Information Research - ideas and debate

Murdoch and the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Vanity Fair is not something I read very often, however the November 2009 issue has an interesting article by Michael Wolfe, "Murdoch vs. the Internet" which appears on the US site as "Rupert to Internet: It's War!"

As Wolf says:

The more he can choke off the Internet as a free news medium, the more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring back to his papers. It is not a war he can win in the long term, but a little Murdoch rearguard action might get him to his own retirement. Then it's somebody else's problem.

The apostrophe

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0000

Even in the rarefied atmosphere of the academic journal, the apostrophe can still be a problem - check out a few random papers here and there and you'll find instances that have escaped the editorial process. Given that, it's nice to come across a clear guide to what and what not to do: How to use an apostrophe

I once sat down with a couple of Master's students and explained the whole thing to them in a very similar way and they claimed that no one had ever explained the apostrophe before - primary school, secondary school, university degree, and they had remained blissfully ignorant. Could it be that their teachers either didn't know or didn't care?

I'd only disagree with one thing - the author says, 'If in doubt, don't use an apostrophe': I'd prefer him to have said, 'If in doubt - find out!'

Universities and government

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:28:00 +0000

Isn't it wonderful what governments will do to avoid paying properly for higher education? Here's the latest smokescreen to emanate from super-minister Mandelson:

Lord Mandelson will today unveil a major plan for universities designed to aid the country's economic recovery and pave the way for an overhaul of student tuition fees.

The new framework for higher education will set out a 10- to 15-year strategy affecting every aspect of university life, from the quality of teaching to ways of funding research that will force universities to become more competitive.

Over the past 27 years or so we've had initiative after initiative - all designed to accomplish what Mandelson now thinks needs to be accomplished. We've had the Research Assessment Exercise, the Teaching Quality Assessment, the Higher Education Academy, schemes to increase university interaction with local schools, other schemes for adult learners, skills initiatives and more. And now this idiot who probably has no idea of what has been done in the past, wants to revisit it once again! Take the Academy, for example, its brief is:

The Academy's role is to be a nationwide focus for enhancing teaching, learning and students' experiences in higher education. We work with institutions, discipline groups and individual staff within the four countries of the UK.

Of course, there will be no new money for Mandelson's plans; in fact, universities are likely to get less because of the government's inability to regulate the banking business, which has brought about the current financial chaos. Nor will there be any increase in taxation, because next year brings a general election, nor will there be an increase in student fees, for the same reason. So, once again, university staff will be asked to do the impossible and the higher education system in the UK will continue its current decline.

Perhaps Lord Mandelson should read a few university annual reports (and that of the Academy) before jumping into something he evidently knows nothing about.

...and don't forget the Doctoral Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:23:00 +0000

Anyone supervising doctoral candidates in the broad area covered by ISIC should publicise the Doctoral Workshop at ISIC 2010 - it is a unique opportunity for candidates to meet and be advised by some of the leading researchers in the field and to meet fellow sufferers on the doctoral path :-)

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

We would like to invite your participation in the Doctoral Workshop held in conjunction with ISIC: the information behaviour conference. During the Workshop, doctoral students will be invited to share their current dissertation work-in-progress with their peers and with an international panel of academic staff.

The Workshop has the following objectives:

1. To provide a setting for mutual feedback on participants' current research, and guidance on future research directions;
2. To develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
3. To contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events.

ISIC Permanent Committee Involvement

Members of ISIC Permanent Committee and other university researchers will participate as tutors in the Workshop. Details will be announced nearer the date of the Conference.

Criteria for Selection
Participants for the Doctoral Workshop will be selected on the basis of their anticipated contribution to the workshop goals. Emphasis will be placed on forming a diverse group of high quality students.

Between twenty and twenty four applicants will be selected for participation. Student participants typically have settled on thesis directions, usually with a research proposal accepted by their thesis committee or departmental research committee. Further details on workshop activities will be available on the web site at a later date.

