Co-creation in health

Academic profiling services are a pervasive feature of scholarly life. Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar discuss the advantages and disadvantages of major profile platforms and look at the role of ego in how these services are built and used. Scholars validate these services by using them and should be aware that the portraits shown in these platforms depend to a great extent on the characteristics of the “mirrors” themselves.

The model of scientific communication has recently undergone a major transformation: the shift from the “Gutenberg galaxy” to the “Web galaxy”. Following in the footsteps of this shift, we are now also witnessing a turning point in the way science is evaluated. The “Gutenberg paradigm” limited research products to the printed world (books, journals, conference proceedings…) published by scholarly publishers. This model for scientific dissemination has been challenged since the end of the twentieth century by a plethora of new communication channels that allow scientific information to be (self-)published, indexed, searched, located, read, and discussed entirely on the public Web, one more example of the network society we live in.

It is not enough to write monographs. It is not enough to publish. Today, scholars must understand what happens when our research is distributed, and we must write, not for rarified audiences, but for unexpected ones. New-form scholarly publishing requires new-form scholarly (digital) writing. Digital academic publishing may on the surface appear as a lateral move from print to screen, but in fact it brings with it new questions about copyright, data analysis, multimodality, curation, archiving, and how scholarly work finds an audience. The promise of digital publishing is one that begins with the entrance of the written, and one that concludes with distribution, reuse, revision, remixing — and finally, redistribution.

Digital publishing is a field worthy of rigorous research and deep discourse. In a post-print environment, for example, social media — Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, WordPress, or Tumblr — have supplanted the static page as the primary metaphors for how we talk about the dissemination of information. Digitized words have code and algorithms behind them, and are not arrested upon the page; rather they are restive there.