Business Week online has an interesting article about the trials and tribulations of Google, from class actions by the publishers to agro from human rights activists - Google seems untroubled by all this and its profits are growing.

The latest issue, Volume 11 No. 3, of Information Research is now available.

I think we have a very interesting issue, but I think that about all of them :-)

The subjects are diverse and some papers are of special interest: first, Terrence A. Brooks's, 'No bad Web pages'. After the paper had been refereed and the changes had been made, I suggested to the author that the paper had a structure, and a topic, that made it an ideal paper to experiment with the concept of 'screen rhetoric'; that is, the design of Web pages to reflect the fact that they are viewed on screen, rather than being read on paper. Terry seized upon this idea with enthusiasm and, using his Javascript skills, has produced a paper which the reader moves through screen by screen, rather than by scrolling down the page. If you want to see the paper as a whole or to print it out, just click on the Print Version link at the top of the page. Of course, this is only one way of implementing the idea: Terry already has ideas on other ways of doing it and we are engaged, in effect, in a continuing experiment into what the scientific paper should look like on screen in the 21st Century. We'd like you to play with the paper - move around it - tell us what you like and what you don't like and what you would do to improve it, or even how you would do it completely differently to achieve a similar result! I shall take all comments, favourable and unfavourable, and put them on a page linked to the paper. We hope to give other papers the 'screen rhetoric' treatment, in different ways, so if you have a paper that you would like us to experiment with, let us know. Both Terry and I will be very interested to have your feedback on the way this paper is presented.

Another 'special interest' paper is the first in a series of Case Studies, which I hope will appear issue by issue over the next year or so. The topic, appropriately, is open access publishing, and the case studies may report on specific journals, aids to open access publishing, alternative modes of open access, in fact, anything to do with the subject that can be presented in the form of a case study. This idea was suggested by Bo-Christer Björk, so it is appropriate that the first is by himself and Ziga Turk, describing the history and present status of ITcon, The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction. If you would like to contribute to the series, please let either Bo-Christer or myself know.

Finally, among the 'specials' is a paper by Elena Macevičiūtė on the development of information needs research in Russia and Lithuania and a comparison with parallel developments in the West. I single this one out because this is a subject which, as far as I am aware, has not been examined before. As Elena's paper shows, sometimes developments in the East were ahead of those in the West, sometimes the other way round, but there is very little evidence, until recently, of the exchange of ideas between East and West. Things are changing, but this retrospective study demonstrates that the 'language barrier' is real, and has probably limited the development of information behaviour research over the past forty years.

I hope that you all enjoy these, and the other papers in this issue. It would be nice to know, occasionally, that you do—scholarly communication is supposed to be at least bi-directional, but I rarely hear from any of the readers.

For some years now, in fact, since 1999, I've been maintaining a list of free magazines and newsletters within the scope of Information Research, which is pretty wide and, today, I've been updating the links, so, by the time anyone checks after about 22.00 GMT tonight, it should be updated. To my surprise, the links are fairly resistant to change - however, I find that my spider (Xenu) doesn't track down all of the problems - URLs may persist, but they sometimes no longer identify what is in the list. So - use the list with caution and, if you come across oddities, do let me know.

The Call for Papers on Activity Theory and Information Studies ought to have mentioned the submission date: we need papers by September 1, 2006. The anticipated timetable is:

• September 1: papers submitted
• Mid-November: reports from referees and decisions sent to authors
• January 1 2007: final versions to Editor
• Mid-February: final corrections from authors
• April 15 2007: publication

There is already considerable interest in this Call and we look forward to an interesting issue of Information Research

Call for Papers: Activity Theory and Information Studies

Contributions are invited for a thematic issue of Information Research on Activity Theory in Information Studies to be published in April 2007. Activity Theory, developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s has become widely used in education, information systems, and human-computer interaction. To date, its application in information management, information science and librarianship has been limited, but the potential for its application is considerable. We will particularly welcome contributions based on research in digital libraries, information systems development, information behaviour, information literacy and information management generally. Theoretical papers on the links between activity theory and other conceptual frameworks will also be welcome. All contributions will be peer reviewed.

