Information Research Weblog

I've been posting to both this Weblog and my new location at http://info-research.blogspot.com for some weeks now and, with the New Year coming up, in future I'll be posting only to the new one. So - if you want to continue to read the Weblog, please use the link to 'Subscribe in a reader' at the new Weblog.

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader and I'm happy with it: however, if you are a 'chatter' you might be interest in what Jack Scholfield has to say about a development there.

Whether you sign up or not - have a Happy New Year!

I really should have said this before the previous message, but...
Never mind - better late than never: a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all - especially if you are a regular reader of Information Research!
...and don't get me started on the collapse of tradition that results in people saying 'Happy Christmas' :-)

I had been using the Browster add-in for Firefox for some time, but was experiencing a problem, so went looking for an update. That's when I discovered that it had died. However, something better turned up, Cool Iris - another link previewer, which works in much the same way as Browster, but which I find to be more user-friendly. With Browster, the preview pane often popped up when you didn't want it to do so, and that rarely happens with Cool Iris. So, if you are looking for something of the kind, Cool Iris will do the job for you.

I mentioned the new SCImago journal ranking site a little while back and thought I would explore it a little further. In doing so, I find that the "Cites per doc" measure, which is given for one, two, three and four year periods might be called the 'SCImago Influence Measure' or 'SIM', since it is more or less equivalent to the Web of Knowledge Impact Factor. I prefer 'influence' to 'impact', since the latter is rather macho and percussive, while the former is much more subtle and, I think, more appropriate, since what we are talking about is the influence that a journal has within its field.

The four-year SIM is particularly interesting, I think, since it allows for a much longer period of time within which the documents have a possibility of being cited. Using the SCImago database to download the data also gives the opportunity for producing some interesting comparisons. The graph below shows the four-year SIM for a long-established journal, the Journal of Documentation, compared with three, now established, open access journals - Information Research, the Journal of Digital Information and the Journal of Electronic Publishing. It is striking that on this measure all three OA journals are now approaching the same level of 'influence' as the older journal. JEP has had some problems in maintaining publication, hence the dip in 2006, but with its future now established (I believe), I imagine that the growth in its influence will resume.

Joseph Esposito, whose article in The Scientist raised some OA hackles last month is at it again - and has been roundly answered by Alma Swan. Read them both for a comparison of ill-thought-out comment vs. sound rebuttal.

At the Official Google Blog, Aseem Sood, Product Manager, Google Toolbar Team, writes:

I've started to notice something peculiar about the Toolbar team, and that's this: we literally can't seem to stop carrying the Toolbar around with us. When we moved to a new space in our Mountain View campus, we brought along a hallway-sized printout of it. For Halloween, eighteen of us dressed up as the different parts of the Toolbar itself.

Oh, how sad! :-( No pumpkin lantern, no trick or treat, just dressing up as Toolbar elements! I think this is the saddest thing I've read this week.

Reading an old issue of the The Guardian Review I came across a piece by Alasdair Gray on the writing of his novel Lanark (started 1953, published 1981 - you can't say he rushed it!) - fortunately still available on the Website. It the piece he remarks:

The notion of Lanark and Thaw's stories being parts of the same book came from The English Epic and its Background by EMW Tillyard, published in 1954, discovered in Denniston public library. It astonishes me to think there was a time when the non-fiction shelves of libraries in working-class Glasgow districts had recently published books of advanced criticism!

Ah, yes - I remember those days. Sadly, the British public library has been in decline since Margaret Thatcher's romantic involvement with the market (continued by T. Blair and G. Brown) and the decline of any feeling in government for responsibility for the 'public sphere'. Once upon a time librarians from the Nordic countries used to visit Britain to see examples of the best in public library systems and services - all the traffic would have to be in the other direction today.

Aficionados of search engines might be interested in Carrot. This uses multiple search engines and then clusters the results by Topics, Sources and Sites. This is a demo site, but it seems to have possibilities.

Biomedical Digital Libraries has a paper by William Barendse on "The strike rate index: a new index for journal quality based on journal size and the h-index of citations" The strike rate index (SRI) is 10logh/logN, where h is the h-index and N is the number of citeable papers published in the period covered. The author argues:

The strike rate index appears to identify journals that are superior in their field and to allow different fields to be compared without recourse to additional data. A good way to select journals is to rank them within a narrow field on impact factor, then ask how difficult is it to get published in that journal, how respected is the editor and their staff, who else publishes in that journal, and how long does it take to get published. All of that is valid, but once the impact factor is reified into a universal measure of journal ranking, those other aspects are apt to be forgotten. When organizations or governments set universal thresholds based on the impact factor, it can be hard for individual scientists to argue against them. The strike rate index helps to address the gap in knowledge of the meta-data associated with the publishing of science, by looking at the long term record of a journal in publishing highly cited material relative to the number of articles published.

We now have at least four different ranking measures: the Impact Factor, probably the oldest and best known and often used by journal ranking sites at least as part of the ranking formula, the h-index (which produces oddities when applied to journals because of the age factor), the SCImago Journal Rank - which appears to produce a ranking very close to that produced by the Impact Factor (and which is a little problematical, since it produces ties), and now the Strike Rate Index - again, presumably because it uses the h-index with its age bias, produces a different ranking from the Impact Factor and the SCImago Journal Rank: for example, in the list I posted the other day Library Quarterly ranks 10th with the IF, =6th with SJR, 2nd with the SRI. Perhaps even more surprising is that JASIST, which ranks 2nd with both the IF and the SJR, ranks 10th with the SRI.

