We can consider ourselves lucky. We live in a „dreamtime” of abundant and easily accessible knowledge, the importance of which is hard to overestimate. The advent of the internet democratized the availability of information, and made long-distance communication essentially free. Before, even simple tasks like finding academic papers meant browsing through volumes of reference works, often only to find that the article of interest is only available through costly interlibrary loans. The chance of never stumbling upon something that could have been useful was in no small part a matter of luck. Interacting with researchers and the public was infrequent and limited. The digital revolution eliminated these constraints – but there are new challenges ahead.The way scientists are doing things has fundamentally changed, yet the status quo and the inequality of the academic landscape is largely unaffected. Papers published in the so-called „glamour journals” are on average somewhat better, but tend to get several magnitudes greater number of citations than those published in more modest periodicals. Though the accessibility of the top and mid/low-tier journals is now basically the same, yet the Matthew effect of science still persists. The dramatic increase of research activity is at least partially responsible for this. For example in 2015 about twice as many articles were indexed in PubMed, as in 2005. Since the amount of information is overwhelming, scientists need to go out of their way, and seek unorthodox ways to increase the visibility of their research, The widely used „publish or perish” phrase is now almost obsolescent – without using novel means to stand out of the crowd one can easily publish and perish. Research published by the top dogs of academic publishing is made sure to get the limelight, by promotion through e.g. popular science news sites, accompanying editorials, and influential newsletters. However, less prestigious venues usually don’t have the same resources. Even if you are a really successful scientist, chances are that most of your papers won’t end up in the elite journals. This means that to scientists need to go DIY, take action, and reach out towards their audience - and this is where social networking sites can be game changers. Effective use of social networking services certainly goes beyond posting selfies with posters and blurry images of  the keynote speech. All the different services have their own strengths and weaknesses so finding the best way to your audience requires some experimentation. Twitter for example is selective if not aristocratic, having a handful of key influencers at the top, and a vast number of users with modest followership. So unless you have influential followers to boost your visibility, your tweets will likely to remain unnoticed regardless their quality. However twitter is great for learning how to be succinct – 140 characters really isn’t much after all. In contrast, reddit is more "democratic": find a relevant subreddit for your content, submit, and wait for the collective decision of the community. Only the quality of your submission matters, its irrelevant whether you have just registered or you have a 20-times gilded account with a karma of 1M. But what if your article would be too technical to follow for a broader audience?  Do what the top journals do – write a short perspective piece about it, highlighting the main findings and importance of your study using layman’s terms, give it a expressive title and share it as a blog post (e.g. medium is a good venue for this). Unfortunately, undergrads/grad students are rarely bombarded by requests to deliver keynote speeches at conferences at sunny resorts Thus, junior researchers should embrace alternative ways to connect with other scientists working on their field, and professional networking sites like Researchgate or Academia.edu can be of great help. These sites make it easier to follow the activity of other researchers, share paper, presentation, or raw data, ask/answer technical questions, review papers and preprints, and ask others to scrutinize yours – so all in all interact with your peers, hone your communication skills, and if all goes well establish collaborations. In summary: social networking sites (both academic and of general) offer some much needed leverage for early career scientists, spark collaborations, and can reduce the infamous Matthew effect in science. The scientific community should utilize these non-traditional forms of outreach more actively, which should be reflected by the graduate school curriculum as well.

