The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
EL
29,6
762
Received July 2010
Revised October 2010
Accepted November 2010
The Electronic Library
Vol. 29 No. 6, 2011
pp. 762-776
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/02640471111187999
Scholarly communication and
possible changes in the context of
social media
A Finnish case study
Feng Gu and Gunilla Widén-Wulff
Department of Information Studies, School of Business and Economics,
Åbo Akademi University, Åbo, Finland
Abstract
Purpose – The focus of this paper is to study the influence of social media on scholarly
communication. The aim is to provide an overview of researchers’ use of Web 2.0 techniques, and
discuss a possible change of information behaviors in the context of scholarly communication.
Design/methodology/approach – A web survey was distributed to a targeted sample of university
staff (professors, teachers, researchers, and doctoral students). SPSS was utilized as a main tool to
synthesize and analyze data, and present the results.
Findings – Web 2.0 tools are well-known to researchers. Most researchers are familiar with blogs,
wikis, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online document. Social media provide a convenient
environment for scholarly communication. Depending on different aims within the scholarly
communication process, researchers choose appropriate modes of communication in their research
work.
Research limitations/implications – A combination of content analysis with survey and/or
interviews may highlight other aspects of Web 2.0, which is not possible using a single method of
content analysis.
Originality/value – There are few studies on the changes of scholarly communication in the context
of Web 2.0. This study provides new insights for exploring the effects of Web 2.0 tools on scholarly
communication and the development of new information behavior to match the scholarly environment
of social media. This understanding can aid the researchers to keep abreast of new characteristics of
scholarly communication and help the librarians to develop the correlative services in the scholarly
environment of social media.
Keywords Scholarly communication, Web 2.0, Social media, Information behavior, Scholarly writing,
Research work
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Scholarly communication is an important part of scientific research (Borgman and
Furner, 2002; Barjak, 2006). Collaboration, discussion and even academic writing are
achieved in the context of scholarly communication. For researchers, different modes of
scholarly communication entail different kinds of information behaviors (Wilson, 1999;
Kling et al., 2003). Scholarly communication is a useful framework when studying the
impact of new participatory context and its impact on research work (Hurd, 2000). New
web technologies create the environment of social media (Warr, 2008). Web 2.0 is a
well-known concept where social media is in the forefront (O’Reilly, 2005; Stephens,
2007). Web 2.0 tools underline features such as openness, interactivity, participatory,
and user-centered activities. With Web 2.0 tools, researchers have more options when Scholarly
they develop their scholarly communication by new information behaviors, which communication
extend and enrich the meaning and the environment of social media (Beer, 2008).
However, the detailed consequences of Web 2.0 tools to scholarly communication are and changes
not yet apparent. This study is trying to explore the role of Web 2.0 tools in developing
researchers’ scholarly communication in the context of social media. In the following
sections, the basic concepts are defined in the situation where the Web 2.0 context and 763
social media are connected to scholarly communication. Following a description of
research methodology, then the results of this study are presented and discussed.

Literature review
Scholarly communication
The term “scholarly communication” describes the process of sharing and publishing
research works and outcomes (Borgman and Furner, 2002). Through scholarly
communication, this is available to a wider academic community and beyond
(Halliday, 2001). The scholarly communication process could be divided into three
main stages: the communication in informal networks like social media, the initial
public dissemination in conferences and preprints, and the formal publication of
research in scientific journals (Graham, 2000).
The development of the Internet has had great implications on research
dissemination and scholarly publication (Walsh et al., 2000). The electronic format
has affected scholarly publication especially concerning availability and accessibility
(Bjork, 2004, 2007). The exploding growth of information has forced individual
researchers to become specialized in adjusting to the specialized research
dissemination forums. Although the distribution of scientific information has
retained part of its traditional structures, the ways of scholarly communication and
research dissemination have been substantially affected via more convenience,
availability and low-cost production of information (Meadows, 2003).
The social and interactive web brings additional challenges as well as possible
advantages for scholarly communication. With the establishment of the new kind of
network society (Katz et al., 2001; Dahlgren, 2005), researchers meet an evolution in
scholarly communication, requiring more knowledge from all kinds of communication
processes, even when they work alone (Thorin, 2006).

Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a unifying term for technologies where users, interaction, and participation
are stressed (Holmberg et al., 2009). Web 2.0 gives opportunities and tools for new
communication channels affecting the form and the content of scholarly
communication. It underlines the characteristics as being user-centered, open,
participatory, interactive, and knowledge sharing (Anderson, 2007; Stephens, 2007). In
the context of social media, Web 2.0 could provide more communicative modes for
researchers (Kling et al., 2003). The tools are “user-centered”, making them easy for the
researchers to apply (Maness, 2006). Despite higher information literacy required to
apply the new functions in the context of Web 2.0, the convenience of communication is
provided by many user-friendly technologies. Researchers can focus on how to use the
tools without the technological knowledge behind them. For instance, blogs may
provide a catalogue, tag, or classification function for the users. According to the
EL topics, users may have easier access to group the scholarly communities that
29,6 consequently form the scholarly environment of social media (Birdsall, 2007).
“Participatory” is the main change in the context of Web 2.0 (Miller, 2005).
Individuals are capable of contributing to the new information. Under Web 2.0
circumstances, researchers could join all kinds of virtual scientific communities and
publish their findings in blogs, wikis, etc. “Open” means open access. Nowadays some
764 scientific information is free to read or use via the Internet and is supported by new
technologies and databases. Web 2.0 is creating a more “Interactive” environment for
scholarly communication. Through social media, researchers have more routes to
express their ideas. They may present their opinions not only in writing but also
through multimedia, including audio, broadcast, video, photo and so on. “Knowledge
sharing” is one of the motivations of scholarly communication. Web 2.0 makes
knowledge sharing multi-dimensional which forms a linear, orbicular or complex
netlike infrastructure. This multi-dimensional improvement of knowledge sharing
satisfies the needs of researchers in their discussions and communications with others
on interdisciplinary subjects. A variety of Web 2.0 communication tools help to save
researchers energy and offer wider channels to communication processes. Overall,
Web 2.0 seems to have influences on information behavior, moving scholarly
communication into the platform of social media (Voss and Procter, 2009).

Social media
“Social Media” is a term that in recent years has become closely related to the
important applications of Web 2.0. It allows individuals to construct the information
with a bounded system and share connections with other users (Boyd and Ellison,
2007). Social media provides a great space for individual Internet users not only for the
basic data storage needs, but even more importantly for the users’ psychological
experience requirements, such as to “be found”, “be authorized” and “be admired” (Van
Zyl, 2009). It expands the opinions from an individual perspective of information
transmission to participatory information transmission, this being the main difference
between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The applications include blogs/microblogs (e.g. Twitter,
Tpeople), wikis/wikipedia, image sharing (e.g. Flickr), podcasts/video-sharing
(e.g. Youtube, Youku), and community forum/social networks (e.g. MySpace,
Facebook) (Beer, 2008; Wilson, 2008).

Scholarly writing
Scholarly writing, an important part of the scholarly communication (Luzon, 2009), is
still the main way to express research outcomes and scholarly opinions. Online writing
is becoming a popular style of scholarly writing, motivated by the development of
online publication. Social media provides technical support for scholarly writing.
Environments such as blogs and wikis are also suitable to cultivate the habit of online
scholarly writing and collective writing, especially among the intense collaboration in
different research fields. Online documents and online writing tools help to control the
schedule and the quality of contents by all members at any time.
Social media also provides the content support for scholarly writing. Innovations
relating to multimedia and Web 2.0 content and functionality are encouraging the
emergence of new types of online scholarly writing (Cox, 2010). More online references
and multimedia resources from social media are forcing the online scholarly
information to be more reliable and accurate. From a recent survey, the rate of Scholarly
quotation, which means researchers quote the web-based references in their papers, communication
has risen from 1.9 to 16 per cent in ten years (Chen et al., 2009).
Copyright helps academic writers to use and publish the resources in social media. and changes
A more strict policy protects the copyright even of the online resources. These changes
make the scholarly outcome more reliable and attract more researchers to write their
opinions online (Wilson, 2008). 765