Take your pick - the assessment of 'quality' is always going to be problematical and one criterion (possibly the best?) - the acceptance/rejection rates of journals rarely gets released by publishers :-)

News of a new journal ranking site from the SCImago research group at the University of Granada. Described as follows:

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators could be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.

This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicatorpdf, developed by SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996.

A natural question for me, then, is: How does Information Research show up in this new ranking? So, I took the journals that are similar to Information Research, in that they are not 'niche' journals, but publish widely across information science, information management, librarianship, etc., from ISI's Journal Citation Reports and then gathered the data from SCImago. To reduce the effort of creating a table (not as easy in Blogger as it is in Free-Conversant) I have taken the top 10 journals from the list:
Journal                h-index SJR   cites/doc     JIF
Info & Mgt             29     0.069    3.65     2.119
Journal of ASIST       27     0.068    2.48     1.555
Info Pro & Mgt         27     0.058    2.11     1.546
J of Doc               23     0.058    1.61     1.439
Info Research          12     0.053    1.77     0.870
Lib & Info Sci Res     14     0.053    1.26     1.059
Int J Info Mgt         18     0.051    1.55     0.754
Lib Qly                14     0.051    1.23     0.528
J Info Sci             17     0.051    1.01     0.852
Lib Trends             14     0.050    0.85     0.545

The use of the h-index is well known in the bibliometrics fraternity and is normally used to measure the productivity and impact of an individual scholar. One of its problems, particularly significant in ranking journals, is that the longer the period in which the scholar (journal) has been active, the more likely it is that the scholar (journal) will receive a high h-index, so it's usefulness here may be limited. However, it is interesting to see that Information Research has an h-index of 12, while older journals (not shown here) have lower measures.

The SJR measure is explained as,

...an indicator that expresses the number of connections that a journal receives through the citation of its documents divided between the total of documents published in the year selected by the publication, weighted according to the amount of incoming and outgoing connections of the sources.

The 'cites/doc' measure is based the number of citations received in the previous four years and the total number of documents published in 2006.

JIF is the ISI Journal Impact Factor.

Heather Morrison suggests that the Directory of Open Access Journals now offers the biggest 'big deal' with, right now, 2996 journals listed.
But is it so? Many of the journals in DOAJ do not fit the model of the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal: for example, in the Library and Information Science area there are journals that are simply the bulletins of professional associations and it is difficult to discover whether or not the contributions are peer-reviewed.
Also, nothing stays still. I checked the eighty journals in the Library and Information Science area and found that thirteen had published nothing in 2007. Of these, two appeared to be completely dead (although one retained the archive of papers) and four had published nothing since 2005.

However, even if this pattern was repeated in other fields (and I suspect that this field might be more prone than others to the optimistic publishing of new journals) and, say, 15% of the journals were inactive this would still leave the DOAJ ahead of the field in the total number of journals 'packaged'. If 'quality' (however we measure it) is taken into account then perhaps another 5% would be suspect, but this would still leave DOAJ with more than 2,300 journals, compared with Science Direct's 2000.

One of the problems is that we still don't have a citation index that covers all OA journals - should SPARC and DOAJ look at that possibility as a further development of the already excellent service?

Carnegie Mellon and the other universities, world-wide, are rightly receiving accolades in the press for the fact that the Universal Digital Library has exceeded its target by having digitised 1,500,000 volumes.

However, the UDL is not without its problems. For example, you need to download and install a viewer - either DjVu (of which I've heard) or the Tiff viewer - of which I'd never heard. Still, I downloaded the latter and then found that it appears to call up Quicktime actually to view the pages - all of them being images, rather than transcriptions. Needless to say, this is rather slow.

Also, I found that not all of the items are 100% open access. For example, I went looking for something on the history of Alsace (having a friend there who grows some excellent wines :-) and found that only 15% of Townroe's A Wayfarer in Alsace is actually available - and it ends in the middle of a chapter; in fact in the middle of a sentence!

Then there's the problem of blank pages being digitised. I located Hazen's Alsace-Lorraine under German Rule and found that the first seven pages were blank, so I skipped to the end and found blank pages from page 262 to 268. However, I persevered, and found text on page 261, so I skipped back to the start and found the start of the text on page 8. I image that others, not as determined as I might give up!

As for printing, you have a choice - you can print either the whole file or the current page and, because the files are all pictures, you can't select text for quoting. And there's no search function within a file.

Clearly digital library technology has a long way to go before it becomes user-friendly and the Universal Digital Library seems to have futher to go than many.

I never cease to be amazed (and amused) by the lengths folks go to to justify the use of the term 'knowledfge management'. The latest is on the Science Commons blog where D. Wentworth seeks to answer the question, What’s “open source knowledge management”?:

'Knowledge management,' or KM, is a term often used by businesses to describe the systems they have for organizing, accessing and using information — everything from the data in personnel files to the number of products on store shelves.

Fair enough - that's what we've been calling 'information management' for about the past 40 years. But no!:

One reason that it’s “knowledge” management rather than “information” management is that the word knowledge connotes use of information, not just its availability. Having the ability to use information is what makes it valuable. One classic example is Wal-Mart, which used real-time data about its inventory to realize tremendous, game-changing efficiency gains and cost-savings.

Now what is it that 'information' does? Information - 'informs', in other words the notion of its use is implicit in the definition and its curious how no definition of 'km' can do without the notion of information. The only reason for the existence of information is that it should be used - calling information that is used, 'knowledge' is simply silly. As Peter Drucker famously said, 'Knowledge exists between two ears, and only between two ears.'

