Axel Bruns (born 1970) is a German-Australian media scholar. He is a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005). In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C (Media and Culture), which publishes M/C Journal and M/C Reviews, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he co-founded dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing. After a brief period studying physics in his native Germany, Bruns' research focus changed to Media and Cultural studies. He completed a PhD at the University of Queensland in 2002 that analysed the emerging Website genre of Resource Centre Sites such as indymedia and Slashdot. Bruns found that "Resource Centre Site produsers engage in an adaptation of both traditional journalistic gatekeeping methodologies and librarianly resource collection approaches to the Web environment: in the absence of gates to keep online, they have become 'gatewatchers', observing the publication of news and information in other sources and publicising its existence through their own sites." His findings in this formulative thesis have spurred much of his further research into the online media field, including two of his key concepts, Produsage and Gatewatching. Bruns is an expert on the impact of user-led content creation in the fields of produsers and produsage, blogging, gatewatching and citizen journalism and learning and teaching in the digital age. 'His current work focuses especially on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter in the context of acute events.' Bruns was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2023. Source: Wikipedia (en)