Why do we make bad political decisions, and how do we make better ones? On Thursday, June 21, ScholCommLabber David Moscrop will unpack these questions and more on the TEDxYYC stage. Drawing from his own and others’ research, as well as from his personal experiences as a media commentator, he’ll examine the way our current democratic system functions—or, rather, dysfunctions— and how it could be improved in the future.

Starting this week, ScholCommLab co-director Stefanie Haustein is publishing a series of guest posts on the Altmetric Blog about the role of Twitter in scholarly communication. Read on for a small taste of what to expect, and find the whole series at at altmetric.com/blog/. It’s almost been a decade since altmetrics and social media-based metrics were introduced.

Support for the open access movement has grown in recent years, and today more than a quarter of scholarly literature is freely available. Yet, despite years of advocacy work and countless policies and mandates promoting openness, the majority of researchers are still not compelled to make their research outputs publicly available. Why is this the case? What barriers stand in the way of creating real change?

With more than 2.2 billion active users—six times as many as Twitter—Facebook is by far the largest social media platform on the web today. Yet despite its popularity, studies investigating Facebook sharing have reported surprisingly low levels of user engagement with scholarly research on the platform. Are Facebook users really sharing fewer academic articles than Twitter users?

Looking Ahead to SCW18’s “How I Scicomm” Panel What does it mean to be a science communicator in 2018?

I have a distinct tendency to see everything through the lens of what it means for research communities. I have just finally read Danah Boyd’s *It’s Complicated* a book that focuses on how and why U.S. teenagers interact with and through social media.

When we talk about open research practice, more efficient research communication, wider diversity of publication we always come up against the same problem. What’s in it for the jobbing scientist? This is so prevalent that it has been reformulated at “Singh’s Law” (by analogy with Godwin’s law) that any discussion of research practice will inevitably end when someone brings up career advancement or tenure.

The Research Information Network has put out a cal for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. The project will be funded up to £90,000. Expressions of interest are due on Monday 3 November (yes next week) and the projects are due to start in January.