Information Research Weblog

See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/1341248&from=rss

When even one of the world's most prestigious university presses behaves in this manner one really must ask, When is the academic community going to take scholarly communication back into its own hands?

I suggested, last week, that academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of PRISM. Clearly, then, I had to do so myself. Below is a copy of my letter to the Editor of the International Journal of Information Management (a journal I founded). I have written in similar terms the editor of Education for Information.
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Dear Philip,

I have felt for some time that there is a conflict of interest in my membership of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management, given my advocacy of open access publishing and, more to the point, the fact that I am publisher and editor of an open access journal.

This feeling was strengthened by the recent announcement of the lobby group PRISM, established, as I understand by the commercial publishers as an attempt to discredit the open access mode of publishing. In particular, their claim that open access threatened the peer review process is nothing less than the 'big lie' - the propaganda technique of Dr. Goebbels - and, clearly, I cannot let my name continue to be associated with a publisher who is prepared to use this kind of tactic.

You and I both know that this claim is nonsense and it is a very great pity that the publishers are prepared to employ the services of a lobbyist who adopts this kind of strategy: it does little to encourage trust in their motives.

I particularly regret that I have to resign from the Board of a journal that I founded and with which I have been associated for so long, but in the present circumstances no other course of action is available to me.

Given that one of the claims of the PRISM Website is that the publishers spend significant amounts of money on supporting the peer review process, and given that, in common with other academic referees, I have never benefited from that spending, I shall in future refuse to undertake unpaid refereeing work for any journal which is not an open access publication.

I shall be copying this message to my colleagues on the Editorial Board and to my Weblog, in support of the open access movement.

With regrets and kind regards to you, personally,

Tom

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The reaction to the establishment of PRISM is growing apace! Thanks to Peter Suber for a pointer to this post from Coturnix, which summarises the debate with quotations from just about everybody.

In the last item, I suggested writing to the UCU and AAUP to find out what their reaction to PRISM is likely to be.

Here's my message to the UCU - I sent it to Malcolm Keight, National head of higher education and mkeight@ucu.org.uk and I suggest that other members of UCU should do the same:

----------------------------------- Dear Malcolm,

I'm not sure that you are the right person on the UCU contact list. but, no doubt you will pass this message on if you are not.

You will be aware of the debate that has been going on for some years now on open access to the scholarly output and of such developments as RCUK attempt to evolve some kind of policy and the government's rejection of the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on the subject.

The most recent development is the establishment in the USA of 'PRISM' (http://www.prismcoalition.org/), the somewhat (and deliberately) misleading "Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine". In spite of its title, this is, in fact a lobby group for the publishing industry and, no doubt it will seek to extend its activities in some way or other to the UK.

So, my question is: What is the UCU intending to do to counteract the highly misleading propositions put forward on the PRISM Web page?

My suggestion (http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/) is that academics should resign from the editorial boards of non-OA journals and begin to charge a daily rate for reviewing papers.

I'll be interested to have your response, -------------------------------------------------------------

Heather Morrison's pro-OA blog has a nice comment on PRISM - the publishing lobby against OA. Noting:

PRISM, the Coalition of the highly profitable publishing industry developed by a branch of the Association of American Publishers, is alerting us to their concern that they believe that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year of revenue they enjoy is at risk, and that we average citizens and voters MUST act to join their lobbying effort, and share our deep concerns about this with our U.S. representative.

I am sure that you, dear reader, are every bit as concerned as I am about this horrendous possible loss of profits for the wealthy. Urgent action is needed, now!

Let's set up a charitable foundation to help out these poor profit-makers. We can call it, "Save the Millionaires!".

Nice one, Heather!

I have another suggestion: since the publishers are spending so much money on the peer review process, isnt't it time that those who do the reviews were properly paid for it? The University and College Union in the UK, I believe, has a recommended daily rate for consultancy and similar work - or at least the Association of University Teachers had such a rate and, when I last looked, it was £650

It takes me, typically, about a day to properly review and write my comments on a paper, so £650 would seem a fair return for the work.

However, apart from that, the real issue is that the commercial publishers are making the running in trying to persuade the population to support their ludicrous claims - so what are the academics going to do? Sit back and wait to be rolled over? Business as usual? There's only one response to this development and that is to fight it. What are the American Association of University Professors and the UCU going to do in response? Can we expect them to lobby Congress and Parliament to counter the action of the publishers? I don't live in the US, but perhaps someone could write to the AAUP and ask them, and I shall do the same here in the UK asking the UCU how it proposes to counter any developments here.

And there is something else, which is long overdue, that all academics can do: resign from the editorial boards of non-OA journals, and state their daily rate for reviewing. Let's have a bit of action! I doubt if anyone will notice it when I resign from the two commercially-published journals on which I serve (one of which I founded), but if we have concerted action from thousands of academics then perhaps the publishers will understand that setting up PRISM to peddle their lies is counter-productive.

The commercial journal publishers are really in a state of panic. Reports from various sources point to their launch of PRISM: The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, a lobby organization to help them try to persuade the US Congress (and presumably Parliament in the UK) to ban Open Access. Of course, they don't say that: we have the usual weasel-worded statement that lobby organizations in the USA seem to be adept at. Fortunately, it isn't going to fool many on this side of the Atlantic. I can't imagine many scientists anywhere taking much notice of the proposition that:

Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by:

• undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it;
• opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;
• subjecting the scientific record to the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling with definitive versions; and
• introducing duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.

Now, what does all that mean. Well, the first one is anti free-OA journals - they are simply lying, and they know it. Free OA, scholarly journals operate the same peer review process as do commercial journals: if they didn't scholars wouldn't publish in them, but free, collaboratively supported journals are growing in number and take away submissions from the commercial journals, which will find it harder and harder to maintain quality. So - in panic - they are lying to you, because, rather like the neo-con supporters that the same lobbyists worked for, the big lie is the only strategy. Perhaps Karl Rove has gone straight from the White House to PRISM?

Number two is a nice one: here are the publishers, going down the so-called 'Green Route' by allowing self-archiving, or the 'Gold Route' of 'author payments' now complaining that this will lead to 'selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record'. What hypocrisy! This particular point just shows how misled are those who think that it is possible to negotiate with business on access. What this means is: 'If you publish in subscription journals, anyone can publish and we will bear the risks; if you want Open Access then you may not be able to afford it.'

Number three is a variant on the second. It plays with the idea that the archived version of a paper may not be the 'definitive' version - unless the publisher allows archiving of the published text. And that business about 'changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling', means "Hands off big business - let us keep on making money by allowing us to get our raw material free of charge and then charge outlandish subscription rates for the privilege of access."

And the final point? Well, here I have to agree with the publishers. Self-archiving may lead to duplication and inefficiencies, since one never knows where a paper is archived - is it in the individual's own home-pages (like mine), is it in an institutional archive, is it in a disciplinary archive (also like mine), or is it only available in the subscription journal that is only accessible to those who can afford to view it - also like some of mine :-) ?

What this recent initiative by the publishers points to is that the only sure way for the scholarly communities to take charge of the scholarly communication process is to rid themselves of their commercial exploiters and promote the publication of free, collaboratively produced and subsidised journals. Forget the Green and Gold routes insofar as they depend upon the acquiescence of the business world and go for the Platinum Route - it is the only way to take charge, and you have been exploited long enough.

Perhaps 'PRISM' really means, 'Publishers Resisting Intellectual Solidarity in the Market'!

From LIS News a story about Questia making 5,000 online books freely available. On a quick look, I guess that many of these are already freely available from sources such as Project Gutenberg. It's always nice to have alternative sources, but I couldn't see any download option

Heather Morrison's Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics has a useful entry for sources of data and information on open access.

