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

How do you feel about preprint servers?

A cancer researcher and blogger, Jacob Scott, tweeted about an informal sentiment survey on preprint server use and was kind enough to engage with our interest in his results. Take a look at Dr. Scott’s blog for a good example of science communication.

Please take the survey and if you are UC San Diego affiliated, let us know in the comments if you have questions or want support in this area. We’re thinking of doing a workshop and would love to know what your interests are.

Barriers to posting pre-prints Survey
“I’m curious what the effects of the bioRxiv have been, so here is a follow up survey – 5 years later! – to ascertain barriers to utilization of open access preprint servers. All data is anonymous, participation is totally voluntary. I’ll be sharing the results on my blog in a few weeks time. If you are curious, the results from 5 years ago can be found here