Information Research Weblog

Observant readers will notice that there's a new button on the front page of the Weblog - I got rid of NedStat, which I've used for years, because it has changed hands and now distributes annoying pop-ups. OneStat.com is free but doesn't have that nasty trait!

There's an interesting paper in the January issue of JASIST: Using the h-index to rank influential British researchers in information science and librarianship by Charles Oppenheim. This demonstrates that the leading researcher in the UK is my former colleague, Peter Willett - a fact that doesn't surprise me, although it will surprise those who have carried out citation studies and have used only the Social Science Citation Index - most of Peter's work is in chemoinformatics and information retrieval and much of his research is covered only by the Science Citation Index.

There are one points of argument in the paper, e.g., I am still research active, although retired, and Beaulieu is not yet retired, and, I think, still associated with the Department at Sheffield. I'd also be rather doubtful about including Harnad as an information scientist - he's a publicist for open access, but his research is in cognitive psychology.

However, read the paper and make up your own mind :-)

I see that the founder of Wikipedia is getting into the search business, with a project to develop a 'community organized' search engine. It'll be interesting to found out what happens, but I found the mailing list contributions pretty impenetrable. I guess the 'community' involved here consists of the open software programmers.

Sorry about the long post yesterday - my efforts to use a macro to avoid it failed and I'm still researching the problem

Free Conversant has a feature that enables me to prevent a long message from being posted on the e-mail list. I hope I've managed to implement it - if so, you will not have received a message about the hits on papers in Information Research. If you would like to see the message, go to http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/798

It's a while since I've reviewed the state of the papers in Information Research in terms of the number of hits attracted. This time I give the information on the most hit papers in each volume (excluding the present volume, of course).

Probably the most interesting point is the way in which papers in the early volumes continue to attact hits - if you want your work to be used, publish in an open access electronic journal!

All of the numbers are live links to the counters, so they will be automatically updated if you bookmark this message and keep on revisiting.

Volume 1 - P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
An action research approach to curriculum development

Volume 2 - Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach

Volume 3 - Hooi-Im Ng, Ying Jie Pan, and T.D. Wilson
Business Use of The World Wide Web: a report on further investigations

Volume 4 - Joyce Kirk
Information in Organisations: Directions for Information Management

Volume 5 - T.D. Wilson
Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods

Volume 6 - Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach

Volume 7 - Chun Wei Choo
Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning

Volume 8 - T.D. Wilson
The nonsense of knowledge management

Volume 9 - Jannica Heinström
Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour

Volume 10 - Christian Schlögl
Information and knowledge management: dimensions and approaches.

Volume 11 - Liana Kourteli
Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from Greece

I made an initial foray into the cellar recently, to begin the process of throwing away the accumulated junk of years. One of the things I found there may be of interest to a future historian of information behaviour research (and, indeed, of what is now called 'information literacy' research). It's a document I wrote for a UNISIST invitation meeting in Rome: the UNISIST Seminar on the Education and Training of Users of Scientific and Technological Information, 18-21 October 1976. [Clearly, a time when language was plain and straightforward and said what it meant :-)]

The paper was called: 'The investigation of information use and users' needs as a basis for training programmes' The paper is now on my Web site, slightly tidied up and with a couple of notes added. Devotees of the arcana of information research may find it interesting for (I think) the first appearance in print of the framework I evolved during a doctoral seminar at the University of Maryland in 1971, which ultimately became part of the models in my 1981 paper. The history of the evolution of the models is told in Fisher, K.E. et al. (2005). Theories of information behavior. Medford, NY: Information Today.

By coincidence, that 1981 paper has been resurrected by the Journal of Documentation in its series to celebrate its 60th anniversary. The current issue, volume 62 number 6, reprints the paper, together with a commentary by the Editor, David Bawden, and a response to that commentary by myself. I wonder what will happen at the 75th anniversary? :-)

Again, by chance, the same issue contains two reviews of the collection, 'Introducing information management: an Information Research reader' edited by Elena Macevičiūtė and myself. There's been something of a production failure here, since the two reviews are not separated, but presented as if a single review with two authors, and then the authors have been mis-assigned to each other's institution. Still, you can't have everything!