The blogger's ideas also ignore the fact that there are at least two other communities that use the term 'knowledge management': those building 'knowledge-based systems' in the AI fraternity; and those concerned with the more effective management of organizational communications through the creation of 'communities of practice' and similar ideas. When a term has such competing demands from totally different use communities it becomes worthless. I suggest that Science Commons should exercise a little 'scientific' commonsense and stick to 'information management'. When we look at the Neurcommons site (which is being blessed with this composite term), what do we find?

With this system, scientists will be able to load in lists of genes that come off the lab robots, and get back those lists of genes with relevant information around them based on the public knowledge. They’ll be able to find the papers and pieces of data where that information came from, much faster and more relevant than Google or a full text literature search, because for all the content in our system, we’ve got links back to the underlying sources. And they’ve each got an incentive to put their own papers into the system, or to make their corner of the system more accurate for the better the system models their research, the better results they’ll get.

In other words it's a database, constructed, it seems, using information extraction methods, which will deliver information items to the searcher. It's a little difficult to understand what is meant by the following:

They’ll be able to find the papers and pieces of data where that information came from, much faster and more relevant than Google or a full text literature search, because for all the content in our system, we’ve got links back to the underlying sources.

What are those urls for each item retrieved by Google other than 'links back to the underlying sources'? And quite what 'the papers and pieces of data where that information came from' means is anyone's guess. It seems that once anyone gets into the mire of language associated with 'km' the critical faculty disappears altogether and hype prevails.

Things have been quiet for the past week here, simply because I was in Amsterdam doing a keynote at the First International Conference on Information Management. Not the first, of course, but the first organized by Prof. Rik Maes of the business school at the University of Amsterdam. And a pretty entertaining event it was too. Apart from doing the keynote I ran a group discussion on future challenges for IM with Chun Wei Choo - like Rik, a member of the Editorial Board of IR - we came to the conclusion that the main challenge was 'managing complexity' - the complexity of systems, of the technology itself, of the proliferation of information resources and the complexity of the information users' approaches to information.

So, that was last week - tomorrow I'm off to another conference in Vilnius, Lithuania - the conference of the Nordic Network for Intercultural Communication, where another Board member, Elena Maceviciute, and myself will be presenting the results of a pilot project we ran earlier in the year on research network building by re-located scholars in Sweden. Well - a change is as good as a rest, they say :-)

It's not likely I'll be attending to the Weblog at all in this period, so nothing more for at least a week - unless some truly startling development takes place!

Firefox 3.0 is on its way and the brave and developers can now test it. Well, I'm not particularly brave in the use of beta software, but I downloaded it anyway. On the surface, nothing much seems to have changed. However, 'under the hood' as they say, the rewriting of 2,000 lines of code has resulted in a lot of changes - too many to list in this Weblog.

However, one development:

"One click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. In later versions, Extended Validation SSL certificate information will be displayed."

The comic thing is that, when you click on the Mozilla icon in the address bar the pop says: "Identity unknown. This Website does not supply identity information". In fact, so far, I haven't found a site that does supply such information - perhaps that feature is there just for Web developers to take advantage of in the future.

See an early review

The Public Library of Science Weblog has an item on the publicity surrounding one of its papers on the discovery that Nigersaurus taqueti, a vegetarian dinosaur. At the time the blog entry was written, there had been 583 news reports and 1,855 blog entries on the story.

This, of course, is one of the benefits of open access - if a paper is newsworthy, the fact will be discovered readily by journalists and access will not be a problem. It's a little unlikely that any paper in Information Research will achieve such notoriety, but you never know... :-)

Cyberspaces is abuzz with news of Amazon's e-book reader, Kindle, for example at the ZDNet site there's a review and pictures. In the review, Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying

"This is a 500 year technology and we forget that it’s a technology. As readers we don’t think about this too often", said Bezos. "An interesting question is why are books the last bastion of analog".
The answer: Books disappear when you read them. They fill their role and get out of the way. "What remains is the author’s world", said Bezos, referring to the reader "flow state".

It seems very odd that a bookseller - on the other hand, he's not a real bookseller, is he? - should say that books disappear when your read them. That suggests that he has no idea of what people do with books - they are an instrument of social interaction: we talk about them, we exchange them, we lend them (occasionally) to friends, we pass them on to charity shops and many of us keep those we treasure to read again and again, and even if we pass the physical object on, some of what we read remains in our consciousness.

E-book readers may become a new fashion item, but unless I am very much mistaken, they'll never replace the printed book - the book just has too many 'affordances' that a computer screen lacks - and apart from anything else, if I leave a paperback on the train before having read it, I can pick up another secondhand copy from Amazon for a fiver - if I leave my 'Kindle' behind I'm nearly $400 out of pocket!

Thanks, as usual, to Peter Suber for drawing attention to the documents and minutes of an EU meeting on open access. It seems that no general point of access to the files exist, since Peter gives links to each, and I have searched the European site without success.

However, the point I want to make (and I begin to seem like a rusty record) relates to the so-called 'green' and 'gold' routes to open access. One of the points arising out of the discussions and reported in the minutes is:

The debate persists on whether to move towards open access through repositories and funding body mandates (“green” open access) or through paid open access models/'reader pays' solutions (“gold” open access). Are there are other paths towards open access? Can the two options coexist?

So, once again, we have an official body which, at present, equates the 'gold' route to OA with author charging and wonders whether or not some other method exists! Of course another method exists and it is the only one that maximises the social benefit of open access - it is the 'platinum' route of subsidised, collaborative publication of OA journals - and this comment from the EU demonstrates why this route needs to be separated from the 'gold'.

Of course, it is possible to conceive of other methods. From the point of view of what the technology allows, the notion of the quarterly journal issue with its package of papers is something of an anachronism. It would be perfectly feasible to set up a peer-review process which resulted not in an electronic journal, but in an electronic archive. By this, I do not mean the equivalent of the 'green' route, but a new, peer-reviewed repository, which used, say, RSS to notify interested parties of new items admitted to the repository.

