: only 29% of scientists in the survey were aware of


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it and just 5% visited regularly. But it has its fans among them climate scientist Hans von Storch, director ofthe Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, who uses the site to share not only his papers, butalso his interviews, book reviews and lectures. Price points out that Academia.edu has much higher web trafficthan ResearchGate overall, perhaps because unlike its rival it is open to anyone to join. And for the 480social science, arts and humanities researchers included in Natures survey, usage of the two sites was moreclosely matched.


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High numbers by themselves do not mean much, says Jan Reichelt, a co-founder of Mendeley (which scored48% awareness and 8% regular visitors among scientists in Natures survey). Weve moved away frommentioning start-up vanity metrics as the key number, he says. It doesnt tell you about the quality ofinteraction.

To get a rough measure of that quality, Nature asked a subset of the most active respondents what theyactually do on the sites they visit regularly (see Idle, browse or chat?). The most-selected activity on bothResearchGate and Academia.edu was simply maintaining a profile in case someone wanted to get in touch suggesting that many researchers regard their profiles as a way to boost their professional presence online(see A battle for profiles). After that, the most popular options involved posting content related to work,discovering related peers, tracking metrics and finding recommended research papers. These are tools thatpeople are using to raise their profiles and become more discoverable, not community tools of socialinteraction, argues Deni Auclair, a lead analyst for Outsell, a media, information and technology consultingfirm in Burlingame, California. By comparison, Twitter, although used regularly by only 13% of scientists inNatures survey, is much more interactive: half of the Twitterati said that they use it to follow discussions onresearch-related issues, and 40% said that it is a medium for commenting on research that is relevant to myfield (compared with 15% on ResearchGate).

A battle for profiles

After Zen Faulkes published his latest paper on sand crabs, he spent half a day updating his many Internetprofiles to display the information. There was his personal website; Academia.edu; ResearchGate;Mendeley; ImpactStory; his page on the website of his institution, the University of TexasPan American inEdinburg; his profile with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) project; and Google Scholar. Itis useful to have a presence on all of them, he says.

Richard Van Noorden


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Papers pleaseLaura Warman, an ecologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, echoes the views of many when she says thatshe has uploaded papers on Academia.edu to keep track of how often, where and when they are downloaded.I find it especially intriguing that my most downloaded paper is not my most cited work, she says. To put itbluntly, I have no idea if these sites have any impact whatsoever on my career I tend to doubt they do but I enjoy knowing that my work is being discussed.

Price says that 3 million papers have been uploaded to Academia.edu, and Madisch says that 14 million areaccessible through ResearchGate (although he will not say how many of those have been automaticallyscraped from freely accessible places elsewhere). An unpublished study conducted by computer scientistsMadian Khabsa at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and Mike Thelwall at the University of

Perhaps wisely, administrators at some institutions have decided that few researchers can be trusted to beas assiduous as Faulkes in updating their various profiles. To avoid the problem of rotting links andout-of-date webpages, institutions are creating their own networks of automatically updated faculty-memberprofiles, using commercial tools such as Elseviers Pure Experts Portal, Thomson Reuters Converis andWileys Knode, as well as open-source profile-building software such as Harvard Catalyst Profiles, run bythe Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and VIVO, developed atCornell University in Ithaca, New York, and funded by a US$12.2-million grant from the US NationalInstitutes of Health (VIVO partners with Symplectic, a London-based software company owned by DigitalScience, a sister company to Nature Publishing Group).

These top-down profile networks do not completely solve the updating problem, because they do not pusheach new profile change to ResearchGate, Academia.edu and the rest. But advocates see them as animportant step forward, both because the information they contain is reliably up to date often fed directlyfrom an institutions human-resources department and because they structure their information insimilar standardized, machine-readable formats. The standardization, in turn, means that computerprograms can easily extract data or yoke together information in separate profiles. Leslie Yuan, whodevelops networking software at the University of California, San Francisco, says that profiles at herinstitution based on the Harvard Catalyst Profiles software have been used heavily by journalists,administrators, faculty members and even a child who accessed them to make scientist trading cards for aschool project.

