Scholarly Social Machines: A Web Science Perspective on our Knowledge Infrastructure

Abstract

A Knowledge Infrastructure comprises the people, artefacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain knowledge, very often mediated by the Web. Our scholarly Knowledge Infrastructure is evolving as researchers embrace digital techniques enabled by increasing availability of digital data, computational power, and analytical tools and techniques. Crucially, the social structures are changing also. Taking a Web Science approach, this paper encourages the reader to view the scholarly Knowledge Infrastructure as an ecosystem of interacting and evolving Social Machines. We illustrate these Scholarly Social Machines with a series of descriptive examples, and reflect on these to propose Scholarly Primitives associated with Scholarly Social Machines. We suggest that this approach facilitates a holistic understanding of our scholarly Knowledge Infrastructure and informs its evolution.