Research methodology
This project is an exploratory study focusing on whether the information practices in
social media affect the different aspects of scholarly communication. In this study, the
basic concept is based on Borgman’s description (Borgman and Furner, 2002) in which
“Scholarly communication” is deliberately limited to a particular group of people and a
particular kind of goal-oriented activity. “Researchers” strictly refer to people directly
engaged in the creation of original scholarly works. Scholarly communication has been
addressed in social informatics and digital libraries, in information behavior research,
and in the context of information needs and uses. Now, scholarly communication has
been extended also to include aspects of open access (Frandsen, 2009), scholarly
publishing (Case, 2009), and information-seeking behavior (Fleming-May and Yuro,
2009). Various kinds of information practices exhibit in the process of scholarly
communication in the context of social media.
While the evidence so far is not strong enough to support any firm conclusion on the
application of Web 2.0 tools in scholarly communication, we formulated the research
questions for this study based on the following assumptions:
(1) The development of Web 2.0 technology will meet the requirement of online
scholarly communication and accelerate communication infrastructure.
(2) Forming the habits of online information behaviors will promote the online
communication activities.
(3) Online scholarly communication will be useful for the minimization of the cost
and the maximization of the efficiency.
(4) The formal information and accumulative knowledge created by researchers
will be transferred into the environment of Web 2.0 through social media.
Therefore, there is a demand for researchers to get familiar with Web 2.0
technologies.

Based on these assumptions, the research attempts to address four questions:

(1) Do researchers use Web 2.0 tools for scholarly communication?
(2) What kinds of Web 2.0 tools do researchers like to use?
(3) In what parts of the scholarly communication processes do researchers use Web
2.0 tools?
(4) What expectations do researchers have when they participate in scholarly
communication?

Based on the previous, we have chosen Åbo Akademi University as the subject for the
study. The developed library system in Finland and the lifelong education system in
EL universities are beneficial to the rapid development of new network technology and a
29,6 new scholarly environment. Therefore, a Finnish university is suitable for this kind of
pilot study.
The target population for the survey was selected from the university e-mail lists of
researchers and employees. The online survey was sent in November 2009 and
received 126 responses, representing approximately 10 per cent of full-time researchers
766 and employees. The questionnaire consisted of 19 questions and the estimated time to
finish the survey was 20 minutes. The questions were divided into five groups: the
basic characteristics of the participants, the information practices in social media, the
application of Web 2.0 tools in research, teaching, and daily life, the attitude about the
information quality and collective writing, and the expectations of library services.
With the help of this survey, we expect to explore the relationships among participants’
information skills, information practices, collective writing, social media, scholarly
communication, and their attitudes to Web 2.0.

Results and findings

There were 65 (51.6 per cent) female and 61 (48.4 per cent) male respondents participating
in this research. The respondents’ research experience range from under one year (4.0 per
cent), one to five years (39.7 per cent), six to ten years (14.3 per cent), 11-20 years (23.0 per
cent), and over 20 years (19.0 per cent). The majority of the participants (97.6 per cent) had
a master’s degree and above. Almost half of the respondents (43.7 per cent) are doctoral
students. The questionnaire was more attractive to the researchers majoring in
mathematics and natural sciences (27.8 per cent), economics and social sciences (22.2 per
cent), technology (21.4 per cent), and arts (17.5 per cent).
Figure 1 shows the years of researcher experience with six different career statuses,
such as doctoral student, postdoctoral researcher, lecturer, university teacher,
professor, and other support staff. This division helps to find a correlative connection
between research experience and online behavior according by 70.9 per cent of the

