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Towards the end of the 20th century, many transformations took place in the internet space, conditioned by the fact of applying new information-telecommunication technologies and the spread of the new ideology of online network interactions (Castels, 2004a). Web 2.0 technology turned the ordinary internet user into a digital content creator and, in so doing, began to shape social networks (Wellman, 2001a, 2001b, Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Today, the opportunities for communication presented by digital technologies are actively being exploited by scientists (Mikki, Zygmuntowska, Gjesdal & Al Ruwehy, 2015, Noorden, 2014, Corvello, Genovese & Verteramo, 2014, Campos-Freire & Ruas-Araujo, 2017). In 2008, new specialized academic websites appeared: Academia.edu, ResearchGate (RG), Mendeley, etc. By 2017, the number of RG users reached 13 million (ResearchGate Official Website). Being an embodiment of open and global science, these academic networks unite geographically separated researchers and organize communicative scientific exchanges by enabling scientists to announce their projects and publications, to upload full texts to be accessed openly, and to exchange opinions (ideas and analyses). Online communications in professional networks are becoming an essential part of everyday scientific practices and are opening new opportunities for scientific activities.
Why is virtual scientific communication so revolutionary? There is no doubt that scientists have always been connected to each other: these connections existed as private contacts (oral communication) as well as via correspondence. Communication means continuous interaction. Interconnections among scientists took on their meaning in the 17th century, resumed in Boyle’s ‘invisible college’ metaphor, which was actively used for representing the organizational structure of science later in the 20th century (Judin, 2010, Price & Beaver, 1966). Therein, connections across a small core of active scientists and the larger weakly structured population of their employees served as the empirical referent of the ‘invisible college’ (Price & Beaver, 1966). Written correspondence had already created the grounds for breaking down the temporal limits of scientific communication and enabled academia to be perceived as trans-spatial and trans-historical (Judin, 2010). Therefore, the connections between geographically separated users themselves are not an exceptional advantage of online communication per se.
The key to understanding the innovative nature of virtual communication lies in the network itself, which enables a mode of communicative behavior which never existed in the pre-digital era. Networks are symbioses of technology and human interactions, their architecture consists of producers and consumers of digital content, the infrastructure and instruments used for producing and distributing this content, and the content itself, which takes the form of digital messages (cultural products) (Howard & Parks, 2012). Network technologies create the patterns of communicative behavior adopted therein, and here two important issues exist: 1) the network provides its users (researchers) with ‘the rules of the game’, simple enough and easily adaptable to their needs (Mas-Bleda, Thelwall, Kousha & Aguillo, 2014); and 2) by accepting these rules, an individual crosses the frontiers of previously stable social connections and relationships: in other words, he/she accesses this new type of communicative freedom (Lavrenchuk, 2009). With this, a so-called ‘networked individual’ appears as a symbol of adaptation to the new forms of social communication, and his/her appearance is determined by integration and ICT expansion (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). To illustrate this, we must project these statements onto the RG network in order to see how they work and identify the social consequences they provoke.