The issue editor is Dr. Mark Spasser and contributions should be sent to him at mspasser@mail.mcg.edu with a copy to the Editor-in-Chief at wilsontd@gmail.com

Thanks to the vigilence of our Associate Editor (Book Reviews) - Elena Macevičiūtė - I discover that Information Research was given an ISI 'impact factor' for 2004, presumably this only happens when all the publications for 2005 are in, so I assume that a measure for 2005 will not happen until 2007.

I don't give these things much heed for a variety of reasons but for those who need to worry about them for reasons of promotion, etc., the factor is measured as 0.841. which puts the journal in the top 20 out of 54 in the category. I'm told that this is really quite remarkable, since the journal only went into ISI's databases in, if I remember aright, 2003.

Journals in the near vicinity of Information Research are shown in the table below:

Rank	Title	Total cites	Impact factor
15	LIBR QUART	207	0.933
16	J MED LIBR ASSOC	96	0.920
17	J INF SCI	366	0.899
18	J INF TECHNOL	217	0.850
19	LIBR INFORM SCI RES	214	0.842
20	INFORM RES	104	0.841
21	INFORM SYST J	108	0.727
22	SOC SCI COMPUT REV	191	0.687
23	J HEALTH COMMUN	201	0.671
24	INFORM SOC	219	0.667
25	ONLINE INFORM REV	93	0.581

The interesting point is not so much where the journal is in the rankings (allowing for some of the oddities that get into this category) but the well-regarded journals that are lower.

ARIST has the highest impact factor, which I imagine is not surprising, as it is an annual review publication.

I wonder if Information Research is the only e-journal, published by an individual, rather than a corporation or an institution, that has an impact factor? Can't be bothered to check it out myself :-)

In the early days of the Web, many Internet users thought they would become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing a kind of "search lurch": Enter some words, click through a few search results, and maybe you'll find what you're looking for in a second or two... or maybe you'll just give up and move on to something else.

Four Web experts — Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Gerrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain — weigh in:

http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=418857&rl=1

Garth Buchholz raises some interesting points and, by coincidence, they are things I've been thinking about myself for some time and, as a result, the April issue of the journal will contain a paper by Terry Brooks which adopts a novel format for the paper. When Terry's paper was accepted I suggested that he might like to look at the idea of 'screen rhetoric' and prepare a special version of his paper that reflected these ideas. Since then, he has been working away on several versions and the latest looks, to my mind, very good.

Whether we can adopt the style for all papers in the journal is debateable, since the mode of presentation would require more work of either the author or the editor. However, we can make the template available and those who wish to use the different style could do so. Watch out for the paper in April.

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

Information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective has been on my site for some years now, but recently a correspondent drew attention to the fact that the diagrams in Chapter 2 were pretty unreadable. So - no sooner the word - it's been redesigned and the figures made legible.

According to Google Scholar (or Scholar Google, or whatever we're supposed to call it) it hasn't had much in the way of citation, but, on the other hand, the paper in Information Processing and Management that was based on the report has had 124 cites, so perhaps people prefer to cite the journal source. Pity, really, since there's more in the report!

I'm very happy to welcome Ricardo Baeza-Yates to the Editorial Board of Information Research. Ricardo has dual appointments with Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. He is the joint author or editor of a number of key works in the field, including Modern Informaiton Retrieval (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

We've had occasional instances of the value of Weblogs in spreading news about papers in Information Research and we have another at the moment. Nahyun Kwon's paper on virtual reference service has been noted in a number of Weblogs and, as a direct result, the hits have soared to more than 2,400 in less than one month. By comparison, the other papers in the issue have an average hit rate of about 400. There's a lesson here for authors - if you want your paper to be noticed, make sure it's noticed in the 'blogosphere' - and you are the ones who will know which Weblog authors are likely to be interested, so get to it! :-)

Keen observers of Information Research will have noticed a change in the design of the top pages. I had begun to think that the previous design was looking a bit clunky and messy and decided to change it. This is just part of the general evolution of the journal and, one of these days, we might have some kind professional designer offering to re-design the entire InformationR.net site - come to think of it, someone might be willing to do that in return for their logo on the top page to recognise their 'sponsorship' of the journal.