Figure 1.
The researcher
background of
participants in this survey
doctoral students have one to five years experience, 50 per cent of the postdoctoral Scholarly
researchers and 45.5 per cent of the university teachers have 11-20 years experience, 50 communication
per cent of lecturers and 71.4 per cent of professors have more than 20 years of research
experience. and changes
Information practices in social media
In Figure 2, 12 information behaviors were selected in the questionnaire for analyzing 767
researchers’ daily information behavior and their relationship with Web 2.0
applications. The behaviors were divided into four groups: read & write (online
journals, e-mail), amusement (web radios or web TV, music online), communication
(instant messaging, internet phone calls, videoconference), life or work related (internet
banking, travel and accommodation web sites, public authorities’ web sites,
programmes, online auction).
Here we assumed that the information behaviors would turn into personal habits
through frequent use (every day or several hours a day). Because of this criteria, we
chose the potentially interesting information behaviors among the 12 ones for an
extended analysis, including e-mail (124 respondents), online journals (39 respondents),
instant messaging (29 respondents), and public authorities’ web sites (31 respondents),
which belong to the “read and write”, “communication”, and “life or work” categories.
Table I shows the detailed information of the survey on four major information
behavior groups. The 126 respondents are divided into different levels based on their
years of doing research work. The “frequent use” group means that the respondents
have the information behavior every day or several hours a day. From this table, we
can see that most of the respondents have considered e-mail use as a habit. It is
interesting to see that the group with 11-20 years of research experience has the lowest
rate (17.2 per cent) of reading online journals. The use of instant messaging is
decreasing from 33.3, 17.2 to 8.3 per cent as the research years increase.

Figure 2.
The information practices
in social media
EL The application of Web 2.0 tools
29,6 Figure 3 is generated from the answers on the use of eight kinds of Web 2.0 tools in
research, teaching, or daily life.
The percentage of respondents knowing multimedia sharing, social networks, and
blogs are 92.9, 91.3, and 85.7 per cent, respectively. Only 35 of the participants (27.8 per
cent) know tagging tools. The acquaintance of Web 2.0 tools leads the respondents to
768 use these tools. Only the application of mini blogs, 66.7 per cent of the respondents
answered that they know, has the lowest ratio of using and knowing the tool (22.6 per
cent). The use of wikis seems to be at the same level both in everyday life and in
research work. But overall it is interesting to notice that respondents use more
multimedia sharing and social networks in everyday life than in research or teaching
work. However, daily life-oriented use shares similar frequency as research-oriented in

Online Instant Public web

journals messaging site
E-mail (frequent (frequent (frequent
Respondents (frequent use) use) use) use)
Research experience Total Total (%) Total (%) Total (%) Total (%)

. 20 years 24 23 95.8 8 33.3 2 8.3 5 20.8

Table I. 11-20 years 29 29 100 5 17.2 5 17.2 11 37.9
The survey responses in Six to ten years 18 18 100 7 38.9 6 33.3 4 22.2
four major information One to five years 50 50 100 18 36 15 30 9 18
behavior groups , One year 5 4 80 1 20 1 20 2 40

Figure 3.
Using Web 2.0 tools in
different situations
blogs, wikis, and online document, which involves efforts in thinking, reading and Scholarly
writing. Table II correlates six common research related practices with different kinds communication
of Web 2.0 tools.
Researchers use wikis (45.2 per cent, 55.6 per cent) and online documents (55.6 per and changes
cent, 58.7 per cent) for “Keeping up to date” with the latest progress or “searching” for
knowledge. Researchers are active in practicing online documents, communicating,
writing, commenting or discussing with others. Some researchers are active in writing 769
commenting on others’ blogs.
To evaluate the applicability of Web 2.0 tools in scientific communication
environment, shown in Figure 4, the survey was trying to find out to what degree online
scholarly communication could replace traditional communication by using Web 2.0
tools when collaborating with other researchers nearby or in different locations.
To illustrate the impact of library service in the online scholarly communication,
we have analyzed the impact of three common services including the use of library

Keeping
up to
date Searching Discussing Communicating Writing Commenting
Tools (n ¼ 98) (n ¼ 105) (n ¼ 53) (n ¼ 60) (n ¼ 46) (n ¼ 55)