For years I used the free analytics site NedStat - originally set up by the Netherlands Statistical Office - but they sold out and the new company started using pop-up ads, so moved to OneFreeStat.com. Here's their analysis of the hits on the 'top ten' pages of the journal from April to December. It's interesting that the most hit paper is in Spanish: justification, I think for my decision to include papers in Spanish in the journal. After all, it is an 'international electronic journal', so why not? :-)

Table 1: OneStatFree analysis of pageviews from April to December 2006

Rank	Page	Pageviews	%
1.	Journal home page	37,753	34.63%
2.	Other	9,970	9.15%
3.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 3	5,988	5.49%
4.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 4	5,557	5.10%
5.	Paper258-Herrera-Solano & Hassan (in Spanish)	5,266	4.83%
6.	Contents page Vol. 12 No. 1	5,021	4.61%
7.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 2	4,466	4.10%
8.	Paper254-Ankem	2,283	2.09%
9.	Paper260-Wilson	2,135	1.96%
10.	The Rest	30,559	28.04%
Total		108,998	100.00%

However for the site as a whole (i.e., information.r.net) I use Google Analytics, which has some pretty pictures:

 

 

This shows some interesting things: most visitors have been new visitors (almost by definition, given the short time the counters have been active), but 20% are returning visitors. When we compare that number with the percentage who come directly to the site (usually from bookmarks), i.e., 26%, we can guess that, probably, most of those who come directly, are returning visitors - my regular readers, if you like. The map is also instructive (although not as much as in the earlier message), particularly when you see the big bulge of users from China.

The 'top ten' pages from Google Analytics (covering the whole site, remember) are, naturally, different from the top ten identified by OneFreeStat.com:

Table 2: Google Analytics report

Rank	Page	Unique views	Page views
1.	Information Research (journal top page)	32,505	60,904
2.	World list... information studies, information management, etc	6,694	11,890
3.	Electronic Resources for Research Methods	5,314	9,124
4.	Europe: World list...	1,305	3,335
5.	(Page without the title tag)	1,809	2,561
6.	Information management (Wilson - Encyclopedia entry)	2,164	2,515
7.	USA - World list...	1,174	2,444
8.	Digital information in the Information Research field (open access magazines, etc.)	1,437	2,100
9.	World list... USA (a duplicate page - needs removing!)	790	1,943
10.	Alfred Schutz, phenomenology (Wilson - conf. paper)	1,637	1,820
Totals (whole site)		94,310	147,149

Maintaining this entire site is a pretty time-consuming task - or set of tasks! However, it looks as though most of what is provided is being used, and it will be interesting to see what the picture looks like when the Analytics cover an entire year. (Incidentally, it also shows the benefits of archiving your publications on your home site.)

All of this stuff is going to be used in one of the Open Access Case Studies running in the journal, so watch out for an update some time next year.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I've been using Maxthon in preference to Firefox for some time - my impression is that it is less memory hungry and it has pretty well all the features that make Firefox an excellent browser. Now version 2.0, available in beta for the present, is an improvement. In fact it has the tidiest layout of any browser I've come across - Microsoft could learn a thing or two from this piece of software, which uses the IE engine. Go get it.

In the UK, Internet service providers advertise 'up to 8Mb' broadband - a bit of advertising weasel wording (with small print get out clauses) that hasn't been thoroughly stomped on yet.