Those who have been with us since the early days will know that the design has changed over the years. The Wayback Machine shows what it looked like in 1995, when there was no separate contents page, just a contents list at the top of the first page; in 1998; in 2002 and in the last redesign in 2003.

No doubt this latest design will not be the last!

Citations to papers in Vol.7 No.1 of Information Research

Eleven papers published, with 40 citations according to Google Scholar (Ave. 3.6). Three papers had no citations.

Analysis of the citations

Sources of citations	No.
Journal papers – online or print [Journal of Information Science, Information Research, Behavioral Science and the Law, JAMA, IEEE Trans. on Software Eng., Int. J. of Inf. Mgt., New Review of Info Behav Research, IFLA Journal, Arquivista.net, Strategic Change, Journal National Medical Association, Int. J. of Bank Marketing]	14
Conference proceedings	2
Conference papers on personal Websites – conference often unidentifiable.	7
‘Grey’ literature on personal or organizational Websites	8
Student papers [Two papers, one citing two different papers]	3
Course syllabus [Same syllabus citing two different papers.]	2
Information portal with document files	3
404 message	1

The list of journals suggest that the availability of papers in an open access e-journal not only increases the probability of citation as Steve Lawrence has shown, but perhaps also widens the range of journals that papers are likely to be cited in. A number of the journals listed could not be described as information science or information management journals by any stretch of the imagination.

I haven’t done an analysis of the locations of the non-journal documents, but they range widely internationally from New Zealand and Brazil to Switzerland and the USA, and I suspect that the geographic span of citing sources is wider than one might expect with closed access journals.

This looks like an interesting project for a student paper - anyone like to take it on?

Further to my previous message on this topic, I have now attached a link to Google Scholar's citation search for each paper in the journal from Volume 1 no. 1 to Volume 9 no. 4. Check it out from the journal's top page. If you are an Information Research author and your paper doesn't have a link, it means that your paper has no citations (at least according to Google Scholar).

A small Christmas present to some of our authors - and, eventually, all of them. As a result of an earlier message, I looked at the practice of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and liked the idea of showing how many citations a paper had in Google Scholar. That journal obviously uses scripts of some kind to access the Google site and deliver the results automatically, but I've achieved the same end with a more tedious route. I've started with the papers in volume 8 and am up to volume 9 no. 1. At the end of each paper, following the section, 'How to cite this paper' authors will now find a link 'Articles citing this paper, according to Google Scholar' - click on the link and you get the Scholar output. I've put this link on all papers for which citations were listed - if, at this point, you don't have any citations, there's no link (of course this may change). When our Technical Editor has a little more time, I'll ask him if something automatic can be done so that the feature is simply part of the template for papers.

I'm also gradually adding the links to Google Scholar and also to Google at the end of the reference list to enable readers to search quickly for related material. I've added Google for two reasons - first, some topics have much more material available on the Web in general: for example, the links on Kourteli's paper on environmental scanning in Greek companies produced 91 items in Google Scholar and 865 in Google. The other reason is that I have signed up to Google's Adsense programme, which means that, if readers click on any of the ads on the results page, a minuscule proportion of a cent wends its way to the Information Research funds. Who knows, if we get up to a million regular readers, the journal could be self-sustaining :-)

And - in case I don't get back to the Weblog before the 25th - I trust that you'll all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and successful New Year

I have posted the following to the JESSE discussion list and one or two more, so forgive me if you've already seen it.

Three years ago I commented on the extent to which Web citation was growing as a means of assessing the impact of research outputs. There was an interesting discussion and, eventually, prompted by the debate, a paper on the subject in JASIST by Vaughan and Shaw (Volume 54, Issue 14, Pages 1313 - 1322).

I'm returning to the topic because of the emergence of Scholar Google as an interesting new venture in the field of bibliographic control, and by my testing of frequently hit papers in Information Research. The results suggest that for university administrations to rely upon the Web of Science citation counts and the associated journal impact measures as a means of assessing faculty for promotion is rather flawed. The same might be said of the decisions by the Research Assessment panels of the Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK to rely upon ranked lists of journals in assessing research outputs.