It would be relatively easy to do this for languages with a relatively small number of native language speakers and probably easiest there in the humanities and social sciences, where the cultural context is most relevant. So, rather than having, for the sake of argument, the Electronic Journal of Bulgarian Literary Criticism (or whatever that would be in Bulgarian!) one would have the 'Bulgarian Humanities Research Repository' - run by a national research body, or by a consortium of universities - which would include not only papers on literary criticism, but on any other humanities discipline. Humanities scholars of all kinds would have point to which to submit papers and one point from which to receive papers. This idea would also have the secondary benefit of allowing national funding agencies to determine the research performance of departments, through the volume of material submitted and accepted and also through the possibility of developing a national citation index for the disciplines.

It is, of course, in the publishers' interest to encourage the assumption that 'gold' involvs user charging, since if this mode of support spreads, they have income from two directions, instead of being exposed by having only one source - subscriptions. So perhaps the EU would benefit by having less close ties to the industry and exercising a little more imagination about the options.

I thought I'd explained the reason: it is essentially ethical - why should commercial interests profit from the free labour of others? Heaven knows, commercial publishers have done so long enough through the scholarly publishing busines!

There is also an economic reason Information Research is produced entirely through voluntary effort, but that effort has costs - of software, of server maintenance, of the opportunity cost of my time and the time of others, etc., etc. Any unrewarded commercial use of the papers published in Information Research removes the opportunity for income. This is why we published 'Introducting information management' (edited by Maceviciute and Wilson, Facet Publishing, 2005) and directed that the royalties, otherwise payable to the editors and authors, should be paid to Lund University Libraries and this is why any income from our arrangement with Ebsco will also be paid to Lund University Libraries.

Simply because authors give their work freely to the journal, which makes it freely accessible to the world at large, does not mean that we should forego any possibility of income to support the journal.

The notion that any commercial organization could then take the papers and use them for commercial purposes is a complete anathema to me

Why so? As an author (not in Inf Res, but in other scholarly journals) I would have no objection whatsoever to commercial re-use.

I understand that selling reprints is big business in some fields (e.g. biomed, where Big Pharma likes to send reprints to prescribing physicians), and in such fields smaller publishers avoid CC-BY, keeping the NC license so that the reprint sellers are forced to pay royalties. But unless I missed something, Inf Res is not charging or making money, so what does the journal lose by allowing commercial re-use?

Readers of the new ARIST (vol. 42) who come across my chapter, entitled 'Activity theory and information seeking' might be rather puzzled to discover that only one page is devoted to that subject.

The intended title was simply 'Activity theory', since the chapter ranges over the origins of AT and its application in a variety of fields, including (but not exclusively) information science. However, glitches happen, even in the best regulated publishing houses, and at some point after the proof copy was corrected, the title was changed. Apologies from all concerned!

That wonderful TED site has just posted a recording of a speech by Lawrence Lessig - it's an excellent presentation. Go take a look.

SPARC Europe is cooperating with the Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ) in the promotion of a 'Seal of approval' for OA journals. There is nothing about this, at the moment, on the SPARC Europe Website but it seems that the award of the 'Seal' will depend upon the journal using the Creative Commons BY licence and supplying DOAJ with metadata for the papers. The CC-BY licence is suggested as being the most 'open' of the licences allowing for 'derived works' and, by implication, it would seem, allowing archiving, text-mining, etc.

Originally, Information Research used the CC-BY licence (or its equivalent at the time I adopted the licence) but I found that the situation was rather ambiguous, since the full licence contains no full definition of 'derived work'. Rather, it defines 'adaptation' and mentions 'derivative work' as part of that definition. Nothing in the full licence says anything about archiving, text-mining or any other post-publication use of OA papers. The definition of 'adaptation' suggests why this is the case:

'Adaptation' means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.

From this, we understand why the "Creative" Commons is so called - it is a licence for creative products in the sense of literary, musical and artistic works, which may undergo various forms of adaptation, a novel into a radio programme, a work of art into an advertisement, etc. - it is does not appear to be designed for works of academic scholarship.

The key questions for scholars are, 'What is meant by derivative work', and 'What kind of derivative work is permitted under this licence?' and I cannot imagine many academics being happy with the idea that their work can be 'built upon' other than in the way we normally think of that, i.e., someone taking an author's ideas as expressed in a work, using those ideas, building upon them to produce a novel work of scholarship with quotation, citation and referencing. Any other form of 'adaptation' that brings about a new product surely deserves the original author to be treated as joint author of the new production.

It should also be noted that the CC-BY licence permits commercial re-use of an author's work and I would find this completely unacceptable for Information Research for the simple reason that the journal is genuinely 'open', i.e., not closed at the input end through author charges, and neither I nor any of the Associate Editors, nor Lund University Libraries (which hosts the journal) receives any financial support for its publication. The notion that any commercial organization could then take the papers and use them for commercial purposes is a complete anathema to me, and I imagine, to the authors whose work would be used in such a way.

My conclusion after exploring this issue is that the present Creative Commons' licences do not properly protect scholarly work, if a BY (or 'attribution') licence is adopted. I turned to Science Commons to see what happens there, but that organization simply uses the CC licences and has not produced a separate licence for scientific works.

At present the only sensible licence for scholarly works is the "Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs" (or BY-NC-ND) licence, which allows open access and anyone may:

a. Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections; and,
b. Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections.

Perhaps it is time for a new 'Scholarly Commons' licence, which makes clear what a 'derivative work' is and removes the present ambiguity and uncertainty.