But Richard Price, chief executive of Academia.edu in San Francisco, says: I dont think thosemegaprojects are focused on what the user really wants. For example, he argues that VIVO has not yetimplemented its idea of joining up institutions across the United States so that one aggregated search findsexperts from many faculties. In his view, the giant academic social networks are better placed to becomego-to profile pages.


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Related stories

PubMed opens forcomment

Peer review: Trial byTwitter

Collaboration: Socialnetworking seeks criticalmass

More related stories

Wolverhampton, UK, suggests that by August this year, the full texts of around one-quarter of all molecular-biology papers published in 2012 were available from ResearchGate. That said, these days papers are easilyfound on many sites: a study conducted for the European Commission last year found that 18% of biologypapers published in 200811 were open access from the start, and said that 57% could be read for free insome form, somewhere on the Internet, by April 2013 (see Nature 500, 386387; 2013).

Publishers are worried that the sites could become public troves of illegallyuploaded content. In late 2013, Elsevier sent 3,000 notices to Academia.eduand other sites under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),demanding that they take down papers for which the publisher ownedcopyright. Academia.edu passed each notice on to its users a decisionthat triggered a public outcry. One researcher who received a take-downrequest did not want to be named, but told Nature: I hardly know anyscientists who dont violate copyright laws. We just fly below the radar andhope that the publishers dont notice.

These concerns are not unique to large social networks, says Price; thesame issue surrounds content posted in universities online repositories (towhich Elsevier also sent some DMCA notices last year). This is really part of the wider battle whereacademics want to share their papers freely online, whereas publishers want to keep content behind a paywallto monetize it, he says, noting the nuance that many publishers allow researchers to upload the finalaccepted version of a manuscript, but not the final PDF. He has seen fewer take-down notices this year.

Open intentionsGiant social networks could also disrupt the research landscape by capturing other public content. In Marchthis year, ResearchGate launched a feature called Open Review, encouraging users to post in-depth critiquesof existing publications. Madisch says that members have now contributed more than 10,000 such reviews. Ibelieve that this is just the tip of the iceberg, he says. He wants users to upload raw data sets too including, perhaps, negative results that might otherwise never be published and says that 700 areappearing on the site each day.

At Academia.edu, Price is planning to launch a post-publication peer-review feature as well. We have to buildbetter filter systems to explain what research you can trust, he says.

Few would argue with these goals, but many wonder why researchers would deposit their data sets andreviews on these new social networks, rather than elsewhere online on their own websites, for example, inuniversity repositories, or on dedicated data-storage sites such as Dryad or figshare (see Nature 500,243245; 2013 figshare is funded by Natures parent company, Macmillan Publishers). To Madisch, theanswer lies with the social sites burgeoning communities of users the famed network effect. If you poston ResearchGate, you are reaching the people who matter, he says. But Titus Brown, a computational


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Corrected:

scientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, is concerned about the sites business plans as theyseek to survive. What worries me is that at some point ResearchGate will use their information to make aprofit in ways that we are uncomfortable with or they will be bought by someone who will do that, he says.

Madisch says that ResearchGate will not sell its user data, and that it already makes some money by runningjob adverts (as does Academia.edu). In the future, he hopes to add a marketplace for laboratory services andproducts, connecting companies and corporate researchers to academics (28% of the networks users arefrom the corporate world, he says). Price talks about providing institutional analytics to universities as well. Butanalysts including Auclair argue that the sites have limited earning potential, because they are targeted at amuch narrower demographic than Facebook or Twitter. Whats most likely is the networks that have criticalmass get acquired and those that dont will die, she says (although Madisch says that being bought outwould be a personal failure).

Mendeleys acquisition by Elsevier last year left the site better placed to become a global platform for researchcollaboration, says Reichelt, because it intersects with other Elsevier products such as the Scopus databaseof research articles. Much of the collaboration done using Mendeley is private, but the firm does allow othercomputer programs to automatically pull out useful anonymized public information such as which papersare viewed most by which researchers. Neither Academia.edu nor ResearchGate yet offer this service,although Madisch says that he is developing it.

