E-Letter‎ > ‎

STCSN-E-Letter-Vol-3-No-1

Science 2.0

Welcome to the STCSN E-Letter Vol.3 No.1!

TABLE OF CONTENT:
  • Editorial
    (by Rene Kaiser, Elisabeth Lex and Peter Kraker
    )
  • From Science 2.0 to Open Science - Turning rhetoric into action? (PDF)
    (by Katja Mayer, University of Vienna
    )

    Abstract:
    Open Science is enjoying great popularity at the moment. The European Union has recently adopted the term Open Science in its research framework programme. However, at the same time being mainstreamed into policy and administration it runs the risk of remaining empty rhetoric. The article examines terminological and actual realms of Open Science. It aims to identify gaps in the current discourse on one hand, and on the other to draw upon the potential of Open Science practices and its precursors. Situating Open Science in a broader picture of cultures of sharing helps to understand its promising role as change maker in traditional academic settings if necessary appreciation, skills and infrastructures are developed timely.
  • The Semantic Web Journal Review Process - Transparent and Open (PDF)
    (by Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, and Krzysztof Janowicz, University of California, Santa Barbara
    )

    Abstract:
    The Semantic Web journal was established in 2010 and in the meantime became one of the primary journals in its field. Besides its focus on top quality research contributions, it is also distinguished by an alternative review process which emphasizes openness and transparency.
  • Digital library content in the Social Web: Resource Usage and Content Injection (PDF)
    (by Christin Seifert, University of Passau, Nils Witt, German National Library of Economics Kiel, Sebastian Bayerl and Michael Granitzer, University of Passau
    )

    Abstract:
    Providers of digital non-mainstream content face two major challenges. First, they have little knowledge about the usage of their content in social media channels, which is necessary to improve dissemination strategies. The second challenge is how to bring the content to interested users, who do not know their portals. We present two case studies for analysing and injecting content into social media channels. More specifically, we analyse the usage of scientific literature from the domain of economics in blogs and tweets that are related to the field of economics. Additionally, we present two mechanisms for injecting content into blogs or tweets, by the means of a Wordpress plugin and a Twitter bot respectively. The usage analysis shows that the resource coverage is rather low in the investigated social media channels (~0.15% in tweets and ~0.5% in blogs). Using a Twitter bot for content dissemination is feasible, but not advisable because the automatic approaches are quite hard to optimise towards Twitter's usage policy. For content injection into the blogosphere the Wordpress plugin shows promising results in a qualitative user study. Our results indicate that content injection into social media channels is a promising way for content dissemination and point towards a preference of blogs over twitter as target channel.
  • Science 2.0 and Libraries - Convergence of two sides of the same coin at ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (PDF)
    (by Isabella Peters, Ansgar Scherp, Klaus Tochtermann, ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
    )

    Abstract:
    The “digitization” of science is currently changing the research and publication processes. This change impacts in various ways not only the day-to-day work of researchers but also library services. Libraries, however, can only manage this transition successfully if they engage in partnerships with the scientific community. That is, to jointly investigate the phenomena related to the digitization of science, draw conclusions, and develop new services. The ZBW goes beyond this idea of collaboration: Since 2014, ZBW has an in-house research group consisting of three professors, five post-docs and several PhD students. The research group covers three aspects of Science 2.0: research on the relationship between Science 2.0 and libraries, development of Science 2.0 technologies in the area of knowledge discovery, and user behavior research. This article introduces these different perspectives and shows how they synergistically contribute to fully understand all phenomena related to the transition of science.
  • The Quest for Keeping an Overview: Knowledge Domain Visualizations based on Co-Readership Patterns (PDF)
    (by Peter Kraker, Know-Center, Christian Schlögl, University of Graz, Kris Jack, Mendeley, and Stefanie Lindstaedt,  Know-Center)
    Abstract:
    Given the enormous amount of scientific knowledge that is produced each and every day, the need for better ways of gaining - and keeping - an overview  of research fields is becoming more and more apparent. In a recent paper published in the Journal of Informetrics, we analyze the adequacy and applicability of readership statistics recorded in social reference management systems for creating such overviews. First, we investigated the distribution of subject areas in user libraries of educational technology researchers on Mendeley. The results show that around 69% of the publications in an average user library can be attributed to a single subject area. Then, we used co-readership patterns to map the field of educational technology. The resulting knowledge domain visualization, based on the most read publications in this field on Mendeley, reveals 13 topic areas of educational technology research. The visualization is a recent representation of the field: 80% of the publications included were published within ten years of data collection. The characteristics of the readers, however, introduce certain biases to the visualization. Knowledge domain visualizations based on readership statistics are therefore multifaceted and timely, but it is important that the characteristics of the underlying sample are made transparent.
  • Visual Analysis of Scientific Content (PDF)
    (by Belgin Mutlu and Vedran Sabol, Know-Center GmbH
    )

    Abstract:
    The steadily increasing amount of scientific publications demands for more powerful, user-oriented technologies supporting querying and analyzing scientific facts therein. Current digital libraries that provide services to access scientific content are rather closed in a way that they deploy their own meta-models and technologies to query and analyse the knowledge contained in scientific publications. The goal of the research project CODE is to realize a framework based on Linked Data principles which aims to provide methods for federated querying within scientific data, and interfaces enabling user to easily perform exploration and analysis tasks on received content. The main focus in this paper lies on the one hand on extraction and organization of scientific facts embedded in publications and on the other hand on an intelligent framework facilitating search and visual analysis of scientific facts through suggesting visualizations appropriate for the underlying data.
  • HowTo: Scientific Work in Interdisciplinary and Distributed Teams (PDF)
    (by Elisabeth Lex and Sebastian Dennerlein, Graz University of Technology
    )

    Abstract:
    Today’s complex scientific problems often require interdisciplinary, team-oriented approaches: the expertise of researchers from different disciplines is needed to collaboratively reach a solution. Interdisciplinary teams yet face many challenges such as differences in research practice, terminology, communication, and in the usage of tools. In this paper, we therefore study concrete mechanisms and tools of two real-world scientific projects with the aim to examine their efficacy and influence on interdisciplinary teamwork. For our study, we draw upon Bronstein’s model of interdisciplinary collaboration. We found that it is key to use suitable environments for communication and collaboration, especially when teams are geographically distributed. Plus, the willingness to share (domain) knowledge is not a given and requires strong common goals and incentives. Besides, structural barriers such as financial aspects can hinder interdisciplinary work, especially in applied, industry funded research. Furthermore, we observed a kind of cold-start problem in interdisciplinary collaboration, when there is no work history and when the disciplines are rather different, e.g. in terms of wording.
  • Communication Patterns in the Altmetrics 2014 Workshop (PDF)
    (by Christof Steinkellner
    , Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria)

    Abstract:
    Researchers at scientific conferences increasingly use Twitter as a tool to share information, to discuss and to promote their scientific work.  In this paper, we empirically analyze a Twitter dataset that has been acquired at the altmetrics 2014 workshop that was co-located with the ACM Web Science conference. More specifically, we investigate the activity of all users who tweeted about the workshop in three types of communication networks that we extracted from the dataset: the user mentions network, the retweets network and the followers network. In all three networks, we determined the most active users. Our study shows that most users are rather passive while only a small number of influential users are responsible for most of the observed activities.

How to cite this E-Letter edition?
Rene Kaiser, Elisabeth Lex and Peter Kraker (ed.), "Science 2.0", IEEE Computer Society Special Technical Community on Social Networking E-Letter, vol. 3, no. 1, June 2015.