A First Look at the Google Phone is the title of an article in the New York Times technology section. It has an interesting couple of videos from Google describing the kind of phone that can be built using the Android platform, using prototypes to demonstration the capacity of the system
The comments are worth reading - partly for their comic character, with Apple adherents whinging about the iPhone being 'ripped off' - what they don't seem to realise is that Google must have been working on Android for hundreds of man-months to get it working and that, rather than a phone, it is a platform for development of applications for phones. What any Android-based phone will actually look like is going to depend upon the phone manufacturers.
What success Android will have is still an open question - many manufacturers are locked into the Symbian platform and I imagine that these videos are at this moment being carefully watched by Symbian engineers - expect something from that direction in the not too distant future :-)

No sooner had my last comment on the topic of Green, Gold (aka Brass) and Platinum hit cyberspace than Peter Suber comes up with yet another bit of misleading information, this time from Jan Velterop, who, in his own Weblog, notes:

Applied to OA, ‘green’ and ‘gold’ are qualifiers of a different order. ‘Gold’ is straightforward: you pay for the service of being published in a peer-reviewed journal and your article is unambiguously Open Access. ‘Green’, however, is little more than an indulgence allowed by the publisher. This, for most publishers at least, is fine, as long as it doesn’t undermine their capability to make money with the work they do. But a 'green' policy is reversible.

Of course, Velterop is entirely right that the Green route of open archiving is dependent, at present, on the 'indulgence' of the publishers - I have suggested elsewhere that open archiving can only be a temporary approach to open access, since either the publishers may withdraw their permissions, or what I have called the Platinum Route, or, possibly more likely, some alternative process of scholarly communication will come to dominate.

However, Velterop conveys the same mis-information about the Gold (Brass) route as I drew attention to in that earlier post: the statement that it involves paying the publisher to open up access. This is true for commercial publishers, but not for those journals, like Information Research, that are published freely on the basis of subsidy and collaborative effort.

I can see that I am going to have to keep on plugging away at this distinction for as long as the notion of 'Gold' is used ambiguously for all OA journals, whether they author charge or not. Let's get into the entirely sensible habit of referring to Platinum for the latter.

There's news around about the imminent release of Firefox 3.0 and a nice article about it, with screenshots, on Lifehacker.

Heather Morrison in a very useful post re-stating the nature of open access states:

There are two basic types of open access:

Open Access Archiving (or the green approach): the author (or someone representing the author) makes a copy of the author's work openly available, separate from the publication process. That is, the article may be published in a traditional subscription-based journal. The version of the article that is self-archived is the author's own copy of the work, reflecting changes from the peer review process (all the work that is provided for free), not the publisher's version.

Open Access Publishing (or the gold approach): the publisher makes the work open access, as part of the process of publication.

However, this is not really the whole story and is in danger of perpetuating the myth that the only form of open access publishing is that made available through the commercial publishers, by author charging. This is why I distinguish between open access through author charging, which is what the Gold Route is usually promoted as being (and which all official bodies from the NIH to the UK research councils assume as 'open'), and the Platinum Route of open access publishing which is free, open access to the publications and no author charges. In other words the Platinum Route is open at both ends of the process: submission and access, where as the Gold Route is seen as open only at the access end.

Harnad has argued that the distinction is unnecessary because at present about half of the Gold Route open access journals do not make author charges. However, if different modes exist we should categorise them clearly and not confuse them: author charging is the publishers' way of maintaining their incomes at the same level as is achieved through subscriptions - rather than being Gold from an open access point of view, we should label it as Brass (Yorkshire dialect for 'money'!), whereas the Platinum Route is the scholar's way of making his/her publications completely open.

We have three ways of achieving open access: archiving, author charging, and completely free - let's make sure the distinction is known and appreciated.

A study for Universities UK (previously the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals - a much better title, which actually told you who was involved!) has come to a rather predictable conclusion:

It seems extremely unlikely that research metrics, which will tend to favour some modes of research more than others (e.g. basic over applied), will prove sufficiently comprehensive and acceptable to support quality assurance benchmarking for all institutions.

However, at least that conclusion has been reached and, rather importantly, the report is mainly concerned with the potential for applying bibliometric measures to fields in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) (the areas targeted by the Higher Education Funding Council). Some differences between STEM fields and the social sciences and humanites are pointed to, but there is no detailed analysis of the problems in these areas, which, of course, are even more difficult to deal with than those in STEM.

Readers outside the UK might be somewhat bemused by this post: the explanation for the concern over this matter is that the Higher Education Funding Councils have proposed the use of 'metrics' (i.e., bibliometrics) for the Research Assessment Exercise. This Exercise has taken place every four or five years for the past 20 years and is crucially important for the universities, since it is the basis upon which the research element of national funding is distributed.

Peter Suber's Open Access News drew my attention to an article in The Scientist, by Joseph Esposito. I'm publishing here the comments I made on The Scientist's site:

Joseph Esposito's article is both thought-provoking and, in parts, a little dangerous. Out the outset he notes: "Many continue to argue one side or the other of a binary choice: Either all research publishing should be open access, or only traditional publishing can maintain peer review and editorial integrity." This is a dangerous comment, since he is picking up on the 'big lie', promoted by PRISM, that OA does not involve peer review. This, of course, is nonsense: every genuinely scholarly OA journal that I know of uses peer review as part of the publishing process - it could never achieve any kind of reputation if it didn't do so. Jan Velterop also seeks to perpetuate this association in his comment on the article - yes, developing and maintaining the brand does take time and effort, as he suggests, but that time and effort is invested by the unpaid peer-reviewers and they are just as happy to work unpaid for non-commercial OA journals as for commercial publishers.