Despite its importance for the evolution and final end states of stars, the physics of stellar angular momentum transport remains poorly understood. Recent advances in ensemble asteroseismology has yielded measurements of core rotation in many ascending red giant branch stars (RGB) . The main result (Fig [period]) is that the cores of these stars are rotating at least 10 times slower than what is predicted by state-of-the art models . Moreover, detailed asteroseismic modeling shows that the bulk of radial differential rotation is localized in the radiative region between the H-burning shell and the bottom of the convective envelope . The magnetorotational instability (MRI) has been extensively studied in the context of angular momentum transport in accretion disks. However, it is not clear what role–if any–it might play in the radiative regions of differentially rotating stars. The existing literature is limited , and attempts to simulate this mechanism in stellar interiors have not yielded complete results appropriate for inclusion in stellar evolution codes. We propose to investigate the role of the MRI in stars using simulations that account for the important physical ingredients of stellar radiative regions: stable radial stratification, mean molecular weight gradients, differential rotation, and magnetic fields. These effects are parameterized by the Brunt-Väisälä frequency N, background gradient ∇μ, shear parameter q = dlogΩ/dlogR, and plasma β. emphasized the importance _double-diffusive_ effects in the stellar MRI. These effects occur when there is an imbalance between the microphysical dissipation of momentum ν, magnetic field η, and heat χ. In their analysis, they note that double diffusive effects can both stabilize and destabilize depending on the relative ratio of these coefficients. Here, we will carefully consider the effects of double-diffusive effects by a series of fast, linear solutions to characterize the parameter space most relevant to stellar parameters. Using the Dedalus framework, we will simulate the MRI in a simplified geometry to extract effective torques over a range of parameters. We will then implement these results in a 1D implementation in the MESA code to test against the full set of observations available: the core rotation of red giants, the solar core rotation profile, and the final spin rate of compact remnants. This project is extremely ambitious owing to the many length scales that must be resolved simultaneously and the very large parameter space to be spanned. However, we have at our disposal the ideal tools to make significant progress: the spectral magnetohydrodynamic simulation framework Dedalus and the extremely flexible stellar evolution code MESA. Dedalus provides an excellent platform to study the MRI in stellar interiors: it can be adapted to include the new terms and its spectral accuracy ensures that the widest possible dynamic range for a given resolution (Fig. [Dedalus]). Thanks to the extraordinary results from Kepler asteroseismology and the versatility of the open stellar evolution code MESA, we will be able to immediately test our results against the observations. This project could lead to a novel theory for internal angular momentum transport in stellar interiors, and, among other results, to updated predictions for SN and GRB progenitors. Both the Dedalus and MESA codes are fully open, so our results will be fully testable and reproducible by the astrophysics community. We will publish not only our results, but also our input files and configuration for both codes.

A common workflow in submitting scientific work to a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or conference, is to adhere to specially provided submission guidelines. To many this story is painfully familiar: your document must satisfy a long enumeration of requirements, including an official citation style, font face, margin and font sizes, single- or multi-column, frontmatter arrangements, ... The list goes on. The work on styling a finished document alone is known to take anywhere from a day to a week, irrespective of which tool you used - Word and LaTeX users alike had to sweat it out. What makes this situation a nightmare rather than an annoyance, however, is that more often than not a manuscript is rejected and needs to be resubmitted to a different venue, where this tedious procedure needs to be repeated from scratch. And that process can repeat for several iterations. As academics are urged to publish their work as quickly and often as possible, this type of friction accumulates.