I'm aware, of course, of Peter Jasco's very interesting paper on Scholar and Web of Science in Current Science, v.89, no. 9, 1537-1547 and no doubt his criticisms of Scholar will provoke some changes. However, my strategy was not affected by the system's shortcomings, since I was looking for citations of known items and I weeded out the occasional 'false drops'.

I looked at the papers in Information Research that had received 10 or more citations, according to Scholar, and the results can be seen at my Weblog.

To take one example: The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by BJ Jansen (Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000) was said by Scholar to have 24 citations (actually, 26 were recorded) - WoS gave it zero citations - and yet the citations found by Scholar were as follows:

Peer reviewed journals - 9 citations (4 journals, all of which are covered by WoS)

Conference papers - 8 citations

University department paper archive - 7 citations

Research group report - 1 citation

Thesis - 1 citation

The paper also had about 200 Web citations, as measured by searching on Google.com

What then, are we to regard as "impact"? It would be wise for any candidate for promotion to press the case for a wider definition than measurement by WoS citations provides. There are problems with other measures but, for example, the international impact is likely to be measured better by either Scholar or Web citation generally. Similarly, in relation to the UK's Research Assessment exercise, it would be sensible for the Higher Education Funding Councils to offer better guidance on how the impact of research outputs should be assessed.

All of the papers in Information Research have counters, all that not all have had them since they appeared. However, they do offer some indication of popularity, and here are the most hit papers in each volume:

Volume 1 P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development 39,465

Volume 2 Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach 31,977

Volume 3 Hooi-Im Ng, Ying Jie Pan, and T.D. Wilson Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations 11,947

Volume 4 Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management 33,452

Volume 5 T.D. Wilson Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods 20,700

Volume 6 Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach 39,717

Volume 7 Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning 42,809

Volume 8 T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management 93,701

Volume 9 Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour 24,856

Volume 10 Lynda M. Baker The information needs of female Police Officers involved in undercover prostitution work 4,087

Volume 11, No. 1 Liana Kourteli Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from Greece 1,593

Interesting, the most hit paper in vol. 8 no. 2 is one of our contributions in Spanish:

Judith Licea de Arenas, Emma Santillan- Rivero, Miguel Arenas, and Javier Valles Desempeño de becarios Mexicanos en la producción de conocimiento cientifico ¿de la bibliometria a la politica cientifica? 6,048

I haven't had time to add the links, but you can find the papers through the author index at http://InformationR.net/ir/ if you are interested to follow up any of them.

The December 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) is now available.

This issue contains seven articles, the 'In Brief' column, excerpts from
recent press releases, and news of upcoming conferences and other items of interest in 'Clips and Pointers'.  This month D-Lib features the Library of Congress Global Gateway: World Culture and Resources.

The articles include:

AIHT: Conceptual Issues from Practical Tests
Clay Shirky, New York University

Harvard's Perspective on the Archive Ingest and Handling Test
Stephen Abrams, Stephen Chapman, Dale Flecker, Sue Kreigsman, Julian
Marinus, Gary McGath, and Robin Wendler, Harvard University

The Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Johns Hopkins University Report
Tim DiLauro, Mark Patton, David Reynolds, and G. Sayeed Choudhury, The
Johns Hopkins University

Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Old Dominion University Approach

Michael L. Nelson, Johan Bollen, Giridhar Manepalli, and Rabia Haq, Old
Dominion University

The AIHT at Stanford University: Automated Preservation Assessment of
Heterogeneous Digital Collections
Richard Anderson, Hannah Frost, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, and Keith Johnson,

Parallel Worlds: Online Games and Digital Information Services
John Kirriemuir, Silversprite

Open Access Federation for Library and Information Science: dLIST and
DL-Harvest
Anita Coleman and Joseph Roback, University of Arizona

My attention was drawn by the LITA-L discussion list to an interesting article in Nature on a test of Britannica and Wikipedia. Nature sent out a total of 50 articles from the two encyclopedias for peer review and concluded that there was not much to choose between the two.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

As a result of the recent fuss over misleading articles in Wikipedia, some changes are being made. Specifically, 'stable' articles will be identified and will not be editable - only a separate version will be editable and that will replace the currently 'stable' version when it is deemed appropriate.