Later Esposito appears at times to conflate 'open access' with 'open archives' - confusingly both can be reduced to the same initials - when he writes of authors choosing to make their work available outside of the formal publishing process. This ignores the fact that OA journals are formally published: they have ISSNs, regular publication intervals, they are indexed by the same indexing and abstracting services as the commercial journals.

There is also the association of OA with 'author charging', and what I have called elsewhere the 'Platinum Route' of subsidised, collaborative OA publishing is ignored - and yet it is this mode that is increasingly adopted by newly-published journals. And new journals are not the exceptional case that Esposito suggests: they are appearing almost every day and many of them adopt the Platinum Route. Case studies of such journals have appeared in Information Research, which is also a Platinum Route journal. The 'one click' push that Esposito refers to is not an exceptional situation, but a common one for new open access journals and the notion that this only works at the fringe of scholarly communication is rather silly - scholarly communication consists of a multitude of 'fringes', each of little relevance to the rest of the community: like any other scholar in a specific discipline I have no interest in what is published in physics, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, Near Eastern studies, Scandinavian folklore and most of the rest of scholarship, but what is available to me openly within my own discipline is going to be central.

As another commentator has noted the costs of OA publishing are exaggerated, especially if the Platinum Route is adopted. No money at all flows in the publishing system for many OA journals, which use freely given time. That time is also given to commercial publishers, and if they had to pay true market rates for the time of editors and reviewers, the economics of scholarly publishing might be different. They would be markedly different if publishers had to pay for their raw materials - the papers - the way companies in other industries have to pay.

The suggestion of a novel OA publishing platform chimes with my suggestion that, on the analogy with music tracks and iTunes, "One future model of scholarly communication could see collaborative peer reviewing in disciplines leading to archived papers that are delivered as tracks are today - the individual (who is always going to be more interested in the paper than in the journal as a whole) downloads papers of interest, and universities provide the finance for the open archive rather than subscriptions to the now-defunct journals". I don't see such a model requiring huge additional investment - as the system changes, as it inevitably will, what is saved in subscriptions can be transferred into the development costs of the new platform.

As I note in the same Weblog entry, commercial scholarly publishing is facing the same kind of threat, brought about by technological change, as the music industry and is reacting in much the same way as the music industry has reacted up to now. Neither industry will survive simply by defending the present model - the dissemination of music and the dissemination of scholarly research are changing in analogous ways and the direction of that change is towards openness and new entrepreneurial models. Just as the old computer companies were never the leaders in change in that industry - think of the switch from mainframe to mini-computer to desktop - so it is unlikely that the giants of scholarly publishing will be at the forefront of change in their industry.

I just took a look at my counter stats and discovered that 17th October, 2007 was the busiest day ever for the top page of the journal, with 3,574 hits - the previous high peak of 2,915 hits occured in July 2006.
The counter also tells me that the top page has had almost 212,000 hits so far this year, with an average of 684 page-views a day.
Turning to Google Analytics, this service tells me that the paper with most hits so far this year is Joyce Kirk's 'Information in organisations: directions for information management' from 1999, with 3,435 hits.

Peter Suber's excellent Open Access news Weblog has been mentioned frequently here and recently he's had a couple of particularly interesting (to me) posts. One relates to Eric von Hippel's making available a couple of his books, with the agreement of the publishers, as open access e-books. The interesting thing is that sales exceeded expectations in both cases. As von Hippel says, this is counter-intuitive for publishers, but it simply shows that publishers have not thought through the logic. They know that, for example, for every thousand mailings of a publicity shot they're likely to get only 2% or 3% response - or even less - so they ought to understand that publicity in the form of open access, which reaches millions of people, rather than a few thousand, is going to increase sales, even if only one or two percent of the downloaders actually buy the book. I could also see benefits if publishers make books OA when the main sales have been made and the order stream is reduced to a trickle: this could give a boost to sales well beyond what would have been anticipated.

The second item is somewhat more esoteric and legalistic. Peter has been engaged in a debate on whether or not real OA includes the right to make 'derivatives' of the work in quetion - referring to the Creative Commons' licences. There are those who hold that the right to make derivative works is a required characteristic of OA works and those who protest the opposite. What is not clear for me is what constitutes a 'derivative work': if someone uses my work to create something related, using, for example, a theoretical model and quoting from my work, I don't see that as 'derivative' in any way other than all scientific work is 'derivative', in that it builds on the earlier research. To be truly 'derivative' in my book means taking my work and re-working it, using the text and the arguments, along with new insights and ideas to create something closely associated and 'derived' from my work. In that kind of work - and I know of none - I would be, in effect, a silent collaborator and I think I would be justified in claiming to be the joint author! So I think the debate may be about two different things: creating a work that simply refers, textually and otherwise, to my own, and creating a composite work, based on my ideas, but extending, etc. I would be perfectly happy with the first form of 'derived' work, but I think that for the second I would deserve a stronger form of acknowledgement than mere citation. Should I, therefore, adopt the 'no derivatives' form of the CC licence?

While pursuing this at the CC site another question occurred to me. The CC licence has a 'no commercial use' element, which simply means that, you cannot use my work for commercial gain. However, if you publish through a toll access publisher, who is in the business of making a profit, can the publisher profit from the inclusion of my work in yours? I think I shall have to watch this carefully in future, since I get numerous requests to use the diagram of my 1996 'General Model of Information Behaviour' - in the past, I've given permission without question, but now perhaps I should say - fine, if you publish in a true (Platinum Route) OA journal, but, if not, your publisher will have to pay.

Thanks to Elena Maceviciute for this interesting picture: it shows the headquarters of the Federal Agency of Construction, Housing and Communal Services in Russia. in Russia. One of its responsibilities is the construction work for preservation projects.