Social media is like a magnet that can draw attention to our research One day I received an email from a researcher who is living in Japan. He said there’s something wrong with my supplementary data set which was published in a paper in 2014. Apparently there was a miss-location in one of the coordinates. Recently, I received an email from a fellow researcher from UK asking for my availability to be the co-PI (Principal Investigator) on a project. Both researchers said they know me and my work from social media. I EVEN GOT INVITED FOR A COFFEE SCIENCE-TALK ORIGINATING FROM A “MENTION” ON TWITTER. Social media opens what once a closed-loop Although Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world, it doesn’t make our research have more impact. This is mostly due to language barrier and limited network. FOR YEARS WE TEND TO DO RESEARCH ONLY AS PERSONAL OR ORGANIZATIONAL EVENT, NO MORE AND NO LESS. Nevertheless, out of that manner, we demand acknowledgment, citations, and better yet we use that citation counts to judge who are more prominent than others. Research had been placed as a closed-loop activity, with no attention from others except the team member itself. More and more research will ended up as closed report and then locked up in somebody’s drawers or some dusty shelves in the library. Social media could be the answer we’ve been looking for. Continue reading and we will show you that IT IS THE ANSWER WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR. Please kindly visit my ScienceOpen interview with Jon Tennant. Social media creates and opens more doors of opportunity Before we know and use social media, as academics living in a developing country, we have suffered from brain drain, lack of ideas, lack of facilities, lack of information and limited network. Today, we can harvest ideas in a snap, add some thoughts, and having more ideas in return. We can exchange ideas with people from the other side of the globe (or other part of the world, for those who believe the earth is flat-your choice). We know about the latest work/ scholarship offers within minutes. It is that easy. We read more science than ever before; we learn from it and disseminate it further. Borrowing [@Thesiswhisperer](www.twitter.com/thesiswhisperer) ’s words “WHEN I READ THE TWEETS OF OTHERS I CONSUME THEIR THOUGHTS AND IDEAS”. We believe people now capture ideas more quickly from social media feeds. Instead of have a direct conversation, most of us are now skillful in fast reading and typing to explain something in less than 160 characters. Social media attracts more scientific-generousity So you might ask what did we and so many others do on social media. Did we just create and respond to random posts or chats, spend more time on it than on our real work, the one we get paid for? No, we simply share what we know and re-tweet others’ that we thought would be valuable for our followers. It could be an inspirational one, a knowledge-driven one, or even a funny one. We don’t intend to brag (or humblebrag) about what we do, we’re just letting others know what we have achieved, and what we have not due to many obstacles. Share the ones we know and the ones we don’t. A KIND SOUL WOULD STEP FORWARD AND TELL YOU WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR WORK AND HOW YOU CAN MAKE IT MORE SOUND. Social media multiplies learning curve Many times, we just send out words. We don’t know who would read nor deeply care about them, but oftentimes people just show up and send us their opinions, corrections, and inputs to expand and enrich our work. On the other hand, simplest rule of nature applies, “you reap what you sow”. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A GIANT ‘TAKE AND GIVE’ SPYDER WEB. We share solutions, instant help, or just send our sincere and deepest sympathy. In the future, others will help you in a way you could never predict. OUR NUMBER ONE MOTTO AS HEALTHY AND BREATHING ACADEMICS IS ‘THE MORE WE SHARE THE MORE WE LEARN’. Isn’t it a wonderful way to live our life?

In the digital age, how are people supposed to know what you’re doing if you don’t share it with them? We are moving into a research age that is all about breaking down barriers, by embracing the reason why the Web was created - for sharing knowledge. We are recognising as a collective that collaboration and communities are more powerful than individuals and isolation. The parallels are everywhere, in the open source and open education movements, for example. For me as a researcher, open science has always been a complex beast to comprehend as a process. But as a vision, it was easy, based on the underlying principles of freedom and sharing. Social media was one way of helping to push forward towards that vision, by reshaping how I both think and operate as a researcher. And you know what? It’s liberating. Knowing there is a world beyond your desk or lab bench, where people are genuinely interested in your work, and want to interact with you and help build you up as a researcher and a person. You feel connected to like-minded spirits, and are empowered by the presence of others also trying to break down ivory towers and walls and make research something for everyone. I would not be where I am now without social media. There is an enormous, welcoming, and energetic community of researchers out there who every single day are a support mechanism for unleashing your potential as a researcher. For example, the OpenCon community is something I would not be part of without dabbling in social media, and through it learning about the open access trade. OpenCon was the first time as an academic I felt truly passionate about, well, anything - it was like an inferno was lit inside me, and I felt this burning desire to commit to this vision for an ’Open World’ as much as possible, and to help others see it too. Two years down the line, I spend every day now supporting the principles of open through various aspects of the scholarly communication process. Social media plays a huge role in this, as part of a massive scale structural re-think towards how we treat and regard knowledge as a society. Social platforms help us to re-shape cultural attitudes towards knowledge generation, and the sharing of that knowledge for the betterment of everyone. Being open about my own research and sharing my work on social media as it was still ongoing has led to many successful collaborations. I have been fortunate to be included now on three research publications, which I would not otherwise have been involved in if other researchers involved hadn’t seen that I was working on similar things by sharing them on social media. In an academic climate where papers are still the trading currency, this collaboration has been invaluable in improving my profile as a researcher, but also in opening up a whole new channel of learning that otherwise would have been closed to me. Often with social media, it’s not obvious what opportunities will present themselves, but you sure as hell won’t find out unless you actually give it a shot and make a commitment. As well as for academic networking, social media can be a powerful platform for public engagement. It is imperative that scientists bond more with wider society to help foster a greater understanding of the world around us. Indeed, what’s the point in doing research after all if no-one is going to learn from it? In spite of this, using social platforms in this manner is still often viewed as superlative to the ‘real work’ of researchers. So, research. Often when people ask me about Twitter or blogging, they say “Oh, that must be good for your CV”, or something similar. Which kind of misses the point entirely - we do these things because of a deep belief that science belongs to everyone, not to parade ourselves around in public. It needs to be seen that research and broader dissemination of research are not disparate, opposite, or disconnected. Research has not been complete until it has been communicated in the best possible way to the maximal audience possible. Realisation of this is the first major step towards embedding a wider sense of ‘science for society’ in our research culture, and being part of reaching a collective vision that science belongs to everyone and not just the priveleged few.