Blogs (%) 23.0 27.0 11.1 11.1 8.7 16.7

Mini blogs (%) 9.5 5.6 3.2 3.2 1.6 4.8
RSS (%) 22.2 15.1 4.0 6.3 2.4 5.6
Wikis (%) 45.2 55.6 6.3 15.1 11.9 10.3
Tagging (%) 6.3 5.6 1.6 2.4 1.6 1.6
Social network (%) 32.5 24.6 27.8 15.9 19.8 25.4 Table II.
Multimedia sharing (%) 23.0 21.4 7.1 9.5 7.1 7.9 Using Web 2.0 tools in
Online document (%) 55.6 58.7 23.8 37.3 27.0 23.0 scholarly communication

Figure 4.
The applicability of Web
2.0 tools in scholarly
communication
EL web site, searching tools and electronic collection. Figure 5 shows the importance of
29,6 the library services in current scholarly communication of the studied researchers.
According to the responses, we can conclude that the majority of researchers use
library services on a weekly or monthly basis. Figure 6 presents the expectations of
researchers for future library services that will enhance scholarly communication
environment through some developments of Web 2.0 functions. The respondents
770 (37.3 per cent agree, 44.4 per cent somewhat agree) would prefer an easier mode to
find and locate online books and articles in the library collections. Researchers (69.7
per cent) either agree or somewhat agree to disseminate information with Web 2.0
tools.

Information quality and reliability

Figure 7 shows several attitudes in judging the validity, timeliness, importance,
creativity, and credibility of online information.
Only 6.3 per cent of the participants ensure that the information sources they get
through Web 2.0 tools are reliable. The majority of the participants approved the
merits of Web 2.0 based information, including creativity, novelty and credibility.
Agreed with the up to date characteristics of online information, some researchers
raised the concerns on the consistence and the reliability of the information.
Furthermore, Figure 8 presents the opinions of researchers on the future trend of
research work. Eight questions are raised on information sharing, information
collaboration, and information dissemination.
The participants (57.9 per cent) agree that the copyright issue will become more
complicated because of the rapid development of new online tools. Almost half of the
researchers believe that it will be more difficult to evaluate the reliability of

Figure 5.
The utilization rate of
library website and its
resources
 Scholarly
communication
and changes

771

Figure 6.
Expectations of library
services in the Web 2.0
environment

Figure 7.
Information quality and
reliability

information (50 per cent) due to the easiness to spread online information. Nonetheless,
regarding information collaboration, most of the participants either agree or somewhat
agree with its importance (77 per cent) and appreciate the convenience of collaborative
possibilities created by the new tools (85.7 per cent).
EL
29,6

772

Figure 8.
The expectation of future
trend of research work

Discussion and conclusions

Figure 9 shows four stages in the development of scholarly communication (Eisend,
2002; Bertin, 2008). Currently, the environment of scholarly communication is moving
to social media gradually. The future scientific research will be more focused on
collaboration. Following the development and the popularization of information
technology, the online scholarly collaboration is easier to achieve in the context of Web
2.0.
This study attempts to understand the relationship between researchers’ general
web skills, Web 2.0 skills, knowledge of social media, and how the skills/knowledge are
applied in scholarly communication and practical research work. According to the
study, with adequate Web/Web 2.0 skills, the researchers have a greater variety of
information practices, more choices for multi communication, and more tools in social
media. The librarians need to figure out, during the training processes of network skill,
how to enlighten researchers to translate the knowledge into practical use of these Web
2.0 tools to favor their scholarly communication in the future.
Among all the tools, tagging has the lowest data of using and knowing the tools (13
respondents/35 respondents). Like Procter’s study (2010), lack of formal skills may be
less of a barrier to apply new scholarly communication tools. Researchers who know
more available tools and services could constitute productively scholarly
communication modes to support their research. There was one exception, only few
researchers (19 respondents) really use miniblogs, even though they know of the
existence of these tools.
Although the online document is the fifth most known tool in this survey, it has the
highest rate of both using and knowing the tool (89.1 per cent). It is worthwhile to note
that scholarly writing might be the most focused part of scholarly communication in
 Scholarly
communication
and changes

773

Figure 9.
Four levels of scholarly
communication

the context of social media while collective writing is easier to organize and
accomplish. Collective writing is easier to organize and accomplish with Web 2.0 tools.
Multimedia sharing may bring another change for scholarly writing, which will
enhance the speed of information dissemination to a great extent.
An interesting phenomenon is the use of instant messaging, which is decreasing
with the increase of research years. Another phenomenon is that researchers with 11 to
20 years of research experience have the lowest rate of reading online journals
compared to other groups. Researchers have different features of scholarly
communication information literacy depending on different requirements or research
experience or kind of research. Also different members of a project group are probably
in charge of different communication processes. Here the library and librarians could
analyze the characteristics of scholarly communication in a research group.
Almost 40 per cent of the researchers believed that Web 2.0 tools are useful for
scholarly communication although they do not seem to be active themselves at the
moment, indicated from the relative low percentage of Web 2.0 tools users in scholarly
communication. This could be partly because that we are focusing on the tools they use
in their research but neglect the tools they are contributing their knowledge to, such as
shared bibliographical management tools, scientific literature databases, wikis writer
and so on. This issue needs to be investigated in our future research.
EL Despite the convenience of communicating with other researchers through the
29,6 virtual environment, the quality control of information is becoming a big challenge
during virtual scholarly communication (Wilson, 2008). There are difficulties in
judging the validity and credibility of online information, considering that researchers
are flexible in exploring their viewpoints by using Web 2.0 tools. This issue deserves a
deep exploration in order to create a standard quality control system to regulate the
774 validity of online information.
Another issue that needs to be discussed is that this survey was performed in a
high-profile university in Finland, one of the most developed western countries with
abundant education resources, which could be one step earlier in piloting Web 2.0
revolution. Our future study would include developing countries such as China to
reflect an average level of Web 2.0 based scholarly communication in the world.
In summary, the study indicates that there are different priorities of scholarly
information literacy for researchers with different requirements and in different
research periods. The results from this investigation would be instructive to build an
assessment system for researchers’ self-evaluation of scholarly communication levels.
It is a challenge for library services in the context of Web 2.0, because researchers get
easy access to the online information by using outside network tools. The integrated
functions should be clearer and easier, like Google user interface. This phenomenon is
one of the possible reasons that library services seem to be replaced by Web 2.0 tools to
some extent. In response to the open questions in the survey, researchers provide three
important suggestions: enhance traditional services, promote the convenience of
services, and provide a clearer and more logical structure of library services.
Further study will surely focus on the role of the libraries and the development of
library services in connection with scholarly communication and social media. How to
develop the library services in the context of social media? Could libraries and
librarians participate in the process of scholarly communication? What processes could
they join in? What status should libraries hold in the online scholarly communication
for trainers, estimators, assistants, and others? And intriguingly, how to build the
standardized process and environment of scholarly communication, provide combined
modes, and estimate the scholarly capital? These aspects will be focused in further
studies in the next few years.

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About the authors

Feng Gu is currently a Doctoral Researcher of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University.
He was a researcher and a subject librarian in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) from 2001
and has been an Associate Professor of Information Analysis & Evaluation in the National
Science Library, CAS since 2004. During 2006-2007 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of
Helsinki. He has held a Master’s Degree in Informatics since 2004. His research fields concern
digital library and subject information service, and current interests focus on aspects of scholarly
communication and scholarly information literacy. Feng Gu is the corresponding author and can
be contacted at: feng.gu@abo.fi
Gunilla Widén-Wulff is Professor of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland,
where she has been Teacher and Researcher since 1996. She holds a PhD in Information Science
from 2001. She teaches in knowledge organization, information seeking, and information and
knowledge management. During 2004-2005 she was a visiting researcher at School of Computing,
Edinburgh Napier University. Her research fields concern information and knowledge
management in business organizations, and aspects of social capital and knowledge sharing in
groups and organizations. She has published widely in her areas of expertise. She is project leader
of two larger research projects financed by the Academy of Finland. One of the projects
investigates social aspects of information behavior on both individual and organizational levels.
The other project is looking at various aspects of Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 and social media.

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