How to Apply
To apply as a student participant in the Doctoral Workshop, prepare a submission package consisting of the following:

1. Thesis Summary: Prepare a two-page thesis summary, which outlines the problem being addressed, the proposed work plan and a description of your progress to date. Include in your summary research problems you have met and would like to discuss.
2. Letter of Recommendation from your thesis advisor or principal supervisor. This must include an assessment of the current status of your thesis research, and an expected date for thesis submission.
3. Additional Information on your background and relevant experience. This should include information typically found in a curriculum vitae, plus additional information which may indicate your potential contribution to the Workshop Format.

All submissions must be submitted electronically, as Word documents (preferably), or Adobe Acrobat .pdf files, (if they contain diagrams or other formatting information).

ISIC 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Time to remind folks that the Call for Papers for ISIC 2010 needs a response from you by February 1, 2010 - and that's getting close, just three months now to get the paper written! The Conference will take place from 27th September (the Doctoral Workshop) to 2nd October. Check out the Website for further information

Call for Papers

The field of human information behaviour is multi-disciplinary in scope: researchers from information science, information management, psychology, social psychology, sociology, information systems, computer science, and other disciplines all contribute to this field of investigation.

ISIC: the Information Behaviour Conference intends to reflect this interdisciplinary character through attracting papers from researchers in all of these areas. The unifying characteristic, which we see as essential in developing a programme is the relationship between the needs or requirements of the information user, the means for the satisfaction of those needs and the uses to which those means are put in practice organizations or disciplines. Thus, papers that deal solely with technological aspects of system design, for example, will not be appropriate for the conference.

Themes of the conference include the following:

1. Theories and models of information seeking and searching: particular theoretical frameworks that are currently of interest include (but are not restricted to) social network theory, actor network theory, cultural-historical activity theory, genre theory, etc.
2. Research approaches and methodologies, both interpretative and positivist, employing either qualitative or quantitative methods.
3. Information seeking, searching and use in specific contexts, e.g., health care, education, business, industry, the public services and government, the emergency services, etc.
4. Organizational structures and processes and information seeking, searching and use.
5. Information seeking and searching in virtual social networks, including gaming and virtual worlds as arenas for information exchange.
6. Information behaviour in everyday life; in communities both real and virtual, including its role in indigenous communities.
7. Integrating studies on information seeking and interactive retrieval.
8. Information use: the nature of information and how information is used to help solve problems, aid decision making or satisfy an initial need.
9. The mediation of information behaviour: how human or software agents can respond to information needs.
10. The design of information delivery systems to meet information needs generally, or in organizational or disciplinary contexts, including Web 2.0 developments such as blogs, wikis, e-learning platforms and open access information resources.
11. Information seeking and information requirements - integrating information science and information systems.
12. The communication of information to users: relationship between communication theory and information behaviour, including, for example, the relationship of information architectures to information seeking behaviour and the design of information products on sound communication principles; including audio and visual communication media.

Papers that deal with the information behaviour of practitioner groups, such as scientists, engineers, local government works, politicians, and other less-studied (in this context) groups, will be particularly welcome. Also, analytical, rather than descriptive investigations, will be sought, with strong connections to previous work and to theoretical or conceptual frameworks.

For the 2010 Conference we shall be particularly interested in papers in any of these areas that address the connection between information research and information practice.

Paper preparation and submission deadline February 1, 2010 Please, submit a prepared paper in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .rtf files) to: isic2010@um.es

We also invite doctoral students to submit an application for participation in the Doctoral Workshop held in conjunction with the Conference on 28th September. We especially welcome submissions from researchers and doctoral students based in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

The death of traditional media

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:40:00 +0000

I watched this very interesting talk from Leo Laporte of TWIT (This Week in Tech) and I hope the link below works so that readers of this blog may take a look. Laporte is talking about the death of newspapers and also of the way network programming of TV works in the USA.

