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Over the past 15 years the Web has transformed the ways in which we search for and use information. The past 7 years have seen the emergence of a new array of innovative tools that go collectively under the name of "Web 2.0", where the information user by sharing or creating content is also increasingly an information producer (i.e., prosumer).
The success of the Web 2.0 tools for personal goals is only partially replicated in the professional sphere and, particularly, in the academic environment to support research and teaching needs.
In the academic context it is extremely interesting to explore how social tools support science research and how the adoption of these tools is affecting the traditional four phases of the scholarly communicatioin system: creation, certification, dissemination and preservation. In this paper we tackle with these issues. We also describe the findings of a survey carried out in 2010 by CIBER at University College London and funded by Emerald Publishing Group.
The CIBER study was carrfied out internationally online and received 1.923 complete answers by academics. Findings show that the most established Web 2.= tools are also the most popular: tools of collaborative authoring (e.g. Google Docs) are by far the most popular (62.7%), followed by social conferencing tools (e.g. Skype, 48.3% ) and by scheduling and meeting tools (e.g. Google Calendar e Doodle). In order to share images and videos, 69% of respondents used YouTube, 14% used SlideShare, and 12% Flickr. The preferred bookmarking service was Delicious. The most used social bookmarking platform was Facebook. The CIBER study also highlights subject differences in the use of the Web 2.0 technologies: scientists are the biggest users of social media, while social scientists and humanities researchers, albeit attracted by the new communicative tools, stay behind.