A busy day, today. My attention has just been drawn to another Google iniative - Google Base. As usual, it is in a beta phase at the moment, but the question is, what exactly is it intended to be? The stated principle is that you can deposit material in the base and Google will host it

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

However, when one carries out a search on Google Base, it is difficult to determine what is hosted by Google and what is normal Web content. For example, I bought a nice fresh sea bass this morning and so went looking for a recipe and up popped a site for one Michael Thompson with, at the head, a recipe for 'Barbecued Squid with Hot Dipping Sauce (Squid Sate)' - sea bass was an alternative to the squid. When I searched on the Web, instead, the same site appeared - although lower down the listing. So, is this a Google-Base-hosted site or does Thompson have his own site?

A further interesting question relates to originality in the recipe field - I put the full recipe name into Google and came up with 370 identically named recipes - down to the parenthetically embraced 'Squid Sate'. Could someone claim to have been plagiarised? :-)

Another search brought up a quotation site - again, not evidently hosted by Google - which had a quotation from J.K. Galbraith that I rather enjoyed:

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong. - Galbraith, John Kenneth

Given Cheney's characterisation of Democratic politicians who have been speaking out against the war in Iraq as peddling 'cynical and pernicious falsehoods', that bit about the mendacity evident in the higher levels of public administration is highly relevant. There's an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black that springs to mind.

There's an interesting two-part article on ZDNet about Yellowikis - a free business directory source, which, according to the article is causing some perturbations in the breasts of those involved in the Yellow Pages industry. [Scroll to the bottom of the first page for the link to the second part.]

The interesting thing from my point of view is that the founder, Paul Youlten, has pretty well the same attitude to open access publishing as myself. Apparently industry reps. have been contacting him with questions like, 'Who's funding you?', 'How are you going to make money?' and 'Why would you do this for free?'

Paul was taken aback by these comments, because Yellowikis (like a lot of Web 2.0 businesses) was developed very cheaply, uses open source technology and relies on word-of-mouth for marketing.

The 'very cheaply' bit meant $500.

Part 2 of the article suggests that the Yellow Pages industry may not need to worry yet, but they are obviously keeping an eye on it, just in case it takes off.

A short article on publishing Information Research has been published in ScieCom Info, an electronic newsletter published by the Svenskt Resurscentrum för vetenskaplig kommunikation.

The other articles in English in this issue are:
Modes of Publication and Scientific Quality, by Thomas Brante, Professor, Department of Sociology, Lund University, which is a lovely piece, pulling the plug on the idiocy of allowing citation rankings for largely US journals, refereed by US scholars, publishing papers from US universities, to govern research policy in European countries;

The Why and How of JISC Support for Open Access, by Frederick J. Friend, JISC Consultant, OSI Open Access Advocate, Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL — a useful review which, however, doesn't tell us why JISC has no programme of support for journals such as Information Research :-) If I published a commercial journal I could get support for moving to an open access model (presumably one involving author charging), but being already open access (and without author charges) I am not an appropriate publisher;

The Simple Book, by Sara Gidlund, Editor at Gidlunds Förlag, in praise, as you might guess of the printed book; and

Electronic Publications - Access Now and in the Future A Seminar at the Royal Library, Stockholm, Sweden, 18 October 2005, by Tomas Lundén, Librarian, Lund University Libraries, Head Office — a useful conference report.

An interesting news item appears on the ZDNet site about an open source alternative to Google's project to digitise books.

The new issue will be available on the Website tomorrow. Here's the Editorial:

Introduction

Getting out the first issue of the new volume - which really signals that ten years have now gone by since Information Research first hit cyberspace - has been rather fraught. My Internet connection has been playing up for the past month or so, with first, intermittent disconnection developing into intermittent connection and finally no connection at all. Eventually, after a couple of weeks talking to my ISP help desk, then tests by BT of the ADSL line, only the router was left as the likely source of the problem. So, now it is en route back to Netgear and I'm using the modem that came with the ISP subscription.

