Check out the survey results

You can see the results in real time at the survey site.

Preliminary report on the reader survey

With more than 200 responses so far, there’s enough information for a preliminary report on the reader survey. But please continue to complete the survey!

26.64% of you have been reading the journal for more than five years.
22.69% found the journal in the course of doing a literature search
40.64% of you only read occasional papers of direct interest to you
31.17% use the journal to help them in their research (and 24.68% use it for personal professional development)
78.35% find the journal Easy or Very Easy to navigate
33.79% rarely use the author index
33.48% occasionally use the subject index
33.64% occasionally use the search page
32.87% never use the Google site-search box

The areas of most interest to you are, in rank order:

1. Information behaviour
2. Information retrieval
3. Internet research
4. Everyday information seeking
5. Information management
6. Digital libraries
7. Web searching
8. Web design and development
9. Information systems
10. Electronic publishing

You live and work in…

21.97% United States of America
16.59% United Kingdom
5.38% Australia
4.48% Canada
4.04% Spain
3.59% Brazil
2.69% Finland
2.24% India
2.24% Ireland
2.24% Netherlands

Information Research readership survey

If you are a registered reader of Information Research you will have already received an invitation to participate in our readership survey, so you can ignore this post. If you aren't a registered reader, but would like to participate, please go to the survey site and complete the brief questionnaire (only ten questions).

The new issue of Information Research

The new issue of Information Research, Volume 13 no. 2 is now online:

Editorial

Lorna Uden, Pedro Valderas and Oscar Pastor
An activity-theory-based model to analyse Web application requirements

Erik A.M. Borglund and Lena-Maria Öberg
How are records used in organizations?

Charles Oppenheim and Mark A.C. Summers
Citation counts and the Research Assessment Exercise, part VI: Unit of assessment 67 (music)

Kursat Demiryurek, Huseyin Erdem, Vedat Ceyhan, Savas Atasever and Osman Uysal
Agricultural information systems and communication networks: the case of dairy farmers in the Samsun province of Turkey

Silvania V. Miranda and Kira M.A. Tarapanoff
Information needs and information competencies: a case study of the off-site supervision of financial institutions in Brazil

Rimvydas Skyrius
The current state of decision support in Lithuanian business

Gary Burnett and Paul T. Jaeger
Small worlds, lifeworlds, and information: the ramifications of the information behaviour of social groups in public policy and the public sphere

Watch this: LINQ shifts the paradigm of query — one of a series of occasional columns by Terrence A. Brooks of the Information School, University of Washington, USA.

Presentation on OA

Thanks to Peter Suber's blog for drawing attention to the presentations given at a session of the ARMA/INORMS congress in Liverpool earlier this month.

The presentations are by Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central on why sustainable funding streams are needed for the OA publishing model (it would be more accurate to say that sustainable work streams are needed - but, then, Cockerill doesn't take into account the Platinum mode of publishing, which relies on voluntary work). Then we have Stephen Pinfield on setting up an OA publication fund - that is, not how to set up a fund for the publication of Platinum OA journals but a fund to continue to subsidise the commercial publisher. Thirdly, Margaret Hurley and Nicola Perrin of the Wellcome Trust explore the Trust's OA policy, that is, meeting the costs of author charging, or requiring deposit in an appropriate repository. Finally, Bill Hubbard on 'building repositories'.

Generally, it will be seen that these authors assume that (apart from repositories) the only true 'publication' route is through author charges. A rather sad reflection on what the different agencies ought to be doing.

Open access to open access information

David J. Solomon - author of one of the case studies in Information Research - has announced that an abridged version of his book "Developing open access journals:
a practical guide" is now available on open access. Nice move, David!

Why is Harvard Business Review so bad...

...at observing bibliographical standards? Suppose you have a reference to, say, Davenport's "Competing on analytics", which appeared in the January 6th edition of the journal, and you want to find volume number, part number and pages. The obvious place to go to is the HBR site - right? Wrong! The HBR site is designed to sell you offprints, it is not designed to help you, the author, find the bibliographical details for any of its articles. So much for having a role in scholarly communication, when the Trustees don't even care whether or not anyone can find a specific paper. Sadly, this is symptomatic of much Web publishing - bibliographical standards fly out of the window in the face of the marketing director.

Firefox heads to version 3

Firefox has made Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3 available for download I've been using this version since its release and it seems to be very stable and various commentators are lauding its speed and new features. I don't experience much of a speed change and I imagine it is micro-seconds of difference over version 2. However, if you are using an old browser, you'll probably see the difference. A key new feature is an improved location bar with an auto-complete feature that pulls in links from your bookmarks and history, so that you are able to select the appropriate link from a wide assortment. The results are ranked according to frequency of use, so if you use a link often, it will come up first. There's a full "What's new" page on the Mozilla site.