Thank you to Anne, Paul, Nick, Ernst and everyone else who attended for the very stimulating discussion that provided me with a number of new ideas – I’m looking forward to continuing it!

Edit: unfortunately SlideShare has mangled my OpenOffice presentation, making all bullet points mysteriously disappear. Duh.

Usage Map of Science

Here’s the full paper by Bollen et al, explaining the methodology in detail. Thanks to Adrian Pohl.

On a side note, I have decided to post preprints of several papers that I currently have in the works here shortly, mostly because the publication process is taking forever and I am getting impatient (two papers are set to appear in paper monographs, which is a ridiculously slow means of publishing that is still highly popular in the Humanities). As someone who is very much involved in investigating scholarly publishing and its future, I am becoming more and more convinced that paper-based publishing (1), closed-access distribution (2) and *our current form of peer review (3) are all aspects of scholarly communication that are in dire need of reform and improvement. The Internet won’t magically do away with all our problems, but conducting discussions of blogging practices in paper volumes is simply more idiosyncrasy than I can stomach.

* = Note that I am not questioning the essentiality of peer review, but the way we are currently conducting it.

The ability to add publications is in itself a nice perk and it could make academia.edu a huge repository over time, provided that enough people use it. Exciting stuff.

Edit: I already anticipate people asking me whether I’ve lived under a rock for the past months (which I have in a sense, considering PhD work). From the stats page it looks like academia.edu has been around for a bit…

Edit 2: As Lambert Heller points out the service has probably not grown organically, but is likely to be the result of harvesting existing social networks. Still, the Google rankings of the profile pages on academia.edu alone are impressive.

I wonder how this ties in with things such as identification services (see the discussion here) and (as mentioned above) repositories. I think an SN for academics has the potential to get all of these things taken care of in a single go. Our mistake to date has been to think that researchers are interested in ID services or repositories in their own right, but I’m not really convinced that they are. A social network-style index where I can browse institutions, departments, research areas and colleagues, all aggregated in one place – that is something that has intrinsic value to academics. And technologists, librarians and administrators could sneak in features like ID services, optimal archiving and indexing of papers etc that are important on the larger scale of things, but that researchers don’t generally pay a lot of attention to.