[] _Social_ is probably the last word that people who know me well (Hi Mom!) would use to describe me. But being one of those pesky _millenials_, I was born too late to ever get to know the (academic) Dark Ages intimately, i.e. the pre-internet past. That, and my abysmal high school diploma, which made sure that no university would accept me for studies in the two years after finishing school – afforded me lots of spare time for _professional social networking/instagramming_, or _blogging_ as it was called then. So I came, somewhat naturally, from blogging about my daily routines to writing about my adventures in the lab, studying and doing science. At some point in ~2008 this developed into the idea of doing a joint science blog with Philipp, then my fellow student of biology, now my co-conspirator on _openSNP_. Being good students we came up with the blog’s title, _Beerology_, after a couple of those I assume (nope, the pun doesn’t really work better in German). Writing about our studies, the latest scientific papers we had read and about the political changes in European Academia not only helped in learning about other perspectives through comments, but also in more tangible scientific experiences. Besides regularly meeting up with other blogging scientists, it also helped in getting around a bit, like like my trip to the _Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings_ in 2010. Many of the friendships formed on these trips are good and lasting. In the best case allowing me to Erdős-esk crash on couches around the globe, re-visiting friends wherever the academic life brings me to. This already means the world if you’ve been on the research-travel-circuit for long enough. However, it probably won't convince everyone of the benefits of social media. Especially not if you're dealing with people who for example complain about things like _professional instagramming_. So let’s instead turn to the metrics that scientists care about: getting publications out. According to Google Scholar I’ve (co-)published 12 manuscripts since 2012. Why is this relevant in the context of discussing the benefits of Social Media for your research? Well, just looking through these I find that OVER 40% OF MY PUBLICATIONS WERE ONLY EVER WRITTEN IN THAT FORM THANKS TO SOCIAL MEDIA. My Master’s degree in Ecology & Evolution nicely explains my work on plants/fungi/fish/rabbit poop (yes, that’s a thing). But my work on bioethics and personal genomics is not a natural fit to my professional education, to say the least. And this is because those were developed completely independently, to a good extent even while I was still finishing up said degree. First, there are the two publications on family-wide personal genomics and crowdsourced personal genomics. These go back to Philipp and me finding the work by @manuelcorpas on these topics more or less accidentally on Twitter & Reddit. Some tweets & emails back-and-forth later I was not only sitting on a plane to the UK to meet in person & discuss how to improve our project _openSNP_, but it also led to two very cool papers, with one of them even being the second-most influential paper in that journal for that year. In a similar way the collaborations with @EffyVayena go back to Twitter as far as I can tell. Besides working on participant-led research, we also did a large survey amongst the users of _openSNP_, collecting very useful data on our cohort, which is being analyzed and written up right now. It’s hard to overstate how useful these connections have been and still are, especially given that I was still early in my career at the time of embarking on those collaborations. Usually you don’t easily get the opportunity to form international collaborations as a Master’s student. But thanks to social media you might as well, especially if you want to connect with people outside your own narrow research field. Because if it was not for social media, I probably would not have been doing some social science. So the TL;DR is: SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T ONLY GREAT TO FIND PEOPLE TO TALK SCIENCE TO, BUT ALSO TO FIND PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO SCIENCE.

