CAREER: Transforming Online Scholarly Communication with Networked Crowd Computation

The goal of this CAREER proposal is to unleash the transformative potential of the online dissemination of science by first providing, based on uniquely rich high-dimensional real-world data, fundamental knowledge about (1) how research findings are disseminated on various online platforms, (2) what scholarship dominates the broad discussion about science, and (3) whether there are specific sharing patterns that would anticipate the outcome of thorough peer review. We will utilize the gained insights to develop informed tools which will (a) help ensure that the online circulation of science benefits researchers from various disciplines, institutions, and cultures; and (b) use the collective intelligence coded in sharing networks to lay the foundations for a crowd review system. The latter would be especially useful for science journalists who are often combing through growing volumes of articles on arXiv before these are subjected to traditional peer review. Overall, this research promises to improve considerably our ability to trace, assess, use, and influence the online dissemination of science towards attaining a scholarly communication system with greater visibility, heterogeneity, and utility. Tightly integrated with the proposed research, the educational and outreach objectives from this proposal consist of (1) curriculum development for different education levels and backgrounds; (2) workshops for underrepresented minorities in science to introduce them to the proposed tool that provides personalized strategies for increasing the online visibility of their scholarship; and (3) webinars for science journalists to train them in the usage of the proposed crowd review system.