This talk, along with reading for review What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis, has firmed up ideas I have been having for some time about the direction in which scholarly publishing is likely to go.

I won't elaborate on that right now, but I hope to be able to get my ideas together in some more coherent form some time soon.

Academic Journals - the open access publisher

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:47:00 +0000

I was asked recently to review a paper for the International Journal of Library and Information Science - and declined, through pressure of work. However, I decided to take a look at the site and found a very odd animal indeed!

The current issue (September, 2009) has two papers, one is entitled:

Spectral sensitivity coefficients (SSCs) of the based materials for photonic devices under optical wavelength and temperature sensing variations in modern optical access networks

This is a predominantly mathematical paper, which appears not to have been copy-edited by any native English speaker and the text is almost completely without paragraphs. Regardless of editorial issues such as these, however, I am bewildered as to what definition of "library and information science" this paper is intended to fit.

The second paper Indian journal of physics: A scientometric analysis is obviously within the usual definition of the field, but again, copy-editing is clearly absent, since occasional sentences are not only ungrammatical but unintelligible.

Others have drawn attention to this publisher of OA journals and, on the basis of this example, they can hardly be said to add to the reputation of open access publication in general.

More browser wars?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:37:00 +0000

A number of browsers have been releasing updates or even new editions recently and Opera 10 has just been released.

I have something of a soft spot for Opera, since I was using it before Firefox (in its first version as Phoenix) came along. The big thing about Opera is that it has been responsible for just about every innovation in browser technology from its beginning. Tabs, for example, were in Opera long before Firefox, it was first with mouse gestures, personalisation with skins, etc. and much more - so it has a strong record of innovation - and, as someone said recently in a discussion group, is worth supporting just for that reason. The problem for Opera, of course, is that it has never made it as a mass-use browser. In the past month, for example, almost 59% of the hits on the Information Research site come from Internet Explorer, 30% from Firefox, 3.5% from Google Chrome, and only 1.12% from Opera. That the newly introduced Chrome should be used twice as much as long-established Opera, is really rather ridiculous!

I'm using Safari most of the time now, since it seems to give me just about all I need, but I'm tempted once again by Opera, because it really has quite a lot going for it. Notes, for example: you can bring up a sidebar and drag and drop text from Web pages; and the Closed tabs button, which enables you to get back to a site you might have closed accidentally. Another advantage of Chrome is that it is multi-platform - every new version is released simultaneously (or as near as dammit) for pretty well everything - whereas it is taking Google forever to get its Chrome fully operational on the Mac.

I think I'll be trying Opera again, however; and I'm sure that the other browsers will be looking at it very carefully and, once again, stealing all the goodies with never a word of acknowledgement.

Here's the video:

Murdoch, again

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:11:00 +0000

The UK newspapers are stilling giving space to discussion on James Murdoch's lecture, in part knocking it, in part revealing that, surprise, surprise, other media barons agree with some of what he said. In an earlier post I listed the holdings of News Corporation, headed by James's Daddy, Rupert - it consists of about 100 companies. And while James is telling his Edinburgh audience about the evils of the BBC and its 'chilling' hold on news distribution, etc. in the UK, Daddy's annual report for 2008 is on the Web for all to see. What does it tell us?

There is no doubt that asset values are under pressure in some parts of the world and that financial institutions are, quite rightly, re-evaluating risk, but money continues to flow to sound companies and to clever ideas. we are in the fortuitous position of having a group of complementary properties whose global reach and digital potential puts us in a position to flourish while others are floundering.

Not much recognition of damage from the BBC there, then.

Meanwhile, in Australia and the U.K., our newspapers are doing very well in challenging environments. And on the global digital front, Fox Interactive Media saw a five-fold increase in operating income. results like these are the reason that News Corporation can report double digit growth for both revenue and operating income. And they reinforce our drive to take advantage of the opportunities arising in a fast-changing media landscape...

