I participated in a workshop at Leed University Business School on Wednesday, which was organized on behalf of the Research Information Network, to get feedback on its report, Mind the skills gap, which I had a hand in producing along with colleagues David Allen and David Streatfield. The three of us were involved in the workshop which was managed overall by another colleague, Sharon Markless.
The participants consisted of a mixture of librarians involved in information skills training and other unversity research training staff, which enabled the discussions to take account of different perspectives. This was particularly valuable, since the report drew attention to a lack of communication at all levels in many universities and collaboration was one of the key words that came out of the discussion on how to improve the situation in the future.
05 September 2008
OA books from Bloomsbury Academic
An interesting announcement about a new publisher and a new strategy for academic texts. Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from the Harry Potter publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.
According to the press release:
The new imprint has its own Website where the FAQ contains answers to questions you might think of asking, such as:
This is an interesting development, which we shall watch with interest - Bloomsbury is taking a chance on the potential for profit from demand for print copies, which it will produce on demand. Given the usually small print runs of academic books, and some anecdotal evidence on the scale of this kind of demand, Bloomsbury may well be right.
According to the press release:
All books will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licences. The works will also be sold as books, using the latest short-run technologies or Print on Demand (POD).
The imprint will initially publish in the Social Sciences and Humanities building thematic lists on pressing global issues, with approximately fifty new titles online and in print by the end of 2009.
The new imprint has its own Website where the FAQ contains answers to questions you might think of asking, such as:
Is this like the open access model for journals where authors (or their institutions) have to pay for the publishing process?
No, Bloomsbury Academic finances the publishing process and expects to recover its costs through sales of hardback copies.
This is an interesting development, which we shall watch with interest - Bloomsbury is taking a chance on the potential for profit from demand for print copies, which it will produce on demand. Given the usually small print runs of academic books, and some anecdotal evidence on the scale of this kind of demand, Bloomsbury may well be right.
02 September 2008
Google Chrome
The bloggers are abuzz with news of Google Chrome - the new browser from Google to be released today at, if my reckoning is right, 7.0 p.m. (UK time). The browser is described (in a very techie fashion) in an online comic from Google. There's also a more user-friendly description and some screenshots.
The memory management system would seem to be a big improvement on other browsers, but I suspect that Chrome will not take a big part of the browser 'market' - the vast majority of people still use whatever comes with what they buy, which means Internet Explorer and an increasing proportion use Firefox - 24% of those who access Information Research, for example. So, I think that, in spite of the strong brand association with Google, Chrome will struggle to make much of an impact.
Later note: 45% of readers of this Weblog use Firefox!
Later still: well, now it's out and the bloggers have been furiously testing. The conclusions seem to be that Google has something here (why is that not a surprise?). Chrome is faster to load and does a number of things faster than either Firefox or IE. The memory management seems to be a winner, since when you close tabs in Firefox a lot of memory associated with those tabs continues to be used, but with separate processes controlling separate tabs, when a tab is closed, the associated memory ceases to be used. For me, it does seem to load pages faster and I quite like the rather restrained user interface. It takes a little time to become accustomed to having the tabs right at the top of the screen, and I found myself closing them accidentally but otherwise, I haven't experienced any particular problems. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
And more: one idiosyncratic aspect of Chrome, which doesn't work for me, is its download function. Click on download and a small pop-up appears at the bottome of the screen, which you then click on. The options do not include "Save" - which is simply crazy. I think Google ought to re-think this one - it's messy and counter-intuitive. Perhaps the urge to be different has been taken to far.
The memory management system would seem to be a big improvement on other browsers, but I suspect that Chrome will not take a big part of the browser 'market' - the vast majority of people still use whatever comes with what they buy, which means Internet Explorer and an increasing proportion use Firefox - 24% of those who access Information Research, for example. So, I think that, in spite of the strong brand association with Google, Chrome will struggle to make much of an impact.
Later note: 45% of readers of this Weblog use Firefox!
Later still: well, now it's out and the bloggers have been furiously testing. The conclusions seem to be that Google has something here (why is that not a surprise?). Chrome is faster to load and does a number of things faster than either Firefox or IE. The memory management seems to be a winner, since when you close tabs in Firefox a lot of memory associated with those tabs continues to be used, but with separate processes controlling separate tabs, when a tab is closed, the associated memory ceases to be used. For me, it does seem to load pages faster and I quite like the rather restrained user interface. It takes a little time to become accustomed to having the tabs right at the top of the screen, and I found myself closing them accidentally but otherwise, I haven't experienced any particular problems. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
And more: one idiosyncratic aspect of Chrome, which doesn't work for me, is its download function. Click on download and a small pop-up appears at the bottome of the screen, which you then click on. The options do not include "Save" - which is simply crazy. I think Google ought to re-think this one - it's messy and counter-intuitive. Perhaps the urge to be different has been taken to far.
01 September 2008
Research assessment and bibliometrics
The Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK have issued an announcement on a pilot excercise (involving twenty-two UK universities) on the use of bibliometrics in the new "Research Excellence Framework", which will take over from the Research Assessment Excercise now underway.
[As an aside, it looks as though the marketing men have infiltrated the HEFC - "Research Assessment Exercise" was obviously far too explicit for them and so it has to be something new that completely hides what is actually going on - just as the "Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals" became the totally fuzzy "Universities UK"! Makes one wonder about the intelligence of those at the top of the academic tree.]