Social media is generally discouraged in science today. A recent article, "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer" castigated scholars with active online social lives. Most advisors won't ask you to "tweet out our paper" or "write a blog post about our findings" and it's likely that you'd close Twitter or Reddit if your colleague or advisor walked by. Some conferences have taken it so far as to enforce a "no tweeting" policy. But social networking is here to stay and will likely become even more integrated into our lives and research.

On September 15th, 2016 Authorea CEO and Cofounder, Alberto Pepe, encouraged the Reddit science community to ask him anything. Below are a few excerpts from the AMA on the topic of metrics and impact. Click here for the full thread.

On September 15th, 2016 Authorea CEO and Cofounder, Alberto Pepe, encouraged the Reddit science community to ask him anything. Below are a few excerpts from the AMA on the topic of Authorea's business model. Click here for the full thread.

On September 15th, 2016 Authorea CEO and Cofounder, Alberto Pepe, encouraged the Reddit science community to ask him anything. Below are a few excerpts from the AMA. Click here for the full thread.Read AMA discussions on the topic of quality control in publishing, metrics/ranking/impact, or Authorea's business model.

On September 15th, 2016 Authorea CEO and Cofounder, Alberto Pepe, encouraged the Reddit science community to ask him anything. Below are a few excerpts from the AMA on the topic of quality control in scientific publishing. Click here for the full thread.

The Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is the official image celebrating the 26th anniversary of Hubble's launch into Earth orbit's. Since 1990 Hubble has been capturing awe-inspiring images of the Universe. Floating about 350 miles above the Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is able to take high-resolution images free of the image-distortion that occurs due to atmospheric turbulence. Hubble performs a full orbit around the Earth approximately every 95 minutes, and since its launch has completed 1.2 million observations. Among its many accomplishments, HST helped scientists determine the rate of expansion of the Universe.

CERN's 2008 Large Hadron Collider is not just the world's largest and most powerful particle collider but also the largest single machine and most complex experimental facility. Here, physicists are able to test fundamental physics theories by smashing particles with extremely high energies. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."

I started a Twitter account in 2010, during my first year of graduate school, because I was told I needed to. Not by my graduate program, but by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). I had just been accepted to be an official “neuro-blogger” for the SfN conference – an annual gathering that draws over 30,000 attendees. The requirements for outreach were minimal: at least one blog post per day during the conference, preferably within our assigned “theme”. Additional postings were encouraged and Twitter accounts were mandatory. 

Thomas Edison has an impressive 2,332 worldwide patents. Some of his well-known inventions include the phonograph, motion pictures, and the magnetic iron ore separator. After the success of his first major invention, the quadruplex telegraph, Edison wanted to build his own laboratory so that he could continue to innovate. In 1875, he purchased around 34 acres in Raritan Township, NJ and built the "Invention Factory". By Spring 1876, the Invention Factory consisted of a main laboratory, ancillary buildings, a carpenters’ shop, carbon shed, and blacksmith shop. His first breakthrough at the Invention Factory, the phonograph, produced the first voice recording (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) and earned Edison the title, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”.

When I first read the question for this essay competition, I immediately associated the word 'social' with the word 'personal', i.e. outside of work. Social media is becoming an important source of primary information about the lives of ordinary people like you and me. But I am wary.

Last Thursday, September 22nd, we held our 5th New York open science meetup (#opensciencenyc). Science journalists, Columbia faculty members, and enthusiasts from our open science meetup group came out to hear Dr. Stuart Firestein talk about ignorance in scientific research and why it is necessary and valuable (yes, you read that right).

Social media is generally discouraged in science today. A recent article, "I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer" castigated scholars with active online social lives. Most advisors won't ask you to "tweet out our paper" or "write a blog post about our findings" and it's likely that you'd close Twitter or Reddit if your colleague or advisor walked by. Some conferences have taken it so far as to enforce a "no tweeting" policy. But social networking is here to stay and will likely become even more integrated into our lives and research.