What 'up to 8MB' really means is that you will never get anywhere near 8MB speeds - in fact, on average, across all providers you'll be lucky to get half of that and most of the time you'll get less than half. The broadband speed tester Nuria has data on a number of suppliers:

	Provider	Maximum	Average kb/s
1	Telewest Blueyonder 10 Mb elite	10240	5250
2	Telewest Blueyonder 4Mb complete	4096	2842
3	BT Broadband Option 4	8192	2420
4	Tiscali Broadband Max	8192	2307
5	BT Broadband Option 3	8192	2170
6	BT Broadband Option 1	8192	1982
7	BT Broadband Option 2	8192	1970
8	Plusnet Broadband Premier	8192	1931
9	Tiscali 2 Mb unlimited	2048	1438
10	Tiscali 1 Mb unlimited	1024	679

From this, it is pretty evident that consumers would be sensible to resist the Siren call of 8Mb and opt for a 4Mb cable connection - they won't get 4Mb, but at least they will be getting better speeds than most of us who have the 'up to 8Mb' connection!

The big question here is, 'Why does Ofcom - the communications regulator - allow them to get away with it?'

New developments in the Pipex battle. I've been contacted by the company after writing to the CEO (who, needless to say, lacked the courtesy to give even a token response himself) by someone who claims that my experience is only typical of broadband users generally! This is an outright lie: I've used the ADSLGuide.com pages to compare all of the providers in the UK - and Pipex turns out to be one of the worst. IDNet, Ke-Connect, Supanet, Twang and Zen Internet are the top performers as far as speed is concerned - regularly achieving 75% of their advertised speeds.

I also used the line checking services of a couple of these providers and they note that I can get up to 2Mb/s at present, with the prospect of 'up to 8Mb/s' in the future. (That 'up to' is really weasel wording on the part of companies!)

A further check on the status of British Telecom's exchanges (upon which all these providers rely) tells me that my loca exchange, is still undergoing upgrade, and is not expected to be finished until 2nd December. Now - if I can discover this, I think I can claim that Pipex Homecall has been mis-selling its services, since they would evidently know that the full service would not be available - I'll be asking them for a rebate for the couple of months of slow speeds.

I recently made the most stupid decision to swith ISP from Pipex, with a 2MB connection to Pipex Homecall with, supposedly, an 8MB connection. Actually, British Telecom told me that the line was capable of 6.5MB rather than 8, but, still, I expected an improvement.

Silly me! The service in now actually slower than the previous 2MB connection - this morning, for example, it was running at about 1MB, and that was an improvement over the 0.5MB and 0.7MB of previous days.

I had expected that Pipex Homecall would be using the Pipex servers that had always given me good service, but I learn that the service is actually provided by Tiscali, which has one of the worst records for customer service in the UK - there was not mention that Pipex would not be the provider when I took up the offer.

In fact, broadband in the UK is in a complete mess - even the cable company NTL, which offers 10MB, can't actually do better than about half that speed most of the time and I don't think there is a single 8MB provider in the country that is matching its advertised speeeds.

There's a clear message here - if your 2MB provider is doing a reasonable job, don't think of switching to an offered 8MB - it's a fiction. I'm not pursuing formal complaints through Ofcom, the communications regulator - as are many more: perhaps we'll have some influence on the outcome.

It's more fun than KFC :-)

 

 

The dots represent hits on the top page of the journal. The map is regularly updated and you can see it by scrolling down to the bottom of the page at http://InformationR.net/ir/

See: http://michaelcastellon.blogspot.com/2006/11/kfcs-logo-first-to-be-seen-from-space.html and read the comments!

There's an interesting little discussion going on on the Library and Information Technology discussion list at the moment, prompted by a request from the police in Worcester, Massachusetts that the public library should install a 'sniffer' to detect possible use of the Internet for 'suspect' purposes. Guest access to the LITA-L archive is said to be possible at http://lp-web.ala.org:8000/ but it looks as though the system isn't working effectively because I kept on being thrown out! Come on, LITA! Freedom of information is also about letting people read your stuff easily!

Jimmy Atkinson of the Online Education Database, has drawn my attention to an article he has written on Research Beyond Google. This is a list, with links, of 119 research resources, including 'deep Web' search engines, books online, general research, government literature, etc. There's an understandable US bias here, but it ought not to be too difficult to create local replicas of the list.

1. Google

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting article about Google getting into the political lobby business. With all of the threats to 'net neutrality' and related issues, this is probably not before time!

