How can a social network be used to increase the dissemination of research

I recently undertook some study to answer this question, at the time of my research I knew nothing about steemit, I'm not sure how I missed it after the countless searches I did around this topic. The area I looked at was the use of blockchain technology in social networks, so I was delighted to hear about this network whilst listening to Lets Talk Bitcoin podcast. Anyway below I will post my shortened abstract which can also be found at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/10187. I will post something more substantial and further commentary around this topic at a later date.

Before reading on it is worth noting that the abstract is written within the context of a presentation I gave at an online conference hosted by the OU as part of my MA ODE.

How can a social network be used to increase dissemination of research?

To begin to understand how we may be able to increase dissemination of research, first we must look at the possible reasons as to why research is not being shared as far widely and as quickly as it could be, my presentation will be looking at ways in which we could increase the dissemination of research and why this might be an advantage.

Leetaru (2016) asks the question, “Why has academia not embraced the internet revolution.” In this article he describes the high cost of journal articles, this can be paid by institutions in the form of subscriptions, and then the journals are made available to its members. This of course means that the readership will be limited to the members of those institutions unless of course motivated individuals pay subscriptions themselves. The other option is the open access model, these articles are free to read but the author will generally pay the fee to an open access publisher like Elsevier, this can range from $500-$5000 (www.elsevier.com). This is a barrier that could be stopping some important work from being read by a large proportion of the population. Weller (2011) describes a conversation between himself and a research student, where the student had asked how much he is likely to be paid for his article, only to be shocked to hear he would most likely be the one paying.

Nielsen (2011) argues that networked science has the ability to not only speed up discovery but amplify our collective intelligence, but to counter this he also points out that there are cultural obstacles that are blocking networked science from achieving its full potential. If we can think for a moment about the exponential function whereby as the numbers increase then the growth will increase at an ever faster rate, by harnessing the intelligence of the many we could see exponential progression in much the same way. In his 2011 talk, Adrian Treuille spoke about his involvement with Foldit, a protein folding game with crowdsourcing science at its core. This application allows gamers to play a game of Foldit and in doing so, solve a complex scientific problem by harnessing the skills of many people rather than a small number of scientists in a laboratory. In order to harness the collective, it is necessary for recognition to take place, Fenner (2011) lays out some principles in his book, “Changing the conduct of Science in the information age” these principles include being able to assign credit and the ability to uniquely identify specific research.
The academic paper I am undertaking will be looking at these problems and ways in which they can be addressed. The academic paper will be part of a larger project where the findings are used to create a workable real life solution in which the dissemination of research is increased, allowing for the collective intelligence of the masses to be harnessed so we can start to see some exponential progression.