This document summarizes the research questions, methodology, and barriers of a PhD project on open science and scholarly communication. The project will examine UK academic researchers' attitudes toward open science through interviews, surveys, and content analysis. It will compare current attitudes to findings from 2010 to see if they have changed as new researchers have entered the field. The goal is to identify strategies to enhance scholarly communication and the impact of open science, which faces barriers like lack of incentives, rewards, time, and technical challenges.

1. Are the New Forms of Scholarly Communication the
pathway to Open Science?
By Yimei Zhu
This PhD project is funded by Manchester eResearch Centre under the supervision of
Professor Rob Procter
Research Questions
• Are the attitudes of UK academic
researchers towards open science
positive or negative?
• What experience have UK academic
researchers had towards open science?
Scholarly Communication • Have attitudes changed in the last 3
• All the activities and norms of years since “Facebook generation”
academic research related to joined research community? (compare
producing, exchanging and with findings by Procter at al 2010)
disseminating knowledge. • What strategies can be adopted to
• Peer-review publication in print has enhance the impact of scholarly
transformed to electronic formats communication practice?
on the World Wide Web. Methodology
• Social Media can facilitate a real- • Pilot interviews by face-to-face, emails
time communication. and Skype
Open Science • Internet Survey to gain a representative
• Scientific information, articles, data, sample of UK academics
methods and tools available freely • Follow-up interviews
online to everyone with internet
access. • Online participant observation and
• content analysis
Openness and sharing
Conference Presentation Slides
Academic Reward System
Shall we use social media for our
Research quality gets judged by research?
publication and its citation impact. http://yimeizhueresearch.wordpress.com
Barriers of Open Science Reference
• Lack of incentives for sharing • Procter, R., Williams, R., Stewart, J., Poschen,
research output and using social M., Snee, H., Voss, A. & Asgari-Targhi, M.
media (2010). Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in
scholarly communications. Philosophical
• Fear of not being able to secure Transactions of the Royal Society A, 368(1926).
academic rewards
• Time and effort
• Technical challenges and lack of
standards
Please contact me if you are interested in my project.
Twitter: @yimeizhu
yimei.zhu@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk