For those interested in Open Access, there's an interesting PowerPoint presentation by the founders of a proposed new OA journal, Semantica and Pragmatics. They are going what I call the Platinum Route or True OA (TOA) to distinquish it from Green and Gold, which are author archiving and author payment. The more of these TOA journals (like Information Research) we have, the better!

In an earlier post I mentioned TiddlyWiki and my applications of it here and there. News about TiddlyWiki is best gathered by becoming a member of the relevant Google Group: one is for users in general and is mainly used for announcements and questions and answers - post a question and you'll usually get a very quick response from someone in the Group; the other is for those with the necessary technical skills to develop applications on TiddlyWiki or to contribute plug-ins and modifications.

Scanning both of these groups can be useful if you get into using TiddlyWiki: for example, a recent post drew my attention to Dave Gifford's Notes wiki, which is a nicely customised version for note taking with an excellent means of generating lists from the tags: you can get a version for yourself, if you right click on this link and then "Save link as...". That wiki advertised Dave's BibblyWiki - a version for creating and displaying bibliographic records of books and articles - again, get a copy by right clicking on this link and going through the same process. There's also a version in Spanish

The Developers' Group brought my attention to a number of things: a version of the basic TiddlyWiki in Brazilian Portuguese, and another in Portuguese Portuguese, and a very clever bookmarklet, which replaces the built-in search module of TW with YourSearch - not easy to describe what happens as a result but it means that you can search any TW with YourSearch. Of course, you need Firefox as your browser, although we are told that it may work in Opera and Safari

Peter Suber has an interesting comment on a message from Steven Harnad in Open Access News. He comments:

If there's a good OA journal in your field, and if it's no-fee or you can afford its fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then go for it. You'll help the journal and help yourself. But if there's not a good OA journal in your field, or if you can't afford the fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then remember that OA archiving provides bona fide OA. Publish in the best subscription journal that will accept your article and then deposit a copy of the postprint in an OA repository.

This seems to be eminently sensible advice and, as Information Research is a fully peer-reviewed journal of recognized quality, why do authors continue to submit to non-OA journals?

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

The latest issue of Information Research is now available at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Here is the Editorial

Introduction Managing an electronic journal is a non-trivial task and, although I have Associate Editors who help greatly in the process of evaluating submissions, the main work of getting the issues out is down to me. With the loss of my volunteer proof-reader, Rae-Ann Hughes, the checking is an additional load. It is something of a relief, therefore, to know that Lund University Libraries (our host institution for the server) is implementing the journal management package, Open Journal Systems. Together with the Associate Editors, I am in the process of testing the system and hope, shortly, that all submissions will be handled through OJS.

This said, there is still room for more volunteers to help with the production of the journal: ideally, a proof-reader who knows British English and an XHTML code editor would be very useful. So, if you have a little time on your hands (a vain hope in these days of overwork!), or if you are recently retired and interested in helping the open access movement, do contact me.

And, speaking of volunteers, thanks to Elena Maceviciute for her link checking this issue - a bigger task than usual, and to Pedro Dias and Jose Vicente Rodriguez for the Spanish abstracts; again, a much bigger task than previously.

In this issue The main work of this issue has been in preparing the final batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context Conference, which was held in Sydney last year. As usual, the range is very wide, from the information needs of Iranian engineers, to the information behaviour of Taiwanese aborigines—evidence that the information behaviour field is dynamic and growing. Very few of the authors, however, explore the implications of their work for information practice, and I hope that the 2008 conference (to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania) will address this issue.

We also have five other peer-reviewed papers and another open access case study. The five papers cover very different topics: professional education in Brazil, Internet services in the countries of the European Union, students' use of the Internet for their Finnish Masters' theses, the impact of the Terrorist bombings in Madrid on the 11th March, 2004, on newspaper documentation centres (in Spanish) and a workflow model for scholarly communication. This last one is very long for a paper and the author has provided a link to a .pdf file so that you may print it out more easily. The case study deals with Medical Education Online, which was established (like Information Researh) by an individual, enthused by the idea of open access publishing.

Partly because of the ISIC papers, we have a good geographic spread of papers in this issue: USA - 4, Finland - 3, Japan - 2, Spain - 2, Brazil - 1, Canada - 1, Iran - 1, Singapore - 1, Taiwan - 1, UK - 1.

Google Analytics As I noted in the previous issue, I now use Google Analytics to monitor the use of the journal and (at the time of writing) I now have four months of data. The data show that the top page of the journal has had 35,323 'unique views' and 66,145 'page views' in this time - which I assume means that each visitor comes back to the top page ('home' on the navigation bar) at least once after the initial click. Extrapolating that for 2006 as a whole suggests that the top page has had 105,969 unique views and 198,435 page views. I've also been using OneStat.com since last April and it shows 32,517 page views for the top page in eight months - extrapolating gives us 48,775 for the year, which is significantly fewer than suggested by Google Analytics, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there :-). However, in 2005 we had 47,117 hits, so usage continues to increase. One thing is certain: the papers in Information Research are getting a lot of exposure!

The Editorial Board I am making changes to the Editorial Board, with a view to stabilizing membership by the beginning of the next volume. Membership is for a period of three years, renewable, and some members are now due to retire, so with this issue, we welcome three new members of the Editorial Board: Jim Jansen, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi. Jim strengthens our representation of the Web research community, while Bonnie and Victor, apart from helping review papers for the activity theory issue due in April, strengthen the information systems area. Welcome folks!

