Article: Web 2.0 Fails to Excite Today's Researchers
This article was written by David Stuart, an independent web analyst and consultant and honorary member of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.
The potential of Web 2.0 technologies for collaboration and communication in a more professional setting has also been widely recognised, with the ‘two point oh’ moniker being added to a host of organisational types and professional activities. However, within the world of scholarly publishing, despite the huge potential of Web 2.0 technologies for the transforming of the research and publishing process, adoption is seemingly a slow affair. The question is, are academics waiting for the right tools, or are they just too stuck in their ways?
It is hard to imagine a group more suited to the opportunities of Web 2.0 technologies than academics, especially when it comes to conducting and publishing research. The importance of collaboration to the scholarly process is so widely recognised that it is often now a prerequisite of funding. The potential of academic research to have a significant impact on the wider economy has not only led funding councils to stipulate that publicly-funded research papers are made freely available online, but has also seen them encourage researchers to come up with new and innovative methods of distributing research findings. In addition to this, rising journal costs and long delays in publication time have led many academics to the conclusion that the current publication process is fundamentally broken.
Unfortunately there are few signs that academics are really embracing the new opportunities offered by Web 2.0. Many academics’ idea of online collaboration is still emailing the findings they have arrived at independently to one another, while their notion of an innovative method of promoting research results is the obligatory ‘project web site’.
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