Abstract
With Web 2.0 and online social networks, the contemporary idea of networking finds its application also within the academia, thereby allowing free access to scientific work through voluntary sharing of the scholar researchers/authors. This article investigates the tools that facilitate such amplification and its possible outcomes in the short and middle run. The explosion of user-created media content on the web in the past decade unleashed a new media universe, which was made possible by free web platforms and inexpensive software tools which enable people to share their media and easily access media produced by others. Besides the changes in the structure of the web, rapidly fallen costs and increased speed of internet connection also allowed for higher possibilities for collaboration, participation and amplification of audience for academic research.
Highlights
Over the past decade, we lived through the seamless integration of the digital and mo bile technologies into our daily lives
The voluntary participation of acad emicians in these online social networks, or their sharing/submission of their work, creates a conflict between the “paid subscription” of various scholar journals and the open access provided by the authors themselves
This paper aims to com pare these online tools on various criteria including whether they serve to make sci entific research available to wider audiences, whether subscription to these services requires an academic email, whether they are userdriven, whether they contribute to the online visibility of the contributing authors, average number of articles/material shared by each author on these networks and whether they suggest a rating system for the academic content they provide
Summary
We lived through the seamless integration of the digital and mo bile technologies into our daily lives. With the presence on the ac ademic social networks in internet, the academicians who are willing to participate and upload their work start to make it available to wider audiences, as these online social networks indicate open access for everyone – especially students that were not able to pay the subscription fees unless they were provided access through university li braries. The voluntary participation of acad emicians in these online social networks, or their sharing/submission of their work, creates a conflict between the “paid subscription” of various scholar journals and the open access provided by the authors themselves. Despite being a good attempt at connecting researchers and contributing to open access to academic work, Academia.edu lags behind the pace of online social networking and offers few interactions that would encourage its users to participate more and spend more active time on the site. This is done on the basis of the profile already provided, via what is known as “semantic match ing” (Nentwich, 2010: 69)
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