as Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley. Academia.edu (2013) reported nearly 9 million registered users in 2013, and ResearchGate over 3 million, although how many of these are active is not clear. The combination of these two factors means that academics are more likely to have some form of online identity.
Veletsianos (2012) identifies seven ways in which scholars use Twitter: to share information, resources and media; to share information about teaching; to request assistance from and respond to requests from others; to engage in social commentary; to engage in digital identity and impression management; to explicitly network and connect with others; and to highlight their participation in other networks, for example, linking to blogs. This corresponds with work by Fransman et al. (2011) at the OU who found that 26% of academics had Twitter accounts, which while not a majority, represents a significant uptake from the very specialised adoption of such tools previously. These were used in a variety of ways, such as communicating within project teams, disseminating findings and musing and generating research questions.
The higher-education focused sites such as Academia.edu represent a ‘safe’ or more obviously relevant route to establishing an online identity for many academics. These sites relate explicitly to academic practice, compared with general social media, which many academics perceive as frivolous or irrelevant. As one respondent in the Fransman study stated, ‘The problem is I’m not really sure what the function of Twitter or these other technologies are or at least how I would use them.’ And others view them with suspicion and fear; one participant claimed, ‘You wouldn’t send your history article round to the world and his wife because you’d end up with it not being yours! And even once you’ve published it you have to be careful because of the copyright so you can’t just stick it anywhere.’