So the shareholders don't need worry too much about the impact of the BBC, then? Seems not:

We are the leading publisher of english-language newspapers throughout the U.K. and Australia...

Sales of our four national papers in the U.K. accounted for approximately one-third of all national newspapers sold last year.

News Limited is Australia’s largest newspaper publisher, with almost 150 titles. last year, we sold more than 12.8 million national, metropolitan and regional newspapers each week in Australia, reaching 9.4 million readers each day. Melbourne grew its circulation to 623,000 copies each week in 2008 – nearly three times the circulation of its rival paper.

I find these statements pretty 'chilling', James!

However, Rupert will do business with the BBC when it suits him - witness the deal between MySpace (a NewsCorp company) and the BBC to deliver video of some BBC programmes through MySpace - so, not a force for evil in the communications world, but a valued business partner!

Clearly all this has an impact on the bottom line and in these hard times, NewsCorp reported income of $32,996,000,000 - or, as near as dammit - £20 billion. And the BBC's income for 2008/2009? £4,606,000,000,
or, about $7.5 billion at today's exchange rate - the World Service alone, uses a very small proportion of that budget to deliver programmes in 32 foreign languages to a worldwide audience of approximately 236 million listeners. Now, exactly what would happen to that one service of the BBC if it was hived off into commercial hands? You know as well as I do, James, that within six months it would be wound up, and 236 million people would be deprived of relatively unbiased news and a whole raft of entertainment and educational programmes. Would Fox TV step up to fill the gap?

Google Books again

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:14:00 +0000

The ongoing debate about Google Books made it into the Observer yesterday. It picked up on Robert Darnton's argument that because books are our common heritage, their control ought not to be in the hands of a commercial organization.

Google's response to this really could be pretty straightforward: simply establish a not-for-profit "Google Foundation" and put access to Google Books under the Foundation.

But, you say, Google makes money from ads on the Google Books pages, so how would that work? Well, it could still work, all that would have to happen is for Google to pay into the Google Foundation some proportion of the ad revenue gained from Google Books and everyone would be happy. Since Google's unofficial motto is 'don't do evil' a solution like this would demonstrate, clearly, the desire to do good.

Join the Pirate Party

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:28:00 +0000

Following on the success of Piratpartiet in Sweden (gaining 7% of the vote and returning a member to Brussels in the recent European elections) a sister Pirate Party has been established in the UK.

Naturally, I've joined :-) Why? Well, primarily because of the Party's opposition to the continuing demands of the communications industries to extend copyright far beyond what is sensible. I'm not interested in file-sharing, which is another issue.

When copyright was first established in the UK in the reign of Queen Anne it gave the creator of a work a monopoly to reproduce that work for 14 years. The notion being that this was a reasonable length of time in which the creator could be recompensed for the initial investment and derive some kind of subsequent income.

Now what do we have? As the Guardian report on the establishment of the Party noted:

Copyright for written works now stands at life plus 70 years, and copyright for sound recordings is 50 years after the recording is made, or 50 years after publication. The EU has extended copyright to 95 years for performers and sound recordings.

With the extension of copyright in this way, it is clear that it no longer protects the creator - it protects the publisher (of texts, of music, of recordings). The aim is not to provide the creator with a reward, but to prevent the wider distribution of texts, etc. and to limit the ability of future creators and performers to build readily upon the work of their predecessors. It is no longer possible to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' because the giants are the corporations and they are standing on you.

So - joint the Pirate Party and help to get some sense into the system.

Media baron vs. the BBC

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:08:00 +0000

I see that James Murdoch, son of the ageing Rupert, has inveighed against the BBC's 'dominance' of the media scene in the UK. You can be sure that whenever the politicians or the media barons speak out against the Corporation that it is doing something well. Murdoch describes the BBC's 'dominance' as "chilling".

