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Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications. We report findings from a study of the use of Web 2.0 services by UK researchers and their use in novel forms of scholarly communication. We document the contours of adoption, the barriers and enablers, and the dynamics of innovation in Web services and scholarly practices. We conclude by considering the steps that different stakeholders might take to encourage greater experimentation and uptake.

Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via the action of retweeting. Following a comparison with different predictive methods, and due to the distribution exhibited by our dependent size measure, we used the zerotruncated negative binomial (ZTNB) regression method. To model survival, the Cox regression technique was used because it estimates proportional hazard rates for independent measures. Following a principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the data, social, temporal and content factors of the tweet were used as predictors in both models. Given the likely emotive reaction caused by the event, we emphasize the influence of emotive content on propagation in the discussion section. From a sample of Twitter data collected following the event (N = 427,330) we report novel findings that identify that the sentiment expressed in the tweet is statistically significantly predictive of both size and survival of information flows of this nature. Furthermore, the number of offline press reports relating to the event published on the day the tweet was posted was a significant predictor of size, as was the tension expressed in a tweet in relation to survival. Furthermore, time lags between retweets and the cooccurrence of URLS and hashtags also emerged as significant.

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of 'practical ethical action' in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid's potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and eScience systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.

In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of 'big and broad' social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this 'data deluge' in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological debates and consider how they relate to the emergence of big and broad social data as a product, reflexive artefact and organizational feature of emerging global digital society. We then explore the challenges and opportunities afforded to social science through the widespread adoption of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies and the gathering momentum of the open data movement, grounding our observations in the work of the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) project. In conclusion, we argue that these challenges and opportunities motivate a renewed interest in the programme for a 'public sociology', characterized by the co-production of social scientific knowledge involving a broad range of actors and publics.

The increase of interest in using social media as a source for research has motivated tackling the challenge of automatically geolocating tweets, given the lack of explicit location information in the majority of tweets. In contrast to much previous work that has focused on location classification of tweets restricted to a specific country, here we undertake the task in a broader context by classifying global tweets at the country level, which is so far unexplored in a real-time scenario. We analyse the extent to which a tweet's country of origin can be determined by making use of eight tweet-inherent features for classification. Furthermore, we use two datasets, collected a year apart from each other, to analyse the extent to which a model trained from historical tweets can still be leveraged for classification of new tweets. With classification experiments on all 217 countries in our datasets, as well as on the top 25 countries, we offer some insights into the best use of tweet-inherent features for an accurate country-level classification of tweets. We find that the use of a single feature, such as the use of tweet content alone -the most widely used feature in previous work -leaves much to be desired. Choosing an appropriate combination of both tweet content and metadata can actually lead to substantial improvements of between 20% and 50%. We observe that tweet content, the user's self-reported location and the user's real name, all of which are inherent in a tweet and available in a real-time scenario, are particularly useful to determine the country of origin. We also experiment on the applicability of a model trained on historical tweets to classify new tweets, finding that the choice of a particular combination of features whose utility does not fade over time can actually lead to comparable performance, avoiding the need to retrain. However, the difficulty of achieving accurate classification increases slightly for countries with multiple commonalities, especially for English and Spanish speaking countries.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of the emergence of virtual research environments (VREs) and related e‐research tools for scholarly work and communications processes.Design/methodology/approachThe concepts of VREs and of e‐research more generally are introduced and relevant literature is reviewed. On this basis, the authors discuss the developing role they play in research practices across a number of disciplines and how scholarly communication is beginning to evolve in response to the opportunities these new tools open up and the challenges they raise.FindingsVirtual research environments are beginning to change the ways in which researchers go about their work and how they communicate with each other and with other stakeholders such as publishers and service providers. The changes are driven by the changing landscape of data production, curation and (re‐)use, by new scientific methods, by changes in technology supply and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research in many domains.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is based on observations drawn from a number of projects in which the authors are investigating the uptake of advanced ICT in research. The paper describes the role of VREs as enablers of changing research practices and the ways in which they engender changes in scholarly work and communications.Practical implicationsLibrarians and other information professionals need to be aware of how advanced ICTs are being used by researchers to change the ways they work and communicate. Through their experiences with the integration of virtual learning environments within library information services, they are well placed to inform developments that may well change scholarly communications fundamentally.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to emerging discussions about the likely trajectory and impact of advanced ICTs on research and their implications for those, such as librarians and other information professionals, who occupy important support roles.