Exploring Digital Scholarly Communication

New Data Sources for Transfer and Translation?

More exploration is also needed in order to understand the communicative activities of scholars in adressing other peers or wider audiences in society. These activities may be interpreted as attempts to interact and exchange ideas or research results with scholars or members of society.

The recent pandemic has shown how important interactive formats between science, society, and policy are. Increasingly, these activities also do take place online (Puschmann & Mahrt, 2012). For instance, social media platforms allow scholars to interact with their peers, starting discussions and debates adressing wider society or simply announcing new research results (Sugimoto, Work, Larivière, & Haustein, 2017).

Currently, the dynamics and frictions as regards scholarly communication is only poorly understood. Though there is wide interest in the topic, it is also not clear how the various types of online communication acts can be interpreted, such as download, view, read (Haustein, Bowman, & Costas, 2016). Yet, more research of this process generated data may also allow us to understand knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer as part of a holistic approach towards knowledge production.

While the diversity of possible research output is central to the Open Science movement, Open Innovation in Science points at another problem of Research and Innovation Indicators. That is, the lack of representation of innovation activities emerging and resulting from interaction with users, citizens, laymen, all of which are considered unusual knowledge providers (H. W. Chesbrough, 2003; H. Chesbrough & Brunswicker, 2013). Yet, a more recent trend shows the relevance and significance of this source for innovation. Particularly large companies in the IT industry launch initiatives and competitions aimed at wider participation.

Some of these initiatives have given rise to novel types of interaction and collaboration with users by companies, giving way to new businesses designing the industry society interface (Inauen & Schenker‐Wicki, 2012). The booming sectors of User Interface Design, User Centred Design, user research can be read as an expression of this very recent development.

Current innovation indicator instruments such as the aforementioned innovation surveys do not reflect these collaborations, while for example, collaborations between science institutions and industry are increasingly well covered by them.