Social networking services as a facilitator for scientists' sharing activities

Understanding and structuring the use of social software by scientists is of high importance in modern research and education – new ways of cooperation and knowledge sharing leads to new ways of work for researchers in both, higher education and enterprises. The possibilities of social networking services provides means for open discourse and offers easier ways to make scientific and educational resources available to the knowledge community. Within this paper, we create a research model and study knowledge sharing and technology acceptance related influence factors to share knowledge in the form of artefacts. These artefacts consist of open science and open educational resources. With our study we will validate the model of sharing influences and understand which factors are most relevant for scientists in IS discipline to share scientific and educational information through social networking services. Through the research, an improved understanding for the use of social software for globally distributed and open scientific communication is obtained.