I think at some point there will be one winner in this race, says Madisch. Or as Natures survey suggestsis already happening different disciplines might favour different sites. Some analysts argue that despitetheir millions of users, massive social academic networking sites have not yet proven their essential worth.They are nice-to-have tools, not need-to-have, says Auclair. But Price says that the networks are on the frontline of a trend that cannot be ignored. We saw the changes in the market, and we could see that academicswanted to share openly. The tide is starting to turn in our direction.

Nature 512, 126129 (14 August 2014) doi:10.1038/512126a

Corrections

This article originally gave the wrong affiliation for Laura Warman, who is at the University ofHawaii at Hilo. It also stated that the University of California, San Francisco, uses VIVO-based profiles, whenin fact it uses the same software as Harvard Catalyst Profiles. These have now been corrected.

Related stories and links

From nature.comPubMed opens for comment24 October 2013


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15 comments Subscribe to comments

Peer review: Trial by Twitter19 January 2011Collaboration: Social networking seeks critical mass15 December 2010Blog post: The new dilemma of online peer review

From elsewhereFull results of the Nature surveyAcademia.eduResearchGateMendeley

For the best commenting experience, please login or register as a user and agree to our CommunityGuidelines. You will be re-directed back to this page where you will see comments updating in real-time andhave the ability to recommend comments to other users.

Guest 2014-09-15 04:28 PMWe thought who are these guys? How are they getting so much money? This one of many thingsthat is wrong with academia. Sure. Who the hell are these guys and why are they doing this...

Clarinda Cerejo 2014-09-03 11:14 AMIt's interesting that there seems to be quite a bit of unrest at some of ResearchGate's policies. I am aresearcher studying trends in academic publishing (ORCID profile: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3161-6951) and active on Twitter in a professional capacity (https://twitter.com/ClarindaCerejo). I used to be active on ResearchGate and enjoyed participating in and learning fromvarious discussions. However, ResearchGate suddenly, and with no intimation, changed their policy torestrict access to users with a recognized academic email address. I happen to be a researcher with acommercial affiliation, whose domain is not in ResearchGate's database, so I completely lost access tomy account, although my contributions are still searchable on Google. By an extension of thisexclusive policy, should retired researchers who no longer have an institutional affiliation be bannedfrom ResearchGate? It is policies like these that go against the grain of open science and seem tojustify speculations and worries that "ResearchGate will use their information to make a profit in waysthat we are uncomfortable with or they will be bought by someone who will do that." I tried to contactResearchGate regarding the access issue on multiple occasions but received no response from theteam. As a result, I have lost interest in ResearchGate altogether and have serious questions and


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concerns about its reportedly noble objectives.

Robert Buntrock 2014-08-29 06:42 PM

As a semi-retired chemist, no longer active in research I was encouraged to join ResearchGate a fewyears ago by Sigma Xi. At first the discussion groups I signed up for were interesting but they rapidlydegenerated into redundant ramblings illustrating that the contributors had not read the previous postson the string. Once a rating system was developed where members got brownie points for anycontribution to the site, the motives for redundancy became obvious: career advancement. Some ofmy publications were automatically posted but their search algorithm must be inadequate for manywere missed. And cancelled out a couple of years ago, with some difficulty. The duplicative dailyupdates are also memory hogs. Significantly both Sigma Xi and ACS are getting on the bandwagonand developing social nets for their members as well. Both my wife and I on separate occasions wereencouraged by friends ("invitations") to join LinkedIn. I cancelled after a few days (again with difficulty)when it attracted unnecessary attention. in my wife's case she stayed on for a couple of weeks untilshe determined they had added, without her input, a hobby--photography--in which she did notparticipate. We noted the site has the most attraction for younger members still building their careerswhether entrepreneurs or not.

Carlo Hamalainen 2014-08-27 05:08 AMNo mention of Github?