One source she points to may be of interest to a lot of people: this is OAIster - pronounced, judging by its logo, "oyster". OAIster harvests open access sources and currently covers getting on for 12.5 million papers. An excellent tool for lesser known journals that may still contain something useful for you.

Thanks again to Peter Suber's newsletter for an item about the decision of the American Anthropological Association to transfer its publishing services to Wiley-Blackwell. The basis for the decision appears to be, in part, a report by the AAA's Director of Publishing which contains a truly amazing proposition:

Today’s electronic environment mitigates against a small scholarly publisher continuing to operate its entire program independently

I don't think I've seen such an unintelligent statement about publishing in the electronic era. It is exactly the opposite of the true situation: the electronic environment makes it easier for scholarly societies to pursue an independent programme. I would urge members of the AAA to abandon their organization (since it has abandoned them to the vagaries of commercial decision making) and develop their own alternative publishing outlets. There are many examples of collaborative, non-commercial OA journals from which they could take models and encourgement.

PS: I ought to have pointed out that the statement is also illiterate: the word sought was "militate" not "mitigate" - you can't "mitigate against" something - "mitigate" means to lessen the effect of something.

Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for this item:

The German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) has announced a funding program to launch new science journals, expand existing journals, and help print journals make the transition to electronic publication. To be eligible for funding, the journals must meet the DFG guidelines for open access, peer review, and preservation. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)

The enlightened character of this development compares favourably with the still unresolved policy of the UK Research Councils, which seem continually to be running scared of actually making a decision - the latest information that I could find on the Website was that discussion of its report on the subject was an agenda item for a meeting of the Executive Group held on the 25 April 2007. What the outcome was appears not to be recorded. However, we know from the earlier publications on the subject that the RCUK considers that there are only two forms of open access, "author pays" and "self-archiving". The notion that research funds, instead of supporting commercial publishers through "author payments", could go to the formation of new, collaborative, no fee, no subscription e-journals, is not on their agenda. The real reason for this, of course, is that the Research Councils fear offending government policy towards business - even if those businesses lie mainly outside the UK. The evidence for this is in the UKRC's own document. The intention is announced to:

Initiate a project to investigate the impact of author-pays publication and self-archiving on research publishing. Three leading publishers (Macmillan, Blackwell and Elsevier) have indicated that they are prepared to be involved in the project.

Obviously the companies want to be involved to protect their interests and I can't envisage anything happening to seriously affect the status quo.

The issue of funding OA publishing is the subject of another pair of items in Peter's newsletter: one on the University of Wisconsin setting aside resources to pay for OA - including support for free journals; and the other points to Heather Morrison's Weblog, where, in an article on the use of National Institutes of Health research funds, she notes:

If half the articles were paid for through article processing fees, about 32,500 articles, the $30 million NIH is already paying for publication charges would cover an average of $923 per article. That this is well within the realm of feasibility is illustrated by the fact that, while $923 average is less than the fee charged by some open access publishers, but it is more than is charged by other open access publishers, including the profitable Hindawi.
The feasibility of full open access publishing for NIH-funded research becomes even more obvious when we consider the possibility of redeploying some or all of the "indirect costs", from subscriptions or site licenses to support for open access initiatives.

From a SPARC mailing list I learn that Google has not only opened its data to university research, but also requires the researchers to publish in open access journals.

I look forward to receiving the numerous submissions that will flow from this decision :-)

I had an interesting message on a mailing list today:

SAGE Publications are pleased to offer free online full text access to the current and back issues of the following selected Information Sciences <https://online.sagepub.com/cgi/register?registration=FT77503> journals, until 30 September 2007, as listed below:

• IFLA Journal
• Journal of Information Science
• Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
• Information Development
• Business Information Review
• Journal of Health Informatics

No reason is given for this interesting trial, but I assume that it is something to do with the success of open access journals. Perhaps income from them is low, since journals in the field typically have quite small subscription lists and perhaps funding them through advertising is on the cards?

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/