(English version of last article) Researchgate.net is the first scientific network with more than one million members. Mendeley.com is very close to its first million. See the chart on the right and the corresponding table  here.

None of these networks are clear about their business models.

Not only has COSIS.net company profiles similar to the company profiles at XING, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages, it has gone one step better by providing a marketplace for them.

The COSIS.net Marketplace

COSIS.net has installed its Marketplace that is partially accessible without login. It provides addresses, logos, descriptions, networking, and links in the basic package for free.

The premium package for 300 € per year includes product specifications, white-papers, jobs and corporate news.

All personal members of COSIS.net can become „followers“ of a company profile which enables them to see updates of the profile in their timeline like in Facebook etc. Members can also connect as employees.

A special feature I did not see elsewhere is the simple form „Create Request for Bids and Partnership“. Users, and also companies can answer these requests, e.g. for a special measurement tool.

COSIS.net challenges established marketplaces in the geosciences like the yellow pages-like geophysicsmarketplace of the SEG by adding social media components to the profiles.

Job exchanges

Having huge numbers of profiles describing professional successes of people attract headhunters and employers.

COSIS.net integrated its job exchange into its marketplace which started in April and shows 68 geoscientific jobs. Among the company profiles, some relevant recruiters are shown (there will be much more the next time.) A 300 € per annum premium package includes 100 job posts which is a really good deal.

Researchgate offers 33 pages (each page has 50 jobs), so in total more than 1500 jobs available and are currently free to list. Most of the offers are posted by universities and concern life sciences. Presently, there are also 56 jobs in the area of geosciences and 2 in religious studies. Job offers can be subscribed by RSS feeds.

At Academia.edu, the price is $300 for posting for 30 days (currently, 14 jobs are shown.) Academia.edu has 1.5 million monthly unique visitors (informed by a mediakit.)

Mendeley.com seems to have no job exchange.

All these job exchanges are comparatively small compared to established exchanges at physicstoday.org or earthworks-jobs.com (which both start at $495 per job post.)

It remains exciting to see whether job exchanges will be reliable for economic success of these social networks, as they were for the newspapers for many decades. At the moment, a job post in the internet is only an enhanced advertisement. It is searchable, linkable, more obvious, more easily subscribed, result-orientated, but paid for by the employer/headhunter. Sites like 1000 Jobbörsen or Superscout, the „social network for jobs“ (where Mendeley is recruiting), and Talents in Berlin point to a changing business model: At Talents in Berlin, companies from Berlin can place job offers for free, paid for by Berlin communal business development.

Miscellaneous

Biomedexperts.com claims to be the „world’s fastest growing scientific social network“, but has grown only from 350,950 to 364,265 profiles since February, i.e. 13,315 or 3.8 % – which is not really much compared to Mendeley and Researchgate. Scholarz.net only informs how much a premium profile will be.

Academia.edu invented a Question & Answer tool that I did not understand completely. They also enhanced their journal TOC alert system („following a journal“), added a full text search, and they promised to pay you for good ideas to improve the functionality of Academeia.edu.

Mendeley’s blog comprises mainly of updates. There are new filters for exporting bibliographies in the specific format of a journal. If you miss a filter, you can write your own in Citation Style Language (CSL) using some XML snippets. A brand new innovation is a wiki for classifications for a more precise use of keywords to describe the contents of your publication.

Researchgate enhanced scientific blogging, whereby articles are selected and edited by researchers for improving content quality. Their profile appearance is also polished.

We see the same task sharing as some months before: Mendeley for literature, Researchgate for scientific facebooking, Academia.edu for organizations, and COSIS.net for business ideas.