Google's October newsletter points to new search developments. At Google Experimental you can try out, and give feedback on, a number of experimental features. These include atimeline presentation of results, a map view and the additional information view. There are also some keyboard shortcuts for navigating through search output and a couple of views that provide contextual navigation bars to the left or right of the search output. Of these, the timeline presentation and the keyboard shortcuts seem the most useful to me.

The organizing committee for ISIC-2008 reminds everyone about the important dates of the international conference Information Seeking in Context 2008. The conference will be held in Vilnius on September 17-20, 2008. A doctoral workshop will be held in conjunction with the conference on September 16, 2008.
Conference paper submission deadline: February 1, 2008.
Doctoral workshop paper submission deadline: March 1, 2008.
For more information please visit the Website of the conference.
Contact person for the conference: Dr. Erika Janiuniene

Because of my need to make the journal publication year conterminous with the calendar year, there will be quite a long time gap between Volume 12, Number 4 (just published) and the first issue of Volume 13 in March 2008.
Consequently, I have decided that, for this issue, I shall publish the papers (and provide the index entries) and reviews on the site as they are ready and then publish the final paper(s) in March 2008 along with the contents page.
This introduces some oddities in relation to date of publication, since the formal publication date will be March 2008, but the papers will be actually published from, probably, November 2007 onwards. To overcome this, I shall add to the 'How to cite this paper' element on the page the information on when the paper was made available. A fictional example:

Carpenter, C. & Smith, P.A. (2008). "Web users' online information behaviour: marrying HCI and information behaviour" Information Research, 13(1) paper 333. [Available 14 November 2007 at http://InformationR.net/ir/13-1/paper333.html]

Heather Morrison has another thoughtful piece on open access in her Weblog, suggesting that the publishers' anti-OA consortium PRISM has imploded.
I'm not too sure about this: PRISM is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of lobbying. We can be sure that the publishing industry is lobbying away vigorously, with people, rather than a Website and it's that personal lobbying that makes the difference, rather than what is on public view. My suggestion is that fellow OA advocates in the USA need to lobby just as vigorously, writing to their senators and congressmen/women and generally countering the misinformation that the lobbyists inevitably purvey. We've seen time and again under this US administration that the truth does not necessarily prevail; the key is how much money the industry is prepared to spend to swing the votes of the legislators, whether it is to damage the Alaskan environment by oil drillling, open the virgin forests of the national parks to the logging industry, or run the worst medical care programme in the Western world for the benefit of the drug companies and the mis-named 'health care industry'.
Constant vigilence and persistence in telling the truth about the warped economics of the existing scholarly communication system is the only weapon we have.

Perhaps most readers of this Weblog are now aware that Lawrence Lessig - the motivating force behind Creative Commons - is shifting his sphere of interest to corruption in American political life. Now there's a target!
To catch up with what's going on, see an interview with him and listen to his lecture at Stanford Law School
There's interesting follow up on the Weblog.

I'm sometimes asked, presumably by those who need to justify publishing in an electronic-only journal, about the journal's acceptance and rejection rates.
Fortunately, the journal management system we've adopted enables me to provide a more precise answer than previously. Under the system, we've handled 88 submissions, of which 68 went on to peer-review and of those:
24 (27%) were accepted, with revisions required;
30 (34%) were rejected, and
13 (15%) were required to be re-submitted.
(Presumably one is still in process)
Another useful statistic is that the average time to review has been 37 days - I don't know what the range is, but, certainly, some have taken much longer.

The latest issue of Information Research (Vol. 12, No. 4) is now online. The index page for the journal as a whole is not yet online, but will be by about 22.00 GMT this evening.
An extract from the Editorial:

This is a bumper issue of Information Research as it includes a supplement containing the proceedings of the 6th Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS 6) as well as the usual clutch of papers and reviews.
I shan't say much about the CoLIS Proceedings, since they have their own introduction, except to thank the Editors, and particularly Nils Pharo, who have spent a great deal of time in getting the papers into publishable form. Without their efforts it would have been completely impossible to publish the proceedings so quickly after the conference.
It has not been possible, however, to put the papers through the usual copy-editing and revision process used by the journal, so readers may find the occasional typographic error or other blemish. It is for this reason that the papers are published as a supplement, with their own numbering series, rather than as papers in the main part of the journal.

Read the rest of the Editorial

For the last couple of weeks or so I've been duplicating my Weblog entries on a new Blogger site: http://info-research.blogspot.com

Why? Well, it seems easier to do a number of things with Blogger than with Free-conversant, which is a marvellous system, but which requires rather more technical nous than I possess to get the best out of. For example, although my design skills are probably better than those of the average bear, I can't really aspire to anything very sophisticated and the Blogger standard templates are quite good. Blogger also has some standard features like tagging, which can probably be implemented in Free-conversant, but which I would have to spend more time than I can afford to implement. So, for now, I'm running the Weblog in two places and some of those who follow the log might like to do so from the Blogger site - take you pick :-) The Weblog will keep on running here, since this is where the archive is - although I do wonder if my maunderings on Firefox from 2003 are ever going to get me the Nobel prize for literature!

Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News for alerting me to the symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, which is being run, online, by Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

The starting point for the Symposium is a report from a non-profit organization called Ithaka on University Publishing In A Digital Age - not a great deal of attention is paid to open access in the report and when it is mentioned we have the usual, false equation of open access with author charging;

The academic community seems to be looking to open access models as a solution to these challenges. But while open access may well be a sustainable solution in STM disciplines, where federal and private research grants can conceivably be extended to support publication fees, one model will not serve as a panacea.

