40 Versions

"Predatory" open access titles in Academic Search Complete

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:51:57 -0700

I was interested in the revelations earlier this year of the “predatory open access” phenomenon—publishers who take on open access publishing as a purely profit-generating enterprise, and neglect quality, professional ethics etc. Jeffrey Beall’s blog is a good way to get a view on how this works (he coined the label), and the Chronicle had a good piece on it several weeks back (alas, behind a paywall; if you’ve got no chronicle.com subscription but do have Academic Search Premier, try this link, though you’ll probably need your proxy; or, LexisNexis Academic).

We’re looking at database adds/drops right now, and just for fun I thought I’d see how many of the publishers on Beall’s current list of predatory publishers are in EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete. Turns out it has 175 journals from 14 of the publishers on that list. (A few of these are marked as “coming soon” rather than “available now.”) Specifically, the publishers are:

Ashdin Publishing
Bioinfo Publications
Canadian Center of Science & Education
David Publishing
EuroJournals, Inc
Human Resource Management Academic Research Society
Indian Society for Education & Environment
Institute of Advanced Scientific Research
International Digital Organization for Scientific Information (IDOSI)
Internet Scientific Publications LLC
Medwell Journals
OMICS Publishing Group
Science Publications
Scientific Research Publishing

There were also journals from “Bentham Science Publishers”—not sure if this is the same thing as Bentham Open, also on Beall’s list.

175 is really a drop in the bucket for Academic Search Complete, which lists over 7,700 full-text scholarly journals. I’m also not implying that Beall’s list is authoritative—but then we don’t really have alternative to it at the moment. (And it goes without saying that more established publishers are also capable of publishing low-quality journals.) Do we assume that EBSCO checked out this content and found it suitable, or was it a cheap way to pad their title list? How much of this stuff makes it in to their other indexes, and those of their competitors? I have to say it’s a difficult problem in our community-college context, where students are just learning the differences between scholarly and non-scholarly content, and definitely aren’t prepared to make the subtle discriminations called for here…

Here’s a link to a CSV file of the list, or browse it below:

I also noticed these publishers popping up in EBSCO’s “open access collections”—this is a sort of cool thing EBSCO has done that allows libraries to display directories of open access content via their A-to-Z list.

Making an econo library Q&A site with Question2Answer

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:27:59 -0700

I was sort of taken with SpringShare’s LibAnswers service when I first saw it—great idea for maintaining an FAQ/knowledge base. I immediately thought about how to find some funding for it, and that led to wondering about a free solution. LibAnswers is not even very expensive, but in the current budget climate asking for money for a new service is really to be avoided.

I googled for similar services and came across the phenomenon of the “Stack Overflow clone.” The idea: q&a around some sort of common interest, usually with user-submitted answers, indications of user trust/authority, the ability to designate a “best answer,” social tagging etc. The genre extends from the lamentable Yahoo! Answers the recently buzzworthy Quora, not to mention Stack Overflow itself. Often Q&A’s will be a portion of some larger site—think Metafilter’s Ask MeFi, MakeUseOf Answers, etc. (There’s probably something interesting to say about the relationship between Q&A sites and general discussion forums but I’ll leave that alone.) Stack Overflow appears to be seen as the starting point for Q&A platforms.

There are dozens of these clones, written in various programming languages, hosted locally or remotely, free/premium etc. (A good list can be found at the Stack Overflow.) Question2Answer was the one that looked most promising for my needs. It’s open-source, fairly new and under active development. Unlike most of the other open-source clones, it’s a LAMP package—so if you’ve e.g. installed and configured Wordpress, you know how to get around in it. (I wouldn’t know how to get started with a Ruby or Python package.) This also means you can test it locally by using XAMPP. The feature set is impressive. You can set tags and/or categories, moderate questions, set permissions for asking, answering, voting on answers etc., and do any number of things with layout. When someone asks a question, they are taken to possible matching questions, and “similar” questions can be made to display near one being viewed. It also has a plugin architecture with at least a few users contributing code regularly. Not many themes are available, but most of the elements are easy to manipulate via CSS. And—cool feature—you can designate a separate, more lightweight theme for mobile visitors. For analytics, you can of course use Google or any other package.