Of course, the real story is that in the present recession, newspapers are suffering from the decline in advertising revenue and see the advertising-free BBC TV and radio as a desirable target for a takeover and conversion to the obscene aims of commercialism. Murdoch, father and son, pander to the lowest audience tastes, delivering dumbed-down output through their world empire. They also want to begin charging for their Web content - a vain hope for most of the trash they delivesr - and see the BBC's Website as an obstacle to this aim. Hence the invective - a copycat of Rupert Murdoch's speech on the same theme at the same venue in 1989.

So James finds the BBC chilling, eh? Well, James, how chilling do you imagine everyone else finds this list of News Corporation's holdings:

In the UK:

The Times
The Sunday Times
The Sun
News of the World
Times Literary Supplement
Times Education Supplement
Times Higher Education Supplement
Page 3.com

In the USA:

20th Century Fox
 20th Century Fox Espanol  
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment  
20th Century Fox International
 20th Century Fox Television
 Fox Searchlight Pictures  
Fox Studios Australia
 Fox Studios LA
 Fox Television Studios
 Blue Sky Studios
FOX Broadcasting Company  
FOX Sports Australia
 FOX Television Stations
 FOXTEL
 MyNetwork
TV STAR
FOX Business Network 
Fox Movie Channel
 FOX News Channel
 FOX College Sports
 FOX Sports Enterprises
 FOX Sports En Espanol 
FOX Sports Net  
FOX Soccer Channel
 Fox Reality Channel 
Fuel TV
 FX
 National Geographic Channel
United States National Geographic Channel
Worldwide  Speed  
Stats, Inc.
BSkyB
Sky Italia
Big League  
Inside Out
 donna hay
 ALPHA  News
America Marketing  
Smart Source  
The Weekly Standard
New York Post
The Wall Street Journal
Dow Jones

And in Australasia

Daily Telegraph (Australia)
 Fiji Times 
Gold Coast Bulletin
 Herald Sun
 Newsphotos 
Newspix 
Newstext NT
News Post-Courier
 Sunday Herald
Sun 
Sunday Mail
 Sunday Tasmanian 
Sunday Territorian
 Sunday Times 
The Advertiser 
The Australian 
The Courier-Mail 
The Mercury 
The Sunday Mail 
The Sunday Telegraph 
Weekly Times

Plus:

HarperCollins Publishers
Zondervan
AmericanIdol.com 
AskMen  Broadsystem 
Beliefnet
 careerone.com.au 
CARSguide.com.au
 Fox.com 
Fox Interactive Media  
FoxSports.com 
FoxSports.com.au 
hulu.com 
IGN Entertainment  
kSolo  
Milkround
 MySpace
 National Rugby League  
NDS 
News.com.au 
News Digital Media
 News Outdoor
 Rotten Tomatoes
 Scout 
Spring Widgets
 truelocal.com.au 
WhatIfSports

James pretends to be worried about competition in the industry - how about getting your Dad to divest himself of some of this lot and stop buying up every media company he can get his hands on?

Browser failure

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:05:00 +0000

The last post got me thinking about how much real progress in search there has been since the first search engine appeared on the Web. Clearly quite enormous progress has been made in some areas, with Google leading the way in delivering search outputs that respond to the entered search terms. But no one seems to have developed anything that will answer questions.

For example, I tried the following question in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Chrome, Wolfram Alpha, SenseBot, Hakia, Powerset, Deepdyve and Ask.com

"In what sense is a programming language a language?"

I imagine that this is a subject that has been debated now and again and which is a reasonable question to ask. However, neither the standard search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) nor the so-called 'semantic search engines' (Hakia, SenseBot, etc.) came up with any results on their first output page - and if it isn't there, the question would be, Why not?

I see that Powerset has been bought by Microsoft, in the hope of improving Bing, presumably, but it looks as though search still has a long way to go before it is anything more than a method for matching input terms against document terms.

