Social sciences focus in scholarly communication

Where are the social sciences on the scholarly communications continuum?

In the blog post, “If you use social media then you are not working” – How do social scientists perceive altmetrics and online forms of scholarly communication?, based on the authors’ (@stl90 , @Isabella83,c@warfair) co-written article, “When You Use Social Media You Are Not Working”: Barriers for the Use of Metrics in Social Sciences, the authors voiced concern that social scientists are missing opportunities to directly engage in the public discourse due to discipline culture.

Meanwhile, MIT visiting scholar and sociologist, Philip N Cohen, wrote a primer for Scholarly Communication in Sociology that “will offer useful guidance for your career – to help you succeed in a competitive, opaque, inefficient system with little accountability. Knowing how the scholarly communication system works will help you navigate it successfully for your career ends. However, I also aspire to help you see the bigger picture in your career, and become an engaged citizen within this system so that we may work together to improve it.”

Female Rock Climber
Female Rock Climber by Eric Foltz on flickr

Workflow is the new content or how to pay to access all that you do

A great commentary by Mita Williams putting the commodification of scholarly communication workflow into perspective.

Disc Ploughs. Powerhouse Museum Collection on Flickr Commons https://flic.kr/p/4MB33q. No known copyright restrictions.






1. The Social Graph of Scholarly Communications is becoming more tightly bound into institutional metrics that have an increasing influence on institutional funding
2. The publishers of the Social Graph of Scholarship are beginning to enclose the Social Graph, excluding the infrastructure of libraries and other independent, non-profit organizations

Williams, M. (2019, March 3). If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost [Blog post]. retrieved from https://librarian.aedileworks.com/2019/03/03/if-the-map-becomes-the-territory-then-we-will-be-lost/