The interruptions to service and the time taken in diagnosing the problem have meant that some papers that should have been published in this issue will have to wait until January - my apologies to the authors. Also, at this point, not all of the papers on the site have been properly proof-read; I simply wasn't able to get them to Rae-Ann so that she could do the proofing. Of course, one of the advantages of electronic publication is that we can correct the papers at any time and we shall do so as time goes by. No doubt, however, there are other errors lurking in the system somewhere: if you come across any, do let me know.

In this issue

We have the usual multi-national contributions to this issue, with papers from Greece, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. From Sweden, we have a second paper from AnnBritt Enochsson on the use of the Internet by children; from Hungary a study of environmental scanning by companies in Western Europe and, coincidentally, another paper on environmental scanning by Greek companies from a Greek research, Liana Kourteli; and, if that was not enough on the subject, yet another, from the USA on environmental scanning by clinicians in substance abuse treatment clinics. Perhaps this ought to have been a special issue on environmental scanning. Finally, we have a couple of papers in Spanish: one on the extent to which academics at the University of Murcia publish in the international journals, and the other on a scientometric study of academic collaboration by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

It is interesting to note that the papers in Spanish that have been published in Information Research are 'hit' to just about the same extent as the papers in English. This makes me wonder why more scholarly journals are not multilingual. I can understand the problems of accomplishing it, of course, especially for print-on-paper journals, but for open access journals (i.e., true open access, not author-charged) the costs are minimal when collaboration with colleagues abroad is so easily accomplished. The multilingual (or, more correctly, bilingual) character of Information Research surely encourages more native English speakers who understand Spanish to read these papers, while Spanish speakers get the opportunity at least to read the abstracts of the English papers in Spanish, even if they are not sufficiently bilingual to read the entire paper.

Finally...

Readers of the reviews (and I understand that there are some of you out there who are more likely to read these than any of the papers!) will notice a not too subtle change with this issue. Information Research has become an Amazon Associate. Each review now carries a link to an Amazon site, enabling you to buy the book reviewed immediately - whether for yourself or for your organization. If you do click on the links to Amazon, the journal gets a small payment for each book bought, thereby helping us to keep the journal going.

I'm also experimenting with Google: initially, you'll find a search box at the end of the reference list on each paper with the search terms already entered. Just click on search and you'll be presented (on a new page) with output of a search on Scholar Google. Let me know if you think it is a good idea.

Interesting, John. Of course, we can expect the publishers to respond in this way because of their fear of losing market share. However, they've become fat on the proceeds of scientific publication as a result of being just about the only industry that gets its raw material free of charge. I don't understand why the universities don't go further and collaboratively publish free, peer-reviewed e-journals. In many small fields, like information science, for example, it need not be very expensive - as Information Research has shown - and I don't find anyone arguing that the journal's standards are lower than those of the print journals.

As for, "Is 'access' winning the battle over 'acquisition'?", I think the answer is probably 'Yes' and the trend is gaining strength as authors in particular learn that they have nothing to lose by demanding open access for their work. I expect the trend to continue and strengthen.

What do the 'lurkers' out there believe? :-)

Hi Tom,

This article on Open Access in the Guardian may be of interest - particularly the comment

"We are worried that the research councils in the UK are trying to push in the direction of a parallel economy without thinking of the possible damage to the journals on which they parasitise."

It seems the prospect of a parallel informational economy (as distinct from a knowledge one) has some people worried. As a manager of e-journal collections I am amazed at the recent growth of free-to-air (albeit embargoed) versions of core titles in biomedicine. Is 'access' winning the battle over 'acquisition'?


John Holgate
Director of Library Services
St. George Hospital

This news is only likely to be of relevance to UK readers, but it may herald a trend.

The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) reports that the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panels (which periodically assess the quality of all academic research in the UK, and which is next due in 2008) have been urged to give attention to the quality of the research rather than the journal in which it is published.

"Senior academics overseeing the 2008 research assessment exercise have urged universities to abandon their obsession with big-name journals such as Nature and Science.

If successful, the move could signal a major culture shift in universities where academics are pressured to publish 'career grade' papers in top-ranking general journals to gain appointments and promotions."

Of course, given the page limitations, print journals ('prestige' or otherwise) can only publish a certain number of papers in a year; consequently, if 'quality' is associated with only certain journals, there is a severe limit to what can be considered quality.

