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 surrounding what has been termed the economy of attention. This is based on the insight that the consumption of information requires investments of time and attention. Since those are limited resources, however, as more information is produced, each item must compete for the limited attention of readers. Such competition underlines the need for all those concerned in the research communications landscape to pay close heed to issues such as ease of search and navigation, branding, and to systems that provide effective signals of trust and authority.

3.31. Social Media. Over recent years, researchers have made increasing use of social media—blogs, wikis, podcasts, online videos, Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, comments on online articles and so on. Recent studies indicate that around a half of the members of academic staff in the UK make use of some form of social media at least occasionally in the course of their work. They do so, however, for the most part on an irregular basis, and much more as readers than as creators: only a minority are frequent users and creators of social media content. Thus while researchers are generally supportive in their attitudes towards social media as a means of sharing ideas and collaborating with other members of the research community, they are wary of the lack of quality assurance, and see them as a supplement to—not a replacement for—traditional publications: they ‘cannot at any point replace high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles’ Nor do they as yet form a key part of researchers’ general workflows. In terms of our remit, they are not peer-reviewed publications.

3.32. Some services with social media aspects do, however, show signs that they might become more generally embedded in research workflows. Mendeley, for example, provides a web-based service which allows researchers to manage and annotate their bibliographies, but also to connect with colleagues and share papers and annotations with them. It also provides a means to discover papers as well as other researchers and research groups working in specific fields. It now has nearly two million registered users worldwide.

Open Access

3.33. The development of the open access movement can be traced back to the 1990s, when the earliest e-print repositories (initially called archives) and open access journals (that is, journals that make their contents available free of charge upon publication) began to appear. These initiatives were stimulated by the rapid