Why is it that the notion of collaborative, subsidised, open-access publishing continues to escape the attention of bodies like this when there are now so many examples of its effectiveness? It is all the more curious in a report aimed at considering the future of university publishing, when that future could include collaboration across institutions to promote subsidised, genuinely 'open' journals.

In spite of all their work it seems that, in the end, the report's authors are too timid to explore the logical consequences of the technological revolution that has hit scholarly communication: they, like the publishing industry generally, are mired in the present patterns of communication, but those patterns are changing irrevocably and numerous alternative new patterns may evolve as habits change. One possibility lies in an analogy with the music industry, which has similarly been hit by technological change: the unit of interest is now the 'track', not the CD or the 'album', and iTunes and other providers offer a delivery service for tracks. One future model of scholarly communication could see collaborative peer reviewing in disciplines leading to archived papers that are delivered as tracks are today - the individual (who is always going to be more interested in the paper than in the journal as a whole) downloads papers of interest, and universities provide the finance for the open archive rather than subscriptions to the now-defunct journals.

In small, niche areas this could happen quite quickly: for example, if a free, open access journal already exists, which is operating a standard peer-review process, it already has the characteristics of an open archive of papers and no-one ever downloads the entire journal issue. The papers are found, predominantly, by the search engines and the individual paper is downloaded or read - further collaboration among interested universities could see the expansion of the journal until it covers virtually the entire output of the niche area.

Or perhaps it will be all down to authors announcing their papers on their Weblogs and making them available without peer review and letting the scholarly community make up its collective mind about the quality, accuracy, etc. Again, the parallel with the music industry is there: bands are ignoring the record companies and putting their music straight on the Web.

Whatever happens, and, given the First Law of Forecasting, we can be sure that the future will be nothing like what the Ithaka report suggests, and nothing like what I have suggested :-)

Three friends and colleagues have recently drawn my attention to a letter they have received from Benthan Science Publishers - a relatively small outfit in the STM world, with 79 highly priced titles. Bentham is seeking Editorial Board members for a new 'open access' (i.e., author charges) journal, The Open Information Science Journal. This is part of a move on the publisher's part to create 200 new 'open access' titles across a range of disciplines and to be, in its own words, "...the largest publisher of quality open access journals..." Sure - the world needs another 200 journals desperately, doesn't it?
Curiously, the Open Information Science Journal is not listed at the Bentham Open site, which presumably means that the editorial arrangements have not yet been established.
Bentham may have a hard time with trying to implement author charging in the information science field, where there are no precedents, where the research community is relatively small and where the existing quality journals are more than sufficient to satisfy the output of quality papers. The author charges quoted by Bentham are:

• Letters: The publication fee for each published Letter article submitted is $600.
• Research Articles: The publication fee for each published Research article is $800.
• Mini-Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Mini-Review article is $600.
• Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Review article is $900.

Bentham may also have a hard time getting editors and editorial board members for some of their journals - all three of my colleagues have turned down the invitation to join the Editorial Board
The interesting aspect of this move is that a publisher has seen a business opportunity in author charging - there is no doubt, judging from my more than 25 years experience of editing journals that there are many poor quality papers around with authors desperate to get them published. How likely is it that a publisher, whose business model requires author charges, will resist the tempation to accept what the quality journals consider to be dross?

Thanks to the BOAI Forum and Steven Harnad for drawing attention to the paper ©Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective© by A.A.Adams, which refutes another paper by K. Taylor (Copyright and research:an academic publisher's perspective.

It's a well-argued piece and my only complaint is that, once again, the case for what I have called the Platinum Route of collaboration and subsidy is ignored and 'Gold OA' is associated with author payments.

With today's technology, collaboration in the production of a journal is very straightforward and, rather than subsidising journal publishers by allowing time for editorial work and peer reviewing, universities could be subsidising OA journals in the same way. The only office you need is Microsoft Office - and, really, not even that - you can get by with a browser and an html editor. There will be questions about how far this model scales and, as far as I am aware, no OA journal published on this basis has yet reached the point at which the question becomes important. There are many niche researech areas with relatively low numbers of active researchers who can be provided for under this model and scalability is only an issue in terms of dealing with submissions. Scalability in use is not an issue, since the technology can cope.

I noted in an earlier post that the JISC in the UK invested well over £300,000 in author payments to publishers, when the same amount of money could have got to subsidising new OA journals. I wonder if anyone is listening?

Noted on the Crave blog: Sony opens book on new Reader
and on LIS News

It's always ironic when papers on OA are published in non-OA journals. Such is the case with a couple of papers in the current LIBER Quarterly:

One is "Embedding Open Access into the European Landscape – the Contribution of LIBER" by Paul Ayris:

Abstract. This paper continues an earlier published history of the OAI Workshops, organised under the aegis of the LIBER Access Division, in CERN Geneva. It discusses the OAI5 Workshop, held on 18-20 April 2007, which underlines the emerging importance of Open Access to support information provision and exchange across Europe.

The other is "Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access" by David C. Prosser:

Abstract In the five years since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, one of the most striking developments in the scholarly communications landscape has been the increasing interest taken in open access at a policy level. Today, open access (in the form of both self-archiving and open access journals) is routinely discussed and debated at an institutional-level, within research-funding bodies, nationally, and internationally. The debate has moved out of the library and publisher communities to take a more central place in discussions on the ‘knowledge economy’, return on investment in research, and the nature of e-science. This paper looks at some of the public policy drivers that are impacting on scholarly communications and describes the major policy initiatives that are supporting a move to open access.

The first of these doesn't look particularly fascinating, but I would have like to have the possibility of reading the second, without having to subscribe, but to do that I have to wait six months.