Social Networks for Researchers on the Internet: A New Sociality?

Abstract

This article considers the digital transformations of scientific communication focusing on social networks for researchers. The author argues that such communities possess certain prospects for turning into a kind of new sociality. She highlights and critically evaluates the major features of interactions on such platforms, including: a network nature; communication “here-and-now”; mobility of ideas, methods, approaches, and solutions; open access to information and its evaluation; blurring the boundaries of previously stable social ties and relations, and overcoming cultural barriers. She argues that social networks for researchers, potentially enabling Merton’s communalism as an ethical norm and partly externalizing dispersed knowledge, can become a new sociality for those researchers who possess fewer opportunities for career fulfillment in offline mode.