It might be thought that the search topic was in some sense "unfair", but surely it is exactly questions of this kind that present the real challenge for information retrieval research? The straightforward problem of matching terms has probably been cracked and certainly most users of search engines appear to be pretty well satisfied with what they get. However, because the output from search engines is so good today, it raises expectations of how good it can be, and those expectations are probably going to be dashed.

Browser history

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:05:00 +0000

Digg drew my attention to an interesting bit of Web history - Surfing Since 1991: The Evolution of Web Browsers by Paul Lilly. It made me reflect on my own use of browsers over the years. I think that the first one I used was Mosaic - which I guess is true for many people. Mosaic became Netscape, of course, and I used that for quite a while, more or less until it seemed to die quietly away as Microsoft got into the business with Internet Explorer. I used IE but was never a great fan and when Opera came along I switched to that, but not for long, because Phoenix came along in about 2003. Phoenix? - yes, later to be called Firebird and then Firefox - and I've stayed with this browser ever since. I've occasionally taken a look at various versions of Opera and I've toyed recently with Google Chrome and, following a switch to the Mac, Safari but I find that, overall, Firefox gives me what I need. I occasionally use Google Chrome, just to keep an eye on how it is developing, but it doesn't have a fully released Mac version at this point. However, it is fast and, because of the lack of add-ins, doesn't delay launching to check for add-in updates. So, unless something remarkable happens (and, of course, the Web being the kind of animal it is, something will) I'll probably be sticking with the flaming fox.

Is Google evil?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:06:00 +0000

This is the title of a featured article in the current issue of the New Statesman. The concerns dealt with by the article include personal privacy (e.g., the row over Google's cameras patrolling towns and cities), the monopolistic trend of Google's online ad business ("the last time I looked, they were in their own right half the [online advertising] market. Search is traded as a dedicated marketplace, and within that they were almost the market.") and, of course, Google Books ("The endeavour is costing Google hundreds of millions of pounds and has won praise for its scope, but the deal includes clauses that could make it harder for anyone else to do the same.").

The authors conclude:

...on the fast-changing web, predictions about what Google and its peers will do next are often shots in the dark. We know a whole lot less about their plans than they do about us.

Perhaps that should make us feel a little uneasy?

Basic statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:31:00 +0000

An item in yesterday's Guardian newspaper reported the astounding finding that most disposed of book, donated to the Oxfam charity shops, was Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code'. The item also reported on the 81 million world-wide sales of the book - it didn't seem to occur to the writer that the book with most sales in recent times should also be the most-donated book. I shall spare the journalist's blushes by not mentioning her name, but perhaps it would be a good idea to take a short sabbatical for a Statistics 101 refresher!

Link rot... and how to prevent it.

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:26:00 +0000

I really don't know how any of the links that appear in print journals can be taken seriously. As readers of Information Research will know, we ask authors to archive all Web documents to WebCite to avoid "link rot". However, practically no one reads the Instructions for Authors, so, in future, I'll be sending back all papers that do not have WebCite links in them. The urgency with which this needs to be addressed cannot be overstated: I recently edited a paper where a number of links from between 2005 and 2008 had simply disappeared. In one case, an entire chunk of material on a site had disappeared, although the main site was still there. This puts the author in a difficult position. What does s/he do about the material cited in the text, when the evidence for its existence has disappeared? In a limited number of cases one might accept the old link and add a note to the effect that the material is no longer available, but normally, the author is going to be asked to rewrite the text, either locating equivalent material or somehow rewriting in such a way that the the missing material is no longer significant.

