Collaboration among scholars has always been recognized as a fundamental feature of scientific
discovery. The ever-increasing diversity among disciplines and complexity of research problems
makes it even more compelling to collaborate in order to keep up with the fast pace of
innovation and advance knowledge. Along with the rapidly developing Internet communication
technologies and the increasing popularity of the social web we have observed many important
developments of scholarly collaboration on the academic social web. matioIn this book we
review the rapid transforn of scholarly collaboration on various academic social web platforms
and examine how these platforms have facilitated academics throughout their research
lifecycle-from forming ideas collecting data and authoring articles to disseminating
findings. We refer to the term academic social web platforms in this book as a category of Web
2.0 tools or online platforms (such as CiteULike Mendeley Academia.edu and ResearchGate)
that enable and facilitate scholarly information exchange and participation. We will also
examine scholarly collaboration behaviors including sharing academic resources exchanging
opinions following each other's research keeping up with current research trends and most
importantly building up their professional networks. Inspired by the model developed Olson et
al. [2000] on factors for successful scientific collaboration our examination of the status of
scholarly collaboration on the academic social web has four emphases: technology readiness
coupling work building common ground and collaboration readiness. Finally we talk about the
insights and challenges of all these online scholarly collaboration activities imposed on the
research communities who are engaging in supporting online scholarly collaboration. This book
aims to help researchers and practitioners understand the development of scholarly
collaboration on the academic social web and to build up an active community of scholars who
are interested in this topic.
