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Apr 17, 2018 Commentary
Introduction to “Specialised portals, online information services, scholarly online networks: the impact of e-infrastructures on science communication and scholarly community building”

by Dirk Hommrich

While most researchers still primarily use emails and simple websites for professional communication, the number of specialised online portals, information services and scholarly social online networks is constantly growing. This development led to the 6th workshop organized by the team of openTA, an online portal for technology assessment. This issue of JCOM pools commentaries on the workshop which deal with questions such as: what are the criteria of successful digital infrastructures? Which potential for changing workflows or scholarly interaction and collaboration patterns do we ascribe to digital infrastructures?

Volume 17 • Issue 02 • 2018

Apr 17, 2018 Commentary
Open science in the making: preliminary remarks on the putative effects of specialised online portals on scholarly collaboration and community building

by Dirk Hommrich

This commentary introduces a preliminary conceptual framework for approaching putative effects of scholarly online systems on collaboration inside and outside of academia. The first part outlines a typology of scholarly online systems (SOS), i.e., the triad of specialised portals, specialised information services and scholarly online networks which is developed on the basis of nine German examples. In its second part, the commentary argues that we know little about collaborative scholarly community building by means of SOS. The commentary closes with some remarks on further research questions regarding the putative impact of such systems on science communication and scholarly community building.

Volume 17 • Issue 02 • 2018

Mar 17, 2016 Commentary
Visual communication, popular science journals and the rhetoric of evidence

by Dirk Hommrich and Guido Isekenmeier

While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for the importance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at #POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life or references to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. We suggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetorical theory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentiality on the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on the other; our example is da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man".

Volume 15 • Issue 02 • 2016