Citizen-Scholars: Social Media and the Changing Nature of Scholarship

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thanks so much for submitting your study. I enjoyed reading the manuscript which is well written and presents a very timely topic clearly. I am familiar with your studies about social scholarship and this paper provides a new civic perspective to your already published research. I also appreciate the broad range of arguments to support the idea of open science and the need to become an increasing widespread culture among academic communities and the general public. The claim to make progressively available the results of scientific research, as well as the struggles academia is confronted with while doing research, is a highly valuable program that might reduce the distance between scholars and ordinary citizens. It might also contribute to keep under control the worldwide phenomenon of the fake news concerned with scientific knowledge, which has become one of the greatest challenges in our digital society.

Taking a critical stance, since you are among the most prominent scholars in the field of social media and digital scholarship, I expected to find more details about how social media platforms are impacting or not on social scholarship. I particular, I would like you to give more examples of social services that are making a difference in the promotion of open scholarly practices. I agree that Twitter may be a good case to provide explicit and implicit reviews of research products and scholarly work. However, there is an increasing amount of literature also in the field of Educational Technology about general social media, like Facebook and Twitter, for scholarly purposes and academic social network sites, like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, you can consider to strengthen your argument. I invite also you to expand the claims about the challenges involved in social scholarship and in open science when social media are employed.

I’ll be happy to read an expanded version of the study.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Thanks so much for submitting your study. I enjoyed reading the manuscript which is well written and presents a very timely topic clearly. I am familiar with your studies about social scholarship and this paper provides a new civic perspective to your already published research. I also appreciate the broad range of arguments to support the idea of open science and the need to become an increasing widespread culture among academic communities and the general public. The claim to make progressively available the results of scientific research, as well as the struggles academia is confronted with while doing research, is a highly valuable program that might reduce the distance between scholars and ordinary citizens. It might also contribute to keep under control the worldwide phenomenon of the fake news concerned with scientific knowledge, which has become one of the greatest challenges in our digital society.

Point 1: Taking a critical stance, since you are among the most prominent scholars in the field of social media and digital scholarship, I expected to find more details about how social media platforms are impacting or not on social scholarship. I particular, I would like you to give more examples of social services that are making a difference in the promotion of open scholarly practices. I agree that Twitter may be a good case to provide explicit and implicit reviews of research products and scholarly work. However, there is an increasing amount of literature also in the field of Educational Technology about general social media, like Facebook and Twitter, for scholarly purposes and academic social network sites, like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, you can consider to strengthen your argument.

Response 1: Thank you for your comments. Now on page 6-7 we provide more examples of social media in the promotion of open scholarly work. Specifically, we give examples of how social media like Facebook, Research Gate, and Academia.edu are influencing open, social scholarly practices, with both advantages and disadvantages.

Point 2: I invite also you to expand the claims about the challenges involved in social scholarship and in open science when social media are employed.

Response 2: Thank you for this suggestion. Now on page 6-7 we have expanded our discussion of the challenges involved in social scholarship. Also, on page 4, we have now included challenges to enacting open science when social media are employed.

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented manuscript provides a much needed exploration of the impact and framing of open science in the current academic models. As the field identifies a desire to move to open, distributed, transparent science models, there is a need to define and explain what these elements would mean for the individuals and system. As we continue to explore these areas, there is need to develop a system that will maintain issues of credibility and relevance in scholarly work.  This conceptual article does well to explore and document these areas.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

The presented manuscript provides a much needed exploration of the impact and framing of open science in the current academic models. As the field identifies a desire to move to open, distributed, transparent science models, there is a need to define and explain what these elements would mean for the individuals and system. As we continue to explore these areas, there is need to develop a system that will maintain issues of credibility and relevance in scholarly work.  This conceptual article does well to explore and document these areas.

Response 2: Thank you for your comments. We thank you for pointing out that our article does a good job of defining and explaining what moving to open, distributed, and transparent science models might mean for individuals and systems. We agree with you that as individual scholars and scientific disciplines explore these areas we need more articles like this one that talk about issues of credibility and relevance in scholarly work. Thank you again for your support of our article.