The RAE overseers have recognized this - as indeed they have since at least the RAE before last. The panel I was on was instructed to assess the quality of papers regardless of where they were published. It seems, however, that not all panels obeyed this injunction, hence the need for it to be repeated. Why the THES has picked on this item on this occasion to make it 'news', heaven only knows—presumably genuine news was scarce last week.

Where does Information Research stand in this story? Well, it is a properly peer-reviewed scholarly journal, with an acceptance rate of about 30%. Consequently, I think that the relevant panels of the RAE are likely to regard papers published in the journal as having at least undergone the same kinds of quality checks as the major print journals. With this re-emphasis of 'quality' for the RAE, I think that if you publish in IR, you stand as good a chance of any as being assessed as a 'quality' researcher.

Anyone using Information Research, the electronic journal, may find a break in service today and/or tomorrow as a result of the files being transferred from a server at the University of Sheffield to one at Lund University in Sweden.

The technical management of the journal is being taken over by the folk who run the Directory of Open Access Journals and we hope to have some interesting develoopments in the future.

We hope that the transfer will go through smoothly, but bear with us if there are technical hitches.

Anyone interested in open access journal publication—and I assume that most readers of Information Research will be interested—my like to wander over to the education pages of the Guardian where they will find an interesting piece on the Wellcome Foundation's decision to require papers reporting research funded by Wellcome to be deposited in an open access archive. As usual, of course, not much space (or rather no space!) is given over to any argument on the pros and cons of archiving versus free open access publishing. So the journal publishers win, one way or another, particularly as the archived items won't be available until six months after publication.

I'm very pleased to announce that we have a new member of the Editorial Board of Information Research, Professor Shunsaku Tamura of the School of Library and Information Science at Keio University. He is member of the Board of Trustees of the Japan Society of Library and Information Science and former member of the Board of Trustees of Japan Library Association. He has research interests in information behaviour of ordinary citizen; literacy and reading research; and management and evaluation of information and reference services, especially in public libraries. His publications include Information seeking and information use (2001, editor, text in Japanese) and various articles. He is currently working on a funded research project on the effects of information service to business in public libraries.

Prompted by Amir's message I took a look at the site and at others - especially GoogleRankings, where I found that in searches for 'knowledge management' the journal site ranks 104th in the top 1,000 and 224th for 'information management'; the World list of departments... ranks 126th in searches for 'information management' and the 'nonsense' paper ranks 22nd in searches for 'knowledge management'.

These are just pointless facts that will enable you to delight and baffle your friends :-) And, of course, a reminder that publishing in Information Research is sure to get you noticed :-)

A very Happy New Year to all readers of Information Research and to all associated with the journal.

2004 proved (again) to be a record year for the use of the journal - the counter on the top page records 47,056 'hits' for 2004 (an increase of 4,282 on 2003), which is more than a 400% increase on 1998, the first year recorded.

I imagine that the growth in use must flatten out at some stage, but there's no way of accurately forecasting when that might happen. I thought that this year would show only a marginal advance over last year - but what do I know? :-)

I've been working in Oporto for the past week with little chance to catch up on current developments, so here's my backlog:

• There's news of IBM's efforts to develop information retrieval systems for use in corporate networks, rather than on the Internet. It comes a little late to this sector, with Google Desktop and a new version of Copernic already in play. My guess is that IBM is likely to make the usual technology-led errors in producing a system, that is, greater complexity in preparing search formulations than users are likely to buy, and not enough work behind the interface to interpret relatively simple formulations. Corporate files also suffer from a very difficult problem for information retrieval, one that was described to me many years ago on a visit to Shell - a North Sea drilling platform could be identified in documents by a project code-name, by geographical coordinates, by the designation assigned once the platform was in use, such as 'Platform Alpha' or by a phrase such as, 'the project'.