So, after a few weeks of playing with a test installation and working on the CSS (using our unfortunate college colors), I opened it to the public around the beginning of March. The “stapler” logo is supposed to refer to the most common library question, but it seems like I’m the only person who gets that… oh well. Branding is not my strong suit. So far almost all the questions have been “seeded” by us librarians. Only three have come from the public, and one of these was withdrawn soon after being posted. I’m using Twitterfeed to auto-post an RSS feed of the posts to our Twitter account. (Yes, the product generates a bunch of RSS feeds, so you can play with that to make widgets if you like.) I’m actually allowing users to answer questions if they like, though I don’t think that’s necessarily ever going to happen.

Obviously this approach has some disadvantages compared to using a service like Springshare’s. I probably spent a good deal more time getting this running than I would have configuring LibAnswers, and I’m now responsible for backing up the SQL database, updating the software as needed, etc. If I need support, I go to the Question2Answer Q&A site and hope for the best.

Then there’s performance. Springshare seems to do pretty well on this score, likely using Amazon or some other cloud service, whereas I’m hosting this on a cheap commercial shared account that our instructional technology team recently got to allow people to start Web projects without going through the grind of marshalling IT support.

But on the other hand, you have a great deal more control over the look of the thing (I’m not a fan of Springshare’s design so this is in itself appealing). You can add stuff to the header—e.g. Google web fonts, favicons, site header/footer etc.—and do whatever kind of add-on widgetry you like. In addition, I generally find tweaking CSS rewarding, simply because it remains relevant and I really don’t want to forget what I know about it.

Anyone out there reading this, please have a look at our site and let me know what you think!

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Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:36:23 -0700

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Seely Brown's Keynote at IL2011

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:15:19 -0700

I’m not really a fan of the “notes as blog post” genre. Hasn’t Twitter sort of made that obsolete? But, I’ve been taking notes at the Internet Librarian conference. Why not reshape them a little here?

I actually read John Seely Brown’s “Social Life of Information” book after getting tired of it hounding me on Amazon when I was in library school. Pretty good read, and the takeaway—that “working from home” doesn’t usually work that well—made some sense to me as someone who moved away from his grad program, then failed to finish his Ph.D.

I liked the opening of JSB’s talk. He argued that we are in a new moment in which the technological rupture we have experienced is not leveling off, not stabilizing, as technological ruptures of the past have. (Although whenever someone tells me we are in a totally new historical moment, I think, “really, just like the modernists said?”)

The bit about how it is increasingly difficult to evaluate textual authority was highly relevant, and only going to become more so. He had a lovely example of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which for a significant period was only covered outside of traditional news sources. A funny moment: he says, in this context, that librarians are more needed then ever. Of course I agree, but I know that in my organization (I do not exclude myself here), we still play the “these (more mediated) sources have authority, and those (Web/social media) sources don’t” game. We need to face these changes.

At times I could have used a few examples. For instance, “the half-life of a skill is now 5 years.” What kind of a skill are we talking about here? Not plumbing, or car repair. Not Web development—yes, the technologies change, but someone who learned HTML ten years ago would still be able to use a good deal of it, though they’d need to have kept up with developments. Although I guess I’m not even clear on what it means—sort of complicated to use “half-life” this metaphorically.

Like so many good talks, it sort of petered out as he told us that we need to embrace play for learning—I mean we knew that, right, even without the rest of it? Then remix, Harry Potter fan fiction, and we’re done. So, in summary, winners: Carla Hesse, David Weinberger, Andrew Sullivan, Piaget; losers: stuffy people everywhere.

I have lots of notes from other panels…

p.s. Many of the ideas in the talk appear to be in an article called Minds on Fire published in the Educause Review.

From a communication textbook

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:44:18 -0700

I was preparing an orientation class and found this gem in their textbook. 2nd edition, 2007:

For the iframe-challenged, or if Google Books pulls the preview, there’s a section starting on page 98 called “Using Library Resources” that includes the sage advice:

The card catalog indexes all the library’s books by author, title, and subject. This catalog is your primary guide to books in the library.

Nice, eh? Worldcat shows the first edition of this as being 2001.