Nikolai Slavov 2014-08-20 09:27 PMThere are many reasons for and against social networks for scientists as you eloquently articulatesome of them. The benefit that resonates the most with me is the ability to upload manuscripts (astypeset by the authors and allowed by legal regulations, not the PDFs produced by the publishers) thatmay otherwise be guarded behind pay walls. Making research results more widely available withoutinfringing legal rights is a clear benefit in my opinion.

Ben Bederson 2014-08-20 05:47 PM

Thanks for making the data public. We created a richer interactive visualization with a web-based toolwe have developed. You can see it and do your own analysis of this data set here: Keshif Visualizationof academic social network data


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Ian Dickie 2014-08-15 02:36 AM

I think the quote from Daniel MacArthur says a great deal. Many of us are on ResearchGate, butresent the endless emails and what seems to me to be almost sleazy practices used by the site to trickusers into inviting colleagues or uploading papers. This lack of user goodwill could become asignificant liability if a serious competitor were to emerge.

William Gunn 2014-08-14 04:53 PMThis is good initial data to have out there, though I think it must suffer a bit from sampling error.Looking at our site stats, it's pretty clear the major use of Mendeley isn't for peer recommendations, soit's strange that that shows up so highly in the survey. By far, the major use of Mendeley is as areference manager and I suspect that if sharing collections of papers with colleagues were an option,many more would have selected that option. So it's good initial data that shows the need for a morecomprehensive survey of the space before any real conclusions can be drawn. William Gunn, Head ofAcademic Outreach, Mendeley http://mendeley.com/profiles/william-gunn/

Richard Van Noorden 2014-08-14 10:14 PM

Reference manager wasn't given as an option, because the survey was only asking about thesocial aspects of networks. Most of the free-text responses on Mendeley did answer 'referencemanager' [indeed many said that they only knew Mendeley as a reference manager, and didn'tknow it could be used for anything 'social' like peer recommendations]. You can see this in the'voices from the survey' featured above in the interactive graphic, or you can see all commentsabout Mendeley in the raw data, hosted on figshare.

Audrey Babkirk 2014-08-14 01:59 PMI must say, I have been searching for reliable information on scientists' use of social media for months,with little success. These results at least provide a general idea of where scientists are going onlineand how they use various social media platforms. This is unique and invaluable information--thankyou, thank you, THANK YOU for sharing it.

Jim Woodgett 2014-08-13 03:57 PMThe stickiness of any of these platforms is key to their survival. New initiatives are developing all thetime and the investment by users in most of the current research-focused sites is quite ephemeral.


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Nature ISSN 0028-0836 EISSN 1476-4687

Scientists will migrate to platforms that offer them something in terms of value. Clearly, the existingefforts are hitting the right note with at least some but the large numbers of "users" is no guarantee ofsuccess. Indeed, as noted by several of the people interviewed, ResearchGate's tactics rub many thewrong way - yet are presumably part of the reason why there are so many "users". That said, it'sdefinitely a positive sign to see increased use of forums for exchange and community building thatbreak down some of the stuffiness and hierarchy associated with academic research. If these toolshelp enable (especially) young researchers to connect with each other, all power to them. Just don'ttake them for granted!

Keith Bradnam 2014-08-13 03:18 PM

This article misses one of the founding fathers of scientific social networks: Epernicus(http://epernicus.com/network) a site that is at least six years old and still active (though seemingly lesspopular than sites that came after it).

o m 2014-08-17 12:59 PM

The French-based equivalent is missed: http://www.mysciencework.com

Richard Van Noorden 2014-08-18 11:30 AMMy Science Work was included in the survey, but the numbers were so small as to be notworth mentioning in the feature. 7.7% of respondents had heard of it; 1.7% used it regularly.You can see all the responses on My Science Work in the raw data, hosted on figshare.

Jim Woodgett 2014-08-13 03:50 PMEpernicus is mentioned in passing in the 5th paragraph.

See other News & Comment articles from Nature


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