2. Firefox

Version 2.0 is due to be released at 17.00 Pacific Standard Time today - 00.00 GMT. According to the BBC News report:

The first version of Firefox was released in November 2004 and since then has steadily been chipping away at the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Now it is believed to enjoy a 12-15% market share of the net browsing market globally. But, said Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, in some nations the share is far higher.

Mr Schroepfer said that there were about 12 big improvements in Firefox 2.0 along with thousands of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Big changes include a phishing finder that alerts people when they stray on to a site that tries to trick them into handing over login details for a bank or other valuable service.

Another change was a spell checker that keeps an eye on every bit of text typed in almost any Firefox browser box be it in a web-based e-mail program or an add-on that lets people post blog updates directly.

Firefox 2.0 also has an improved session restoration system that will let users resurrect tabbed webpages they accidentally closed or will re-start a net session at the point before a crash.

Other changes include improvements to the web feed, search engine and add-ons manager.

Chasing down a reference recently, I happened upon the 'Language Corner' of the Columbia Journalism Review. Back entries are available in two printable lists. Here's a sample:

Unlike the distinctly unlovely use of 'reference' as a verb (CJR, July/August 2006), the figurative use of 'resonate' is effective and apt. But it became painfully popular as the century rolled over; a nice metaphor has been cheapened.
'Resonate' means to sound strongly and deeply, or to echo, pleasingly or otherwise. And our word makes for a fine, versatile metaphor, meaning ring a bell, strike a chord, make a strong impression, have a lasting impact, be memorable, and so on.
And on:

'But it takes a Byrne, Rushdie or Fellini or Dali to make the details resonate'.
'What is important is that the Teen-age Mutants resonate so strongly with the kids'.
'The songs resonate to her own experience'.
'When people see the big company letterhead, it resonates well'.

But enough — and that’s the point. 'Resonate' is trite. We should let it rest awhile.

and

Some distinctions between similar words need to be maintained because they’re useful; examples abound in the archives of this font of wisdom. Here’s another: the distinction between 'historic' and 'historical.' In the phrase 'Chile, Bolivia’s historic enemy,' the choice was unfortunate. By hoary consensus, 'historic' has been reserved for events of great moment, like the Battle of Yorktown or the Emancipation Proclamation. To describe a longtime pattern, like Chilean-Bolivian enmity, or for any variation on the broad notion 'relating to history,' the job is best done by 'historical.' Different words for different meanings. Useful. (CJR September/October 2004)

Not at all useful is the insistence among the finicky (including this traveler at one time) that 'advisor' is a misspelling, an ignorant back-formation from 'advisory,' and that only 'adviser' is correct. 'Advisor' is ubiquitous, and it was not surprising to find 'became a valued advisor' in a historical (not historic) work of impeccable pedigree. So we should pick a spelling (CJR prefers 'adviser'), stay with it, and relax.

It's good to know that there's a small voice of reason in journalism in the USA, although the battle against the linguistic barbarism of current academic writing will probably be a long one

So Internet Explorer Version 7.0 is finally out, but, according to a couple of reviews I've seen, still playing catch-up with Firefox and, when Firefox 2.0 is out (coming shortly), presumably IE 8.0 will have to get under development. The most complete review so far appears to that on PC World's Website. The crazy thing for IE users is that browsers using the IE engine have been providing some of the new features for some time - see Maxthon, for example - so the died in the wool IE user needed have waited all this time for something better. And, of course, Opera is still going strong and had most of the features that IE is finally bringing on stream some time before Firefox.

Just for interest, readers of Information Research over the past month have been using the browsers like this:

IE	79.81%
Firefox	15.70%
Safari	1.81%
Opera	1.07%
The rest	1.61

That's still a massive lead for IE and the picture in the rest of the Internet user world is usually portrayed as IE having about 93% of the total.

Peter Suber's Open Access Newsletter is always worth a read - and worth subscribing to, and this month's issue is particularly interesting, devoted as it is to the issue of quality in OA journals. Peter demolishes a number of myths, largely put about by the commercial publishers and provides links to lots and lots of evidence. If you are at all interested in open access, Peter's newsletter is a 'must read'.