So, the message is: whenever you find a Web document which you think you may use, archive it to WebCite immediately - it takes less than a minute and not only do you benefit by being sure that you can find the document again, but everyone who reads your paper will also be able to locate the same document. In my experience of using WebCite only a very small proportion of sites refuse to allow WebCite to archive documents - when this happens I'm tempted to archive it myself! Here's what a correct reference will look like:

Lawrence, S. (2001). Online or invisible? Nature, 411(6837). 521. Retrieved 18 August, 2009 from http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/ (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j7fVIChu)

All this fuss about references, you might say. Well, that's another point: authors seem to be under the impression that citations and references only serve to satisfy the reviewers that they've actually done some background work :-) Not so - the purpose of the reference is to enable the reader to discover your sources and check them out for him/herself - there is little that is more frustrating than finding an interesting quotation in a paper and then being unable to find the source because the document has disappeared from the Web. Strike a blow for scholarly communication - USE WEBCITE!

Paying for news

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:43:00 +0000

Big news in recent weeks has been Rupert Murdoch's conversion to paying for online news. Originally, he believed that online news could be paid for by advertising but, buying the Wall Street Journal and being shown the books was his 'on the road to Damascus' moment and he was suddenly converted to the opposite.

Now RM is a big media baron owning everything from Sky tv to The Sun newspaper - as well as Fox tv, the Times newspaper and dozens of other properties. Probably his aim is to take over the media world in its entirety.

But will he really get people to pay for news? The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are specialist business newspapers and subscriptions to their online content is likely to be a business expense rather than a personal expense, but is anyone going to pay for The Sun's content?

There's no denying that newspapers are in real difficulties - hit, on one hand, by the new technology, which makes the worldwide distribution of news so easy, and on the other hand by the recession, which has cut into their advertising revenue. To a degree, newspaper publishers are in the same fix as scholarly publishers - the technology has made them potentially redundant and they are desperate to find out how to 'monetize' their online activities. What business model will replace the existing one is hard for me to tell - not having the gift of foresight, but I imagine that one consequence, and a very undesirable one, will be to concentrate ownership of the news media in even fewer hands, with fewer journalists, little on-the-ground foreign coverage, and more and more regurgitated wire services content.

The humanities and open access publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:41:00 +0000

A recent report from the National Humanities Alliance reports that:

Even learned-society publishers in the humanities and social sciences may be taken aback by just how expensive it is to publish an article in their fields. It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed, compared with an average of $2,670 for STM journal articles.

Makes me wonder how I manage to publish Information Research on a budget of zero!

Anonymous posts

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:39:00 +0000

I've removed a couple of anonymous posts from the 'Twitter' posting. I post openly and it seems to me only right that any commentator should do likewise.

Checking out Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:52:00 +0000

I've stayed away from Twitter, as I stay away from most of these so-called "Web 2.0" developments - they seem to offer huge amounts of scope for maximum time-wasting. However, I'm always curious as to what things like this are used for, so I joined Facebook for a few days, found nothing of interest to me and never used it again. However, you don't have to use Twitter to find out how it is used. And it bears out my worst imaginings.

Consider Stephen Fry, for example, hugely self-satisfied individual, whose TV appearances become more and more boring - here's something that would fit nicely into Private Eye's "Pseud" column:

"Just chatted with Clive Anderson in Proms interval. Lebecq sisters caused much delight with a Poulenc piece."

Or, Britney Spears (who she?):

"Just had dinner with my boys at the Eiffel Tower. So beautiful! -Britney"

John Cleese: "I like collective nouns... Like a spread of sticklebacks... an array of objects... or my favorite for politicians - a waste of time."

Neil Gaiman (surely he should know better?): "Am backstage at the fire festival. Things are flaming and festive."

These are from the Times Online article on the fifty most popular "celebs" on Twitter. Why on earth would anyone want to know these things?

Librarians, of course, are eager to get in on the act, as a way of publicising their activities, but I wonder how many people are likely to follow the thoughts of whoever is inputting the information from Little Hicksville Public Library? Perhaps this is all a sign that although technology has not led to the increase in leisure time that was anticipated fifty years ago, it has led to leisure time being incorporated into work time, since most of this stuff will be consumed when people are supposed to be working - just as e-mailing friends, Web searching, Facebook dwelling and even online gaming have been incorporated into work time. Now there's an interesting theory worth exploring - assuming that you could drag people away from their twittering long enough to interview them!

