4:15 PM - 4:30 PM
[MTT43-01] My JpGU: a social network service for Japan Geoscience Union members
Keywords:Japan Geoscience Union, social network services, scholarly communication
The Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU) is an alliance of 50 Japanese associations related to geosciences. It is one of the large-scale scientific associations in Japan, with more than 9,000 members. In 2014, 7,046 people registered for the annual meeting, in which 2,428 oral presentations and 1,378 posters were presented in 194 sessions over five days. Communications between participants tend to be less active in such a large-scale conference in comparison to a small-scale one (with less than one thousand members typically). To address this, JpGU created its Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2011 and launched a smartphone app for the annual meeting in 2013, but those were used for unidirectional announcements from the union office to members. However, there seemed to be a latent demand for a social network service (SNS) to facilitate bidirectional communications between members, particularly during annual meeting and pre-/post-meeting periods.
JpGU also launched a full open-access peer-reviewed online journal titled Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (PEPS) in 2013. In order to encourage JpGU members and international researchers to read articles and submit manuscripts to it, it was necessary to implement an online service to publish the latest information about PEPS articles.
To fulfill this goal, JpGU developed My JpGU (http://mypage.jpgu.org), an SNS and scientific communication tool for union members to share research topics and interests. A My JpGU account is given to every union member, who is allowed to edit a personal profile page, to which links to related websites??affiliated laboratories for instance. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Researchmap (an SNS for researchers in Japan, hosted by Japan Science and Technology Agency at http://researchmap.jp)??can be made. Personal information is disclosed to the public, My JpGU members only, or nobody, by the member's own choice. Current fields of research, as well as research topics and interests, books, papers and other academic records, documents, images, and video links can also be added to a personal page. For the list of academic records, a mutual batch data exchange service between My JpGU and ORCID (http://orcid.org), an international unique identifier for researchers, was implemented. Using My JpGU, members can share presentation files, such as documents, images, and videos, used at annual meetings. My JpGU is also featured by (1) the retrieval of PEPS articles and (2) personal bookmarks to other members of interests.
In the first ten months since its release in March 2014, 2,762 unique users have visited the My JpGU website; 93% of those came from Japan, while others came from the United States, Russia, Brazil, Germany, The Netherlands, China, and other countries. Only 55 My JpGU members edited their personal page, and only 26 members synchronized their bibliographic data with ORCID. These numbers are quite low, and therefore the JpGU Information System Committee will promote and improve My JpGU further.
JpGU also launched a full open-access peer-reviewed online journal titled Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (PEPS) in 2013. In order to encourage JpGU members and international researchers to read articles and submit manuscripts to it, it was necessary to implement an online service to publish the latest information about PEPS articles.
To fulfill this goal, JpGU developed My JpGU (http://mypage.jpgu.org), an SNS and scientific communication tool for union members to share research topics and interests. A My JpGU account is given to every union member, who is allowed to edit a personal profile page, to which links to related websites??affiliated laboratories for instance. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Researchmap (an SNS for researchers in Japan, hosted by Japan Science and Technology Agency at http://researchmap.jp)??can be made. Personal information is disclosed to the public, My JpGU members only, or nobody, by the member's own choice. Current fields of research, as well as research topics and interests, books, papers and other academic records, documents, images, and video links can also be added to a personal page. For the list of academic records, a mutual batch data exchange service between My JpGU and ORCID (http://orcid.org), an international unique identifier for researchers, was implemented. Using My JpGU, members can share presentation files, such as documents, images, and videos, used at annual meetings. My JpGU is also featured by (1) the retrieval of PEPS articles and (2) personal bookmarks to other members of interests.
In the first ten months since its release in March 2014, 2,762 unique users have visited the My JpGU website; 93% of those came from Japan, while others came from the United States, Russia, Brazil, Germany, The Netherlands, China, and other countries. Only 55 My JpGU members edited their personal page, and only 26 members synchronized their bibliographic data with ORCID. These numbers are quite low, and therefore the JpGU Information System Committee will promote and improve My JpGU further.