However, back to the message. The announcement points to another document, Bibliometrics and the Research Excellence Framework. This tells us how the exercise will actually be carried out. Research output data will be collected from the participating institutions (why is this necessary, given that the HEFC already has such data for the current RAE?) and processed by Evidence Ltd., a data processing company based in Leeds.
Both documents express caution in using bibliometric indicators and the point is specifically made that journal impact factors will not be used. The bibliomtric indicators for each institution in each field will be 'normalised' by comparison with the "field norm", that is "the average number of citations for all papers published worldwide in the same field, over the same period". This is where Evidence Ltd. will need to be very careful indeed, since what constitutes the "same field" is open to wide interpretations. It will be especially risky to rely upon the journal groupings used by Web of Knowledge and SCOPUS to defined the "field". I referred in my earlier Weblog to this problem as far as defining the field of "Information Science & Library Science" is concerned, and I have no doubt that similar problems exist in other fields.
"Bibliometrics and the Research Excellence Framework" also notes that, because of the difficulty of using bibliometric indicators across all disciplines, "other indicators" will also be used. But we are not told what these "other indicators" might be - perhaps they don't actually know yet? The document also proposes the use of a "citation profile" which will show how the papers produced by a particular institution relate to "worldwide norms", so that papers are labelled, for example, "Below world average" or "Above world average". Quite what this means is difficult to understand - does HEFC seriously believe that this would be anything other than a completely arbitrary measure? Especially in social science fields, which are very much culture-bound, comparison of work done in the UK, with work carried out "worldwide" - which would actually mean (because of the volume of output) "carried out in the USA" - would simply result in nonsense.
Having retired from having anything to do with the administration of higher education I shall gaze on, fascinated, by what might emerge :-)
[As an aside, it looks as though the marketing men have infiltrated the HEFC - "Research Assessment Exercise" was obviously far too explicit for them and so it has to be something new that completely hides what is actually going on - just as the "Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals" became the totally fuzzy "Universities UK"! Makes one wonder about the intelligence of those at the top of the academic tree.]
However, back to the message. The announcement points to another document, Bibliometrics and the Research Excellence Framework. This tells us how the exercise will actually be carried out. Research output data will be collected from the participating institutions (why is this necessary, given that the HEFC already has such data for the current RAE?) and processed by Evidence Ltd., a data processing company based in Leeds.
Both documents express caution in using bibliometric indicators and the point is specifically made that journal impact factors will not be used. The bibliomtric indicators for each institution in each field will be 'normalised' by comparison with the "field norm", that is "the average number of citations for all papers published worldwide in the same field, over the same period". This is where Evidence Ltd. will need to be very careful indeed, since what constitutes the "same field" is open to wide interpretations. It will be especially risky to rely upon the journal groupings used by Web of Knowledge and SCOPUS to defined the "field". I referred in my earlier Weblog to this problem as far as defining the field of "Information Science & Library Science" is concerned, and I have no doubt that similar problems exist in other fields.
"Bibliometrics and the Research Excellence Framework" also notes that, because of the difficulty of using bibliometric indicators across all disciplines, "other indicators" will also be used. But we are not told what these "other indicators" might be - perhaps they don't actually know yet? The document also proposes the use of a "citation profile" which will show how the papers produced by a particular institution relate to "worldwide norms", so that papers are labelled, for example, "Below world average" or "Above world average". Quite what this means is difficult to understand - does HEFC seriously believe that this would be anything other than a completely arbitrary measure? Especially in social science fields, which are very much culture-bound, comparison of work done in the UK, with work carried out "worldwide" - which would actually mean (because of the volume of output) "carried out in the USA" - would simply result in nonsense.
Having retired from having anything to do with the administration of higher education I shall gaze on, fascinated, by what might emerge :-)
12 August 2008
Citations and performance evaluation
Gerry McKiernan has drawn attention on the BOAI discussion list to a special issue of Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, devoted to 'The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance'. All of the papers are open access and the authors include Philip Campbell, Editor in Chief of Nature on escaping from the Impact Factor and concluding, Although the current system may be effective at measuring merit on national and institutional scales, the most effective and fair analysis of a person’s contribution derives from a direct assessment of individual papers, regardless of where they were published; Peter Lawrence on how measurement harms science; Anne-Wil K. Harzing and Ron van der Wal on Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis; and Stevan Harnad on Validating research performance metrics against peer rankings. There are fourteen papers in all including the introduction to the issue and all are worth at least dipping into.
The Harzing and van der Wal paper is likely to be somewhat contentious, since other research into the use of Google Scholar has downplayed its value. I first raised the question of using Google in performance measurement in a message to the JESSE mailing list in 2002. I commented that:
This led to an extended and interesting discussion. It was followed by a paper on the subject in JASIST by Vaughan and Shaw (Volume 54, Issue 14, 1313-1322) and by a comparison of Google Scholar and Web of Science by Peter Jasco in Current Science, v.89, no. 9, 1537-1547 - incidentally, Harzing and van der Wal reply to some of Jasco's criticisms of Scholar.
All of this suggests that interest in the application of 'metrics' in performance measurement is growing and, perhaps, there is also a growing awareness that the impact factor provided by Web of Knowledge is not necessarily the only tool that can be used. We have also seen the emergence of the Scimago analysis of impact, which I have referred to earlier and these developments, as well as providing for a new academic industry of papers on Web citation, are likely