Web 2.0 and academic debate

Abstract

The Internet—in particular social media—has had an enormous impact on our daily lives, allowing anyone with a connection to publish, access, share, discuss and debate every variety of information imaginable. Following in the wake of the public's increasing use of social media to share and critique issues and ideas, the scientific community—for whom the Internet was ostensibly created—has also begun to use online tools to discuss the planning, conduct and publication of research, especially via post‐publication review and commenting, but also through new modes of sharing and publishing the results of research. Not all publishers and scientists are yet ready to embrace these new modes of communication, but there is little doubt that social media is gaining in importance both in scholarly scientific communication and in communicating science with the public. Two interesting questions are whether and how these developments might affect the scientific publishing industry's current publication model—including pre‐publication peer review and the existence of journals—and whether and how they might influence the conduct of research itself. > … there is little doubt that social media is gaining in importance in both scholarly scientific communication and in communicating science with the public The Internet has already made possible new publishing models including open‐access publishers, pre‐publication servers and even alternative business models such as that of PeerJ, which charges authors a membership fee in exchange for “free” publication of their work in its journals. There is also PubPeer, which was launched in 2013 and allows people to comment on any research article that has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Meanwhile, Internet giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are already shaking up the news, book publishing and broadcasting industries, and it might be only a matter of time until they move into scientific publishing. Google Scholar, for instance, already provides an …