This paper conveys the outcomes of what results to be the first, though initial, overview of commenting platforms and related 2.0 resources born within and for the astrophysical community (from 2004 to 2016). Experiences were added, mainly in the physics domain, for a total of 22 major items, including four epijournals, and four supplementary resources, thus casting some light onto an unexpected richness and consonance of endeavours. These experiences rest almost entirely on the contents of the database ArXiv, which adds to its merits that of potentially setting the grounds for web 2.0 resources, and research behaviours, to be explored. Most of the experiences retrieved are UK and US based, but the resulting picture is international, as various European countries, China and Australia have been actively involved. Final remarks about creation patterns and outcome of these resources are outlined. The results integrate the previous studies according to which the web 2.0 is presently of limited use for communication in astrophysics and vouch for a role of researchers in the shaping of their own professional communication tools that is greater than expected. Collaterally, some aspects of ArXiv s recent pathway towards partial inclusion of web 2.0 features are touched upon. Further investigation is hoped for.
Significant literature has proved that scholarly communities shape their online communication and information practices in different modes according to the different disciplinary domains ( [15], with a review of the literature; [16]). These variably adjusted practices include uptake and use patterns of specific online tools or families of tools, as it has been illustrated, e.g., for social media within research environments [45,51,53].
The community of astrophysicists and that of physicists have received considerable attention with regard to these topics, probably for having pioneeringly taken the path of remodelling a significant part of their internal communication by means of the Internet, and conceivably -with specific regard to astrophysics -also for being a relatively small and tendentially self-contained scholarly community. Studies have ranked physics as the third discipline by use of social media in general [9,51], although appropriate warnings have been issued with regard to the specific behaviour of sub-disciplines [46]. As for astrophysics, the preferred modes of scholarly interaction have been convincingly found to consist of email exchanges and colloquia within working groups [25]. Also, it has been maintained that “astrophysicists have limited engagement with Web 2.0 technologies”, while the role of “email networks” for communication has been stressed, in an overall setting where “face-to-face interaction remains an essential part of the collaborative process” [25]. This has later been confirmed by [13,33] (the former in a specific context, the latter for high energy physicists).
In recent times, though, a non-negligible diffusion of some 2.0 communication tools has in fact been detected. Light has been cast on the use of Twitter [26,27,29] and on that of professional social networks ( [33]; at present, anyway, these practices don’t appear to have decisively undermined the most established communication trends in the discipline.
The present research is aimed at understanding astrophysicists’ and physicists’ disposition towards paper commenting and rating in online contexts, through dedicated platforms. Interactivity is among the major marks of the web 2.0 era [40], and it interlinks with the progressive erosion of scholarly consensus around the classic form of peer-review ( [23,54]; a review is in [3]). As such, scholarly commenting has been object of dedicated studies since the first decade of the present century. Neylon and Wu [37] have provided valuable considerations and insights into this practice at large: “commenting in the scientific community simply hasn’t worked, at least not generally”, because scientists “are used to criticizing articles in the privacy of offices and local journal clubs, not in a public, archived forum”, which may damage careers; anonimity has pros and cons, namely it “can support more direct and honest discussion but [. . .] often degrades discussions [. . .]. Another issue is that the majority of people making hiring and granting decisions do not consider commenting a valuable contribution” [37].
In 2008, Michael Nielsen had supported the same perspective on his blog [39], and subsequently identified a further obstacle in researchers’ tendency not to build the tools for online commenting on themselves, which would be a driver of success for this kind of practice. In his words, “to create an open scientific culture that embraces new online tools, two [. . .] tasks must be achieved: first, build superb online tools; and second, cause the cultural changes necessary for those tools to be accepted. [ . . .] [The former] requires a rare combination of strong design and technical skills, and a deep understanding of how science works. The difficulty is [that] the people who best understand how science works are scientists themselves, yet building such tools is not something scientists are typically encouraged [ . . .] to do” [38]. Procter et al. are in line, confirming that “so far [ . . .] providing ratings or comments on articles has not proved popular” in various scientific contexts [45].
The research that follows proposes a contextual revision of some of these otherwise sharable considerations, as it tracks remarkable exceptions in scientists’ behaviour towards the creation and -to some extent -uptake of commenting tools based on the world-famous preprint database ArXiv.
The community of astrophysicists and -to the extent to which it has been surveyed -that of physicists, with the addition of some mathematicians, shows over time a persisting effort to create 2.0 tools of its own, destinated to colleagues, with the purpose of openly commenting papers posted on ArXiv.
The present research can be estimated to have required about fifteen months of activity (FTE). The first documentation (both literature and web resources) was retrieved in late 2014, the last one in March 2017, with updates in Autumn.
Internet search engines have proved to be of limited usefulnes
This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.
