We have been experimenting with social media and web 2.0 tools and technologies at Huddersfield since 2005:

Stone, Graham (2011) Social Media in Computing and Library Services at the University of Huddersfield. Illuminea (7).

We plan to feature the usual RSS feeds from the Teaching and Lifelong Learning landing page and also to Tweet new articles as they are published. However, we would like to go a step further than this by encouraging authors and readers to use social media based on the recommendations of the RIN report, ‘If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0’

Ultimately this is more than we can achieve during the life of this project, as it will involve buy in from funders, universities, computing and library services and the researchers themselves. However, as a university we are committed to this. Huddersfield and then Imperial College were the first universities to run courses promoting social media to researchers:

Stone, Graham and Collins, Ellen (2011) 25 Research Things @ Huddersfield: engaging researchers with social media. ALISS Quarterly.

Collins, Ellen, Pattern, David and Stone, Graham (2010) 25 Research Things.

Imperial College, Blogs, Twitter, wikis and other web-based tools: Collaborating and building your online presence (2011)

In addition Publishing Perspectives have put together a round up, ‘What Role Does Social Networking Have in Scholarly Publishing?’ based on discussion at the Association of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP) conference.

We are also looking into the SNEEP suite of social networking extensions as part of the journal pages on the Repository – for this we have to thank our fellow JISC project SAS Open Journals for the inspiration for this. This will allow readers of the journal to comment, tag and make notes once they log in. However, this will be dependent on how comfortable readers feel with social media and this leads us back to the way this is encouraged by their host institutions.

We do have more ambitious ideas which we will keep working on after the project completes. One of the project team, Dr. Ian Pitchford, is very keen on the concept of open peer commentary from a group of appointed expert individuals. One such model can be seen at Behavioural and Brain Sciences, which has thousands of appointed open peer commentators. It’s become so prestigious to be a Behavioural and Brain Sciences affiliate that it is the sort of thing academics put on their CVs!