Noted on the BOAI discussion list, this interesting report from Australia. (But does it really need a url of 206 characters?! Thank heaven for TinyURL)

The bottom line is that it would cost AuD10 million (i.e., a little under £4 million, or $7.5 million, or €6 million) to set up an Australia-wide archiving system for scholarly papers, but would deliver:

A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research

Typically, however, the report considers only two alternatives as 'open access' - the 'author pays' model and the institutional repository. As long as committees of this kind are blind to the potential of subsidised journals, they will miss the opportunity of true open access.

Of interest to all libraries these days is the recently published, 'Best Practices for Designing Web Services in the Library Context' from the [US] National Information Standards Organization's Web Services and Practices Working Group

As the conclusion says:

As web services become a more common tool for communication between applications, unforeseen library-specific uses may arise. The intent of this paper is to explain briefly some of the decisions involved in finding, designing, implementing, and using web services.

Back in March I sent out a call for papers on Activity Theory and Information Studies

We've had a good enough response to enable the issue to go ahead in April 2007, but we'll be happy to extend the deadline for anyone who has a paper in preparation, but couldn't make the September 1 deadline.

If you have a paper that you would like to submit get in touch with either myself or with Mark Spasser and we'll be happy to see if we can accommodate you.

Like many others I occasionally take advantage of the 'Readers Offers' in the Guardian newspaper. Never again!

On the 18th August I ordered the ION usb turntable for converting my vinyl to CDs via the PC - the promised delivery was 7 to 21 days. 25 days later I called to find out where it was. 'Oh, it was out of stock, and we are just getting them in this week. You'll be a priority delivery.'

'You have my e-mail address and my phone number, why did no one call to tell me this?'

'I'm sorry, someone ought to have let you know.'

Small satisfaction

Today, I called again, to cancel and was told, 'I can't cancel it because it is on the pick list [only on the pick list 5 days after my last call!] and it could go out today.'

The annoying thing about all this is that I could have ordered from three or four other suppliers at the same price and on the same terms on the 18th August and have had the turntable by the 20th August - at the latest!

So - never again!

The second Pew Internet and American Life report on the future of the Internet is out, and attracting interest. Be careful, however, in accepting the ideas. It is based, in part, on whether or not the respondents accepted the offered 'scenarios' of the future and those scenarios seem to have been rather carelessly constructed. Below are the scenarios that achieved more than 50% agreement.

A global, low-cost network thrives: By 2020, worldwide network interoperability will be perfected, allowing smooth data flow, authentication and billing; mobile wireless communications will be available to anyone anywhere on the globe at an extremely low cost——56%

Mmm. Does that mean that the commercial companies are going to turn into charities? Given the merger and acquisition tendency, I'd expect the 'low cost' to be something of a mirage! 2020 may be just a little too early for this, unless the net becomes a public utility paid for out of taxation, world-wide. That would be the sensible thing to do to ensure coverage and take-up, otherwise it is going to be slow and spasmodic.

Virtual reality is a drain for some: By the year 2020, virtual reality on the internet will come to allow more productivity from most people in technologically-savvy communities than working in the "real world". But the attractive nature of virtual reality worlds will also lead to serious addiction problems for many, as we lose people to alternate realities——56%

Sounds confused to me. Where is this 'virtual reality' that can allow actual physical products to be produced? Real services, external to the Web, to be delivered? The scenario confuses two applications of virtual reality: one in which work is done, which is likely to be only as addictive as work is in the 'real world'; and one in which play is done. It's in the latter that addiction is likely—in fact it's already here.