The journal's publication schedule will also be changing, partly to bring the volume year into line with the calendar year and partly to avoid holiday periods as far as possible. So, this year, the final two issues of Volume 12 will be published in April and October and Volume 13 will have its four issues in March, June, September and December of 2008, with subsequent volumes having the same publication pattern. This way, I might actually have some holiday time at Christmas!

Given how far the month is advanced, it may seem a little late, but... a very Happy New Year!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief January 2007

With immediate effect, submissions to Information Research will be handled through the journal management system, Open Journal Systems. This will provide the Editors, Reviewers and Authors with direct access to the process of review and will maintain more effective statistics on the number of submissions, etc. Papers currently in the process of review will not be affected by this change.

Also, given the amount of work I had to do over the Christmas 'holiday' to get the January issue ready, I have decided to change the production schedule. This year, there will be issues in January, April, and October (the remaining three issues of volume 12), and, with effect from 2008, the volume will be conterminous with the calendar year, with the issues of volume 13 being published in March, June, September and December. This will also have the effect of avoiding a July issue, thereby enabling a genuine summer vacation :-)

For those interested in open access developments, Peter Suber's review of developments in 2006 should be essential reading.

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

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

There's a new book out on open access publising: 'Open access: key strategic, technical and economic aspects', edited by Neil Jacobs and published by Chandos Publishing. However, on a quick scan, before doing a full review, I find that it seems to be concerned entirely with either author-charging by commercial and society publishers, or open archiving. There is no treatment of sponsorship as a business model. Since this is the model that delivers maximum social benefit, the omission is rather surprising, and the omission must be deliberate, since there are a number of open journals around that are published on this basis. As readers will know, one of these was described in Information Research Volume 11 No.3

The omission of sponsored journals is a not-too-subtle bias, which is dangerous, since books of this kind are promoted to lobbyists and politicians, who get the impression that author-charging is the only way to deliver open access when, in fact, such a system is 'closed' at the submission stage - 'open' access should be genuinely open and there are only two ways to deliver that - open archiving and free, sponsored journals.

I thought I'd re-run a search on Google Scholar to discover the most cited papers from Information Research - here they are. In parentheses after the Scholar score I give the number of citations found in Web of Knowledge - 'not found' means that, when I ran a search on the title of the paper, WoK failed to find the paper. I also give the number of hits on the page as reported today by the page counter.

1. The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
   TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 121,473 Cited by 72 (WoK 4)
2. The effect of query complexity on Web searching results
   BJ Jansen Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000 The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by Bernard J. Jansen ...
   Hits 4,370 Cited by 39 (WoK not found)
3. The duality of knowledge
   PJ Hildreth, C Kimble Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 34,587 Cited by 36 (WoK 0)
4. Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations
   YJP Hooi-Im Ng, TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 1998. ...
   Hits 13,111 Cited by 35 (WoK 12)
5. Searching heterogeneous collections on the Web: behaviour of Excite users
   A Spink, J Bateman, BJ Jansen Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 2, October 1998. ...
   Hits 8,570 Cited by 34 (WoK not found)
6. What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic …
   M Thelwall Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 3, April 2003. ...
   Hits 3,424 Cited by 33 (WoK 1)
7. The Semantic Web: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Web Applications
   S Lu, M Dong, F Fotouhi Information Research, Vol. 7 No. 4, July 2002. ...
   Hits 7,319 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
8. Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study
   SP Harter, HJ Kim Information Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, August 1996. ...
   Hits 5,496 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
9. A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners
   C Haythornthwaite Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 1, July 1998. ...
   Hits 9,939 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)
10. Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology
    G Burnett Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 4, July 2000. ...
    Hits 10,470 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)

The ratio of 'hits' to Scholar cites varies enormously - from the most 'productive', which is number 6, generating one Scholar cite for every 104 hits, to the least productive, number 1, which needs 1,687 hits to generate a Scholar cite. If we remove these two from the list, as being unusual in some respect or other, the average hits to cites is 352:1 Does anyone have a student looking for a dissertation topic? - all the data are there in the search and in the hit records on the papers. It would be nice to say to authors, 'For every 'x' hits on your paper you are likely to get a citation recorded by Google Scholar', and suddenly the virtue of publishing in free, open-access journals becomes evident :-)

Just in case you are one of those people who does NOT belong to one or other of the mailing lists I send announcements to, the July issue of Information Research is now online. It contains the first clutch of papers from the ISIC Conference, currently happening in Sydney, Australia, another clutch of 'normal' papers and book reviews, by tomorrow it will also have Terry Brooks's latest column. Just click on the issue number at http://InformationR.net/ir/

In the Editorial to the latest issue of the journal I promised to analyse the papers in Volume 11 to show the geographical distribution of authors. Here's the result:

Country	No. of papers
Australia	5
Canada	2
Chile	1
Finland	1
Greece	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Lithuania	1
S. Africa	1
Spain	4
Sweden	2
UK	2
USA	9

There were also three examples of international collaborations: 1 for Portugal and Chile; 1 for Finland and Hungary; and 1 for Mexico and Spain.

Some readers of Information Research may have noticed that there is a new feature at the bottom of the top page of the journal - you have to scroll down the page to see it. Click on the map and you are presented with a larger map of the world with the hits presented as clusters of red dots. The size of the dot indicates the number of hits from that location. A link on the page allows you to select a map with smaller clusters, which gives a little finer detail - but not much because the scale of the map is not sufficient for much detail. The map comes from ClustrMaps - go get one for yourself :-)

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!