Research Cooperative Review (Issue 16, 6th December 2011)

To all members,

My sincere best wishes for the End of Year, New Year, and all of 2012!

1. UPDATE: This year, so far, our membership has increased by about 600, without any large or costly effort to promote the network. Our natural rate of increase has been about 1 or 2 new members every day, or a 20% increase in one year. This means that by the end of next year, we should have a lot more than 4000 members.

In any case, we already have enough members for many useful interractions to be supported by our network. Thanks to all our new members for joining. I have not been able to personally greet every new member. I encourage all members to actively contribute to our various forums, with offers, requests, with questions, information, and advice.

Please visit our network whenever you forsee a need for help with a research writing and publishing project, or whenever you can offer help for such a project. Our network is highly visible, internationally, and we are regularly receiving in the order of 3000 visits every month, but mostly from new visitors. For members who are involved in research , language services, or publishing there is much to discover if you can make occasional return visits to explore the network and become familiar with the depth and range of our membership. It may take some practice to learn how to use the network effectively (as with any online social network). If you like, please visit us now! See: http://researchcooperative.org
2. REVIEW : My main effort this year (2011) has been to improve the ways in which members can find each other, through search panels, language groups, country groups, and topic groups. See all groups here , or our featured and most popular groups .

Next year, I would like to encourage more interaction between members, so that the network becomes more interesting and useful for all of us. All suggestions and offers for help in this direction will be welcome.
3. ANNOUNCEMENT: In 2012, we will have a monthly challenge to invite new members involved in research and research communication.

This will be a challenge to engage with the wider networks of colleagues, students, professionals, and companies with whom we work. At the same time, we can try to engage new members with greetings, encouragement, and directions for using our network, for any purpose related to communicating research .

This is my challenge, as network creator, to all members. I hope that each member can accept this as a personal challenge, to be carried out according to personal interest and circumstances. I cannot contact each member individually - our network is too large already for this - but members are welcome to contact me for suggestions about how to help.

Please help us develop an active global community of people involved in the communication of research -based knowledge.

Here is the currently planned twelve-month sequence for our invitations campaign (from January 2012):

1. Editors and proofreaders

2. Social science researchers

3. Translators

4. Natural science researchers

5. Illustrators and others involved in visual presentation of research

6. Mathematical and physical science researchers

7. Publishers and the managing editors of journals

8. Medical and health science researchers

9. Conference organisers

10. Engineering and technical science researchers

11. IT specialists involved in research communication, website design etc.

12. Graduate research students

See previous issues of our Research Cooperative Review here . See also our Tips for Networking .