The internet opens worldwide access to success: In the current best-seller The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman writes that the latest world revolution is found in the fact that the power of the internet makes it possible for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. By 2020, this free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings and/or other geographically diverse and reconfigured human organizations tied together by global networks——52%

I have difficulty with the concept of 'access to success'. Success is not something to be 'accessed' and used; it's something to be achieved. This is woolly thinking on the part of the scenario writers. What if an alternative scenario had been posed: The capacity of the Internet to allow communication and interaction is likely to increase feelings of national identity and strengthen the opposition to globalisation. National communities, bound together through the Internet, will establish services that bypass the global corporations and foster strong local suppliers.

Some Luddites/refuseniks will commit terror acts: By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from "modern" society. Some will live mostly "off the grid" simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload while others will commit acts of terror or violence in protest against technology——58%

Oh heaven, what a mish-mash of ideas! No wonder it has the biggest proportion of agreement - it's almost impossible to figure out what one is supposed to be disagreeing with. Where, exactly, are these people going to be 'left behind'? We still need bus drivers, shop assistants, welders, plumbers, etc., etc., etc. Just because some of them may not be totally wrapped up in the Net, they are going to be 'left behind'?! What nonsense. And these plumbers, bricklayers, electricians are going to be motivated to form 'a new cultural group' - I must have a word with my builder about that and see what he thinks. Millions of people (in fact the majority of people in the world) already live 'off the grid' and get on with their lives and work without worrying about being in this condition.

I may be giving the impression that I am not entirely sold on the ideas on this report, but do read it! Critically! The more critically, the better: because people are going to be quoting this stuff as what is actually going to happen.

Short article about the company providing service to Norwich in the UK

The Royal Society has announced the availability of all of its journals online - including the Philosophical Transactions from 1665.

The journals will be freely available until the end of the year but then only through subscription. Unfortunately, the Royal Society has teamed up with JSTOR in making this offer, and JSTOR is not an open access supporter.

So - this fascinating resource will not be available readily to historians of science, unless their institutions pay the subscription, or to enthusiastic amateurs, or, presumably, to school-children. Surely the archive could have been made partially open access - from 1665 to 1899, perhaps?

Once again, we have an instance of commercial interests closing down access to scholarly, scientific information.

A slightly (unintentionally?) comic story from Ireland, which includes:

Close to one third of Irish CFOs (chief financial officers) have said that improving the quality of information management will be a key business challenge over the next 12 to 18 months, new research has found.

Makes one wonder what they've been doing up 'til now!

And:

One of the event speakers, Justin Scanlan of PwC’s performance improvement section, commented: "Following PwC's data management survey, three out of four companies reported 'significant problems' as a result of inaccurate data that led to added costs, failure to meet strategic objectives, poor service and eroded shareholder value among them. Information management is no longer an IT issue and is now firmly on the corporate agenda."

Ah! So that was the problem: information management had been seen as 'an IT issue'...

For some time now I've had a volunteer proof-reader, RaeAnn Hughes from Seattle. However, Rae has been very ill and my last messages were returned by her e-mail service saying, No such user - I fear the worst.

Which leaves me looking for a replacement (or even two to share the load)

I need, as the subject line suggests, a pedantic nit-picker: someone who can work in English rather than American, who has a sense of good writing style, knows the intricacies of APA 5th ed. for citations and references and who can work to deadlines. And - if this wasn't enough, can do it without pay, since all work done for Information Research is voluntary, as the income is zero!

Also needed, a volunteer html-tidier: although we have a template and pretty good instructions on preparing papers, many authors don't get it exactly right. It takes me between half a day and a day per paper to sort out the code. A volunteer to help with this would be welcome: anyone who enjoys boring, tedious work would be a natural for the job.

All offers (I'm sure I'll be inundated!) to wilsontd@gmail.com

Of interest to US readers of this Weblog and anyone travelling in and around the USA, is the guide to wi-fi connections in US airports. Available from TravelPost.com, it claims to provide, the most complete listing of wireless Internet access, service providers, airport coverage areas and Internet subscription pricing plans available. With TravelPost.com's guide to airport wifi, travelers can easily determine which airports offer wireless Internet access and which airports offer free wireless high speed Internet access.

That's 141 airports from Akron-Canton, where the wi-fi is free to Wilmington, where it is also free, via Atlanta-Hartsfield, where it costs $9.95 a day, Chicago O'Hare ($6.95 a day) and New York, JFK, where it is also free. There's also a handy link beside each entry to a local hotel list.

There's a very interesting item on 'hybrid open access journals' in the ever-useful newsletter on open access publishing produced by Peter Suber. The hybrid OA journal is one that provides open access on the payment of a fee by the author (or someone whom the author persuades to pay!). As Peter says, for the publishers it is a win-win situation - they still have their subscription income, so if the take-up is small (as I suspect it will be), they don't have a problem and if the take-up is large they are being paid twice (once by subscription, once by the author), unless they reduce their subscription rates along with the increased take-up by authors - NOT a likely scenario in my opinion.

Personally, I regard these moves by publishers as nothing more than window-dressing, a PR move against the OA movement, which, eventually, will amount to very little in actual access to the research literature. Pressures from funding agencies and, ultimately, governments (which have so far shown little interest in pitching against the publishers) will demand true OA, not some hybrid, which I don't regards as being OA under any proper definition.

This from Charles Bailey's excellent 'Current Cites'

Sale, Arthur. "The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles" University of Tasmania EPrints Repository (2006). - In this e-print, Sale examines what happened when the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the Queensland University of Technology, and the School of Computing at the University of Tasmania mandated the deposit of article e-prints. Based on an analysis of the deposit data at these academic units, Sale concludes: "What can be estimated is that a university-wide mandatory deposit policy takes at least three years to be (say) 80% effective, if it is the authors themselves who provide their documents. If the repository managers adopt a proactive policy of actively uploading missing documents on behalf of the authors, as at CERN http://public.web.cern.ch/ then the apparent transition will be faster, but the rise of self-archiving might be slowed due to lack of direct author incentive and involvement. Repository managerial promotion and assistance, such as that undertaken by the Library in QUT, matters very significantly under a mandatory policy, although under voluntary policies it seems to be largely a waste of money. . ." - CB

My thanks to Associate Editor, Terry Brooks for drawing my attention to WebCite, a newish service that fills a major gap for electronic journal editors - the problem of the dead link. WebCite will look up a non-journal Web page that you have referenced, cache it and give you a new, permanent URL so that the page is retrieved from the cache, rather than from the original source. Many news pages and company pages disappear from the Web or are moved to undiscoverable locations and are, to all intents and purposes, 'dead'.

I am asking all authors to review their papers and, where a linked page has a probability of disappearing from the Web, to use WebCite to creat a permanent URL. This will make life much easier for readers!

The following information is going into the Instructions for Authors tonight:

WebCite  WebCite is a free service that enables you to replace URLs likely to 'die' with URLs that are permanent links to cached versions of the same page. Please use this service for any URLs that are of this character such as links to news pages, company pages, Weblogs, etc..

You can use WebCite by going to the site and clicking on:

1. 'Archive' on the navigation bar at the top of the page. Enter a URL that you wish to archive and your e-mail address. The page will be archived and you will be sent a URL to use in the reference list; or
2. 'Bookmarklet' and following the instructions for creating a JavaScript bookmarklet; or
2. 'Comb' and uploading the file you wish to have reviewed for the identification of appropriate links. (In my experience it is best to click on 'Consider all links' and then select those that you wish to have cached.) WebCite will replace all of your URLs with permanent links to the cached pages.

Use the permanent URL only in the 'live' link to the page, citing the original page URL as part of the reference, thus:

Chris. (2003, March 24). Why a search engine crawler is not at all like Lynx. Message posted to http://www.searchguild.com (Search engine optimization (SEO) forums). Retrieved 8 June, 2006 from http://www.searchguild.com/tpage283-0.html

If you roll your mouse pointer over the live link, you will see that it points to www.webcitation.org, while the original URL is given below.

Quotation from an extract:

Dr. Liolios: At MEDNET 2005, you reported some interesting data on the citation rate of OA articles, showing that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles.

Dr. Eysenbach: The OA study was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles. While there have been other studies before that claimed that OA articles are more frequently cited, these previous studies all suffer from huge methodologic problems because they just compared crude citation counts of openly accessible articles on the Internet. You can’t just compare OA articles vs non-OA articles without adjusting for the many different confounders. To my knowledge, the study I presented is the first rigorous study that applied multiple regression techniques to adjust for the many possible confounders -- and it still found, after adjustment, that OA articles are 3 times more likely to be cited than non-OA articles in the first 10-16 months after publication. This is clear evidence of the fact that OA accelerates the speed with which new findings are taken up by peers. It ultimately speeds up the pace of progress and knowledge translation....

Read the extract at Peter Suber's site

My only critical comment on this quotation is that Dr. Eysenbach, like many others, assumes that there are only two alternatives: author pays, and subscription journals. There are three, the third being the subsidised journal - like Information Research. Until the subsidy model is recognised as a viable 'third way', the goal of true open access will not be achieved.

Later in the extract, Dr. Eysenbach noted that the notion that OA journals were likely to have less rigorous peer-review processes was nonsense: he might actually have said that they were likely to be higher, especially in relation to the subsidised, free journal. A print journal has pages to fill, whereas a free, subsidised, electronic-only OA journal can be highly selective, since it can publish several papers or one paper in an issue.

Google's Book Search, which I admit to using rarely, has a new feature, which has attracted the interest of at least one discussion list - LITA-L. The feature is the capacity to identify library catalogues that hold items. The Book Search Weblog says that the library catalogue search results will be presented if it looks as though there's no record in Google. However, you can choose to search the union catalogues upon which this is based by using the advanced search page. The debate on LITA-L seems not to take account of this point and individuals berate Google for not providing library catalogue links in addition to the normal Book Search output.

Well, if librarians have a grouse about this, I guess it is their own fault: why don't more of them enter into partnership with Google by, say, using Google Search as their Website search engine? I know that a limited number of libraries do have partnerships in relation to the digitization of (mainly) out-of-print books, but the real potential of partnering with Google seems not to have been explored very widely.

This week's Guardian technology supplement has a short article by long-time commentator, Jack Schofield, on the recent AOL security lapse that enabled the identification of people using its search engine (provided by Google). Jack raises the issue of using privacy software and services to hide one's identity and provides some links. The most useful of these, at least as far as I could determine is the Electronic Privacy Information Centre which is a page of links to 'Snoop Proof Email', 'Anonymous Remailers' and a variety of other tools. This is a good spot if you want to 'snoop proof' yourself.

It seems that reports of Google planning to roll out free wi-fi services across the USA have been vastly exaggerated. Beta News reports that Google has no such plans, but has recently provided free wi-fi in its home town of Mountain View, California, in addition to the operation in San Francisco.

The same information appears in the Google Blog. There's also a map of the location of the wi-fi nodes - an illustration of how many are actually needed to provide coverage!

The latest piece of nonsense to be perpetrated by the commercial world against the world of open availability of information is the action by the business yellow pages company Yell.com against the open access provider of the same kind of information, Yellowikis

This came to me via a BBC news broadcast, which included an interview with the daughter of the founder of Yellowikis (Paul Youlten) and with a lawyer unconnected with either - who seemed very keen, however, to find in favour of Yell (so much for the disinterested observer!).

Yell's case, apparently, is based on the premise that the user of Yellowikis may be so confused as to mistake it for Yell - such a user would have to be well into his or her cups to make that mistake! The two sites have practically nothing in common. Yell claims that the logo is similar - Yell's shows the Yellow Pages walking fingers, Yellowikis shows a target - both use the colour yellow and that is the only similarity.

Clearly, this is an attempt by Yell to shut down a competitor (although I hardly seem them as such myself, since Yell is much more complete!) and no doubt they hoped to frighten Youlten into just giving up: I hope that, when it does get to court, the Judge fines Yell for wasting court time, awards massive damages to Yellowikis and tells Yell to grow up and start acting like an adult company.