• The The International Telecommunication Union has produced a press release headed, Low Cost Broadband and Internet Access Essential to Information Society with a link to Best Practice Guidelines for the Promotion of Low Cost Broadband and Internet Connectivity. This document lists some very worthy aims, but one wonders whether competition and regulation are really likely to deliver low prices. In many countries the national PTT or the dominant controller of existing wires can effectively control access to the necessary exchanges and so on; in these circumstances something stronger than 'regulation' may be needed. As for competition: well, we have that in fuel supply to the garage forecourt, but I don't see too much impact on price.



• The big news for libraries, of course, was that Google is in the process of scanning millions of books in the libraries of Harvard, Stanford and Michigan universities, in the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Other contributions to the debate about this initiative can be found here, and here, and at the Wall Street Journal (setting aside its neocon bias for a change!)

For those interested in such matters, I have finally discovered the University of Sheffield's usage logs for the InformationR.net site. Unfortunately, for some reason, they only cover the period from 8th October 2004 and they are not accessible to outside users. However, I have copied the files to the Information Research site and will continue to do so in future.

You can find the data for October and November on the site, and you will find that they give a much more comprehensive picture of usage than the counter on the top page of the journal. Information about the stats. can be found here.

One point to note is that the statistics cover the whole of the InformationR.net site - not just Information Research. However, if you click on 'URLs' at the top of the page, you are taken to the list of the top 100 of the 2,783 URLs on the site (I knew it was a pain to maintain!), from which you can see that the top page of the journal ('/ir/') had 6,350 hits in November; the World list... ('/wl/') had 2,227, the guide to research methods ('/rm/') had 1,043, my home page ('/tdw/') had 534 and that the guide to free resources does not figure in the top 100.

The KBytes figure shows the amount of data sent out by the server - for November it was 7,251,013 KBytes, making it one of the busiest sites on the University's servers.

I have been intriqued by the fact that, in a recent survey of readers of Information Research, few respodents were able to quote a price that they believed their institutions might have to pay, if the journal was a commercial product. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to check on the current institutional subscription rates for the journals most frequently cited by those readers when they were asked what other journals they read. The results are:

• Information Processing and Management - $1,495 ($249.16)
• Journal of Documentation - $709 ($118.16)
• Journal of Information Science - $432.96 ($72.16)
• Journal of Librarianship and Information Science - $457.00 ($109.68)
• Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology - $1,974 ($141.00)

Giving an average price for these five of $1,012.69

There is a difference, of course, in the number of issues a year and, correcting for this (price for an issue is in parentheses), we have an average price of $138.03 for an issue of a journal in this set. Of course, we could go further and calculate the price of a paper in these journals, but this seems overkill for the present purpose.

Interestingly, those readers of Information Research who were able to suggest a subscription price generally aimed low: there was a bi-modal distribution: nine responses suggested $50.00, i.e., less than half of the issue price of those above, and nine suggested $100.00 - still short of the cost of an issue.

The results suggest that readers, even when they are in the information professions, are generally unaware of the costs of journals - one imagines that the government's response to the Fourteenth Report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on open-access publishing is guided by similar ignorance.

I thought a little non-serious questionnaire analysis might amuse you - I'm in the process of a rough and ready analysis of the questionnaires returned by readers of Information Research and three of the questions generated some interesting responses. Well, actually, they are all interesting, otherwise I wouldn't have asked them, would I?

However, the three I have in mind tonight are those that asked for the 'most interesting paper', the paper that had been 'most useful recently', and which paper would get 'the best paper award'.

Naturally, there is just about as much variety as there are responses, and the first thing to note is that, in general, people didn't respond to these questions: 39 non-respondents to the first, 45 to the second, and 60 to the third—out of about 90 analysed to date.

Of those selected as 'the most interesting', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Brooks-Web search: how the Web has changed information-paper 154
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour-paper 165
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper 144

Of those selected as 'the most useful', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Dervin-Human studies and user studies-paper166
• Franklin and Plum-Library usage patterns in the electronic information environment-paper 187
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions-paper165
• Jarvelin and Ingwersen-Information seeking research needs extension-paper 212

Of those selected for the 'best paper award', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Miller-I=0-paper140
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper144

What does it all mean? Well, I guess there's some correlation between the number of hits a paper gets and the probability of it being selected, and that choice will be dictated by current concerns and interests. But, looking at the list, I think that they are all pretty good papers :-)