Bentham follow-up

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Happily, the editor of The Open Access Information Science Journal, Bambang Parmanto, of the University of Pittsburgh has resigned - I wonder how long it will take the other Editorial Board members to do so? Tellingly, Dr. Parmato commented that he never saw the hoax manuscript and an Editorial Board member of another Bentham journal, who has also resigned, said that in his time on the Board he had never received a paper for review. Peter Suber comments: "In April, Marie-Paule Pileni, editor in chief of Bentham's Open Chemical Physics Journal, resigned when the journal published a 9/11 conspiracy-theory paper without her knowledge or approval."

It's a strange scholarly publishing activity where editors don't see what is to be published and where board members don't get papers to review. One wonders whether the term 'scholarly' should be used at all!

Dr Parmanto also commented, in respect of the author pays business model: "I see that [Bentham would] have the incentive to maintain the credibility of the journal, but I also see the potential for abuse."

Exactly.

Author pays, publisher profits & science loses?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:07:00 +0000

Peter Suber reports on the successful submission of a hoax paper to the Bentham Science, The Open Information Science Journal, which claims to have peer-review. Last year Bentham Science announced about 200 new OA journals, all using author charges and, of course, the aim is to maximise profits. It does make one wonder, however, how far other more reputable publishers may be prepared to go in maximising profits and raises a question about the whole idea of OA based on author charging.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of my feelings on the subject: money spent to support corporate shareholders and executive bonuses should be spent, instead, on establishing really open journals, like Information Research. No money changes hands in any direction as far as publication or access are concerned: strict and strong peer review is applied because I don't need to fill pages. The only thing that counts is the quality of the content.

Any other process is flawed: author charging will encourage corruption, and 'toll access' puts money in the wrong place. Some day the policy makers are going to understand this, it's just a pity that it is a long time coming!

When this particular journal was announced several friends of mine and I were approached to be members of the Editorial Board - we conferred and we all declined. I trust that those who accepted the invitation will now resign - although I must admit that the names of only six of the Board members are known to me.

The missing link and open access

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:36:00 +0000

The Guardian newspaper had a number of items on the discovery of Ida - the 'missing link' in the evolution of primates. An interesting piece from one of them was this:

There will be some raised eyebrows in the scientific establishment that Hurum did not opt to publish the scientific description of Ida in either Science or Nature, widely regarded as the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Instead he and his team chose for PLoS ONE, an online open-access journal that does not charge people to read its papers.
Hurum said the main reason was to ensure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to read the paper. "I'm paid by the tax payers of Norway to do this research. I'm not paid by Nature or Science and still they charge money for other people to read my scientific results," he says. "This fossil really is part of our history, truly a fossil that's a world heritage. A find like this is something for all human kind."

Now, wouldn't it be a good idea for all scientists to take note of Jørn Hurum's stand?
Here's the paper.

Jargon and the Local Government Association

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:34:00 +0000

Finally, someone in local government (no such wisdom in central government yet!) has decided that the unthinking use of jargon is not a good idea. The Local Government Association has come up with a list of words that it thinks ought not to be used.

Wonderful! Among the words are some of my pet hates, such as 'stakeholder' - which actually means someone who holds the money for parties to a wager - the LGA suggests 'other organizations' will do, but I think that there are alternatives, depending upon what is actually meant - assuming, of course, that the writer has something particular in mind when using the term. 'Typology' gets kicked out, with the comment, 'Why use at all?' - but 'classification' will serve just as well.

'Why use at all?' is attached to many terms, e.g., Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Network model, Overarching, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network, Pooled risk and more. No doubt the managers in local government are now desperately trying to find copy-editors to peruse their texts to eliminate these and other words.

But what happens if nothing is left? :-)