"Connecting the world of science” – Facebook for scientists

In the past few years, the global community of researchers has been sharing new innovative knowledge dissemination practices, including social networking sites (SNSs). Despite early skepticism about the online platform’s ability to gain traction within the scientific community, academic social networks (ASNs) are now used by millions (Van Noorden 2014). Among the most popular ASNs, namely, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley and Zotero, Research Gate (RG) is reportedly the largest one in terms of active users. Established RG has since grown; the company, modelled after Silicon Valley startups, is currently headquartered in Berlin, with computing infrastructure in Toronto. To date RG has raised over $100 million capital from investors including, among others, Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs, Four Rivers Group, with a membership mushroomed to more than 1.5 million. RG was established in Boston in 2008 by the Harvard-trained virologist Ijad Madisch, with the aim «to connect researchers and foster collaboration» (reported in Winter 2015). RG in fact allows scholars to share publications and present their research, build an online portfolio, search a database of user publications, track demand for published articles, list scientific conferences, post public queries, contact other users, find a new/right job, etc. RG main affordances thus mainly entail knowledge dissemination; self-promotion (Barbour and Marshall 2015) and enhancing cross-borders and cross-disciplines (Kelly 2013). Additionally, not only does the site offer same features as that of other SNSs (Ovadia 2014), but has also an interface with other diffused social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Friend Feed of LinkedIn, so researchers can connect with already existing profiles. The New York Times defined RG « a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons » (Lin 2012). In this open-world RG dimension the most archetypal way of disseminating/sharing knowledge, typically based on a dyadic teacher-student(s) or parent(s)-children relationship, has been substituted with new multimodal tools which require an interactive, collaborative information-management system where also podcasts, blogs, videos, even fictional, can be exploited for educational purposes. The present study aims both to investigate the potential of ASNs and to examine if and how the RG’s multimodal affordances make science easier to access and to share within/across the disciplines. More specifically, from a multimodal discourse analysis perspective (Kress 2010, 2001; Kress. and T. van Leeuwen 2006), RG videos intended to illustrate scientific discoveries to mainstream audiences will be analysed.