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Scholarly communication in the web 2.0 environment: why not?

EDITOR'S VIEWPOINT

Scholarly communication in the web 2.0 environment - why not?

Correspondence to Correspondence to: Suely de Brito Clemente Soares Cybrarian - Masters in Education, Science and Technology - FE-UNICAMP Interactive Digital Library - BRC digit@l interativa of Rio Claro Campus - UNESP email: suelybcs@rc.unesp.br.

Tim O´Reilly employed the term web 2.0, in 2005, to define a collaborative and interactive web. The web that internet users not only can search/download/print, but also build/modify/comment on/reformat. The media have immediately adopted "2.0" as an adjective for each and every that has innovation appeared since then. "Everything became 2.0". Despite criticism regarding the use of the term, the web, indeed, changed!

Possibly due to the conservative nature of scientific communication, there is still so much resistance to the adoption of both 2.0 tools and 2.0 as an adjective in the context of academic publications. Nevertheless, authors are not always aware of the advantages that they would obtain from scientific communication being open to evolving these tools in the human-mediated communication. Nowadays, persons do not only search on the web, they also interact in there! Authors would satisfy their basic necessities more easily and more rapidly regarding capture of new audiences, having their studies read by more persons and, consequently, being more frequently cited! This new environment involves not only publishing or being available on the web, but it also implies the utilization of web 2.0 tools for being visible, accessible, indexed and read!

In this context, I have three personal considerations:

1. Authors, usually, still write their papers taking into account the printed format, though their objective is to submit their manuscripts to an event organizer or electronic journal. Even now, their writing style is linear, designed for linear reading. The only innovation maintained is PDF conversion, which is, however, used for top-to-bottom and left-to-right reading, and therefore, as a printed document. Furthermore, many of these papers present two-column layout to be read on a screen!

2. Even if an author innovates by writing a hypertext, using moving images, audio or video files, dynamic tables and other means, most of the technical scientific publications are not prepared to receive this type of work. In most cases, the virtual environment is not configured to publish studies in innovative formats. Why not?

3. Perhaps the simplest innovative measure would be to prepare electronic journals to accept user commentaries after their articles. So, why not create a blog feedback section under each paper? Therefore, it is a responsibility of scientific editors to reconsider alternatives wasted by the non-use of web 2.0 tools, namely: RSS, Weblog, Social Bookmarking, Streaming Media, Podcast, Mashup, Wiki, Tagging, Folksonomy among others. I recommend the following selections: FARBER, M. How shall we write and read in twenty-first century academy? Notes on the margin of electronic publishing and Scientific communications in web 2.0 context from the blog Scientific Curiosity.

  • Correspondence to:
    Suely de Brito Clemente Soares
    Cybrarian - Masters in Education, Science and Technology - FE-UNICAMP
    Interactive Digital Library - BRC
    digit@l interativa of Rio Claro Campus - UNESP
    email:
  • Publication Dates

    • Publication in this collection
      19 Mar 2009
    • Date of issue
      2009
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