I couldn’t agree more with this – I’m also fascinated by what this shift entails for the provision of services within institutions. The best answer I can offer is ‘networked facilitators’ though I’m not entirely sure what that means in practice beyond academic technologists proactively engaging with research communities on a range of levels and, perhaps, increasingly supplementing the strategic delivery of services with tactical collaboration on a more ad hoc basis, learning from direct engagement in practical settings and feeding that back into broader strategic questions.
You’re probably familiar with Linked-in: it is a profile service for many sorts of people and I’ve noticed that outside the UK it is used for academic networking too, more so than inside the UK, at least in the circles I move in. It has 225 million members. You might not know about Academia.edu (nearly 3 million) and researchgate (2.8 million). They are examples of social networks for academics. Google scholar allows academics to manage their publications profile. Flavours.me is one of several personal profile tools that allows you to pull together identity over many platforms.
Now comes ORCID, a researcher identifier scheme increasingly being adopted by big publishers and third party web services alike. In it’s own words:
“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated…
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Mark Carrigan 