Social Networking Sites and their role in Scholarly Communications :
“The study was originally defined in a specification document produced by the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham, in which the Centre indicated it wished for a report on social networking sites and their role in scholarly communication […] In particular, the Centre was interested to determine to what extent social networking sites are usurping the role of Open Access repositories and to what extent they are likely to do so in the future. The study therefore naturally needed to consider the relationship between Open Access repositories and social networking sites, both now and in the future. Furthermore, the study needed to examine the behaviour patterns of researchers in using different web locations for research communications and to attempt to predict future trends.”
URL : http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs/Social_Networking_Report-Duke&Jordan.pdf