Waste

Receiving, as I do, books for review, I'm often staggered by the amount of packing provided for a single book. An example arrived today: the book (a slim paperback of 186 pages) weighs 302 grams, the packaging 122 grams. The picture shows that one could get about six such books into the available space in the box! I wonder how much the publisher is charged for post and packing by the agency sending it out. (That agency is itself a subsidiary of the Hachette company.) Clearly the notion of protecting the environment hasn't yet hit the publishing industry.

Bogus organizations?

Two of my colleagues on the journal have received a rather odd e-mail from someone claiming to represent the "American Society of Science and Engineering" - an organization of which I have never previously heard. As the e-mail address bore no relationship to those on the Society's Website, but used the domain "163.com", I contacted the Society to advise them that their identity might have been stolen. (The 163.com Website is entirely in Chinese, which made me even more suspicious!). The message stated: "The purpose of this email is to inquiry about the possibility of cooperation with your journal… In the mutual-beneficial cooperative relationship, we can do publicity, promotion and collect papers for your journal, and we can guarantee the quantity and quality of the papers we provide. Moreover, we will also pay the publication fee if any. I wonder if we can sign a publication agreement upon the cooperation." This sounds very much like one of the new, bogus, open access, "scholarly journal" scams and I was therefore rather surprised to get a response from the Society stating: "Thank you for your reminding and cooperation! Actually, ASSE has some cooperation with some Chinese orgnizations, for example, the information below stated, and you could contact with them if possible!" Which now makes me even more suspicious about this Society! Not only is the message grammatically illiterate, it gives me no information about the nature of the relationship it has with the Chinese organization, nor why that organization is contacting my Associate Editors. Is the American Society of Science and Engineering a bona fide organization, or is it, too, bogus?

The impact of social media

As readers of Information Research may have noticed, I have started to use links to Facebook, Twitter and various bookmark sharing services at the bottom of each paper in the journal. The service, from AddThis.com, provides information on the number of clicks these links receive and the resulting 'clicks-back' to the relevant paper. The number of resulting hits, divided by the original clicks provides a measure of what they call "viral lift", i.e., the additional hits resulting from the social media links. This provides some kind of measure of the 'popularity' of a paper, which the usual citation indexes cannot. A citation can mean many things: agreement with the propositions in a paper, refutation of those propositions, mere token acknowledgement of its place in the literature, or whatever. A social media link presumably means: "I've read this and you might find it interesting". What one cannot know, of course, is how many of those referred to a paper from a Facebook or Twitter link would have found the paper without such help. However, over time, we may be able to contrast the hits on the site before the introduction of this feature with the situation afterwards.


The results, since the publication of volume 18 number 1, on the 15th March 2013, for the top ten listed items are as follows:

Factores para la adopción de linked data e...
219 Clicks 30 Shares 730% Viral Lift

Visitors and residents: what motivates engagement wi...
169 Clicks 57 Shares 296% Viral Lift

Multi-dimensional analysis of dynamic human informat...
136 Clicks 16 Shares 850% Viral Lift

In Web search we trust? Articulation of the cognitiv...
125 Clicks 9 Shares 1,389% Viral Lift

The nature and constitution of informal carers' info...
71 Clicks 9 Shares 789% Viral Lift

Big-data in cloud computing: a taxonomy of risks
39 Clicks 23 Shares 170% Viral Lift

Exploring design-fits for the strategic alignment of...
29 Clicks 15 Shares 193% Viral Lift

Search behaviour in electronic document and records...
23 Clicks 7 Shares 329% Viral Lift

Managing collaborative information sharing: bridging...
17 Clicks 13 Shares 131% Viral Lift

Workplace information practices among human resource...
16 Clicks 9 Shares 178% Viral Lift

Emerald embargo on open access

You may have read that, in response to the UK government's policy on open access (which is hardly totally enlightened) Emerald, which publishes the Journal of Documentation, is to have a two-year embargo on papers being deposited in repositories. This, of course, makes nonsense of the idea of "open" access - two years is far too long a period for such an embargo. However, there may be good news in this: perhaps authors will be persuaded that publication in a genuinely open access journal like Information Research is to be preferred. After all, not only are all papers openly available to all from the moment of publication, but copyright rests entirely with the author who can then do anything he or she wishes with the paper: generate as many copies as necessary for a class handbook, put in the institutional repository, or whatever. I don't exactly look forward to an increase in submissions to Information Research, since we get just about as much as we can cope with now, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on things.

Can Google Alerts be trusted?

The notion of trusting Google becomes more and more unlikely. I've been using the Alert service since December 2011 to monitor the news on e-books, in the expectation that we might get some funding for research on the subject. However,when I started to analyse the data recently, I discovered that there appears to be a maximum count of 45 items in any one Alert - in fact in 36 out of 59 days examined so far this was the case - and no day exceeded 45 items.

Using the service to try to discover trends in news reporting, therefore, is made impossible, since one will never know the "true" number of items published, or even discovered by Google's spiders. As far as I can discover, there is no information on the Alerts site about any such limitation. When one couples this problem with the further difficulty that Google covers much more of the US news than anywhere else in the world it become difficult to treat the service seriously.

The U.S. election

It would be comforting to believe that the American people could not be so stupid as to elect yet another right-wing millionaire bent on destroying what is left of the public sphere, but, sadly, history teaches us otherwise. After Reagen's disastrous handling of the economy (and his abandonment of the 'balance' rule in the media, which allows Fox News to pour out its poisonous rubbish), which saw only the rich getting richer, Clinton managed to turn things around and actually leave an economy in credit. All that was swept away by Bush, whose sole political aim seemed to be to keep his rich friends happy. Obama has had Congress stacked against him, preventing the implementation of perfectly sensible strategies for dealing with the mess left by Bush, and now it seems that half of the voters in the USA want to trust the management of the country to another Republican. From outside the USA this seems unbelievable, but it seems that memories are short in the USA - this guy didn't manage to do enough to get us back on track, so let another muffin-headed playboy have a go! What has all this to do with a foreigner, you might ask? Well, Bush's mis-management of the economy and de-regulation of the financial service industry brought about the collapse than now sees a number of European countries on the rack - do you imagine that they want another Bush?

Worried about the US election?

You should be: http://www.newstatesman.com/star-spangled-staggers/2012/10/mitt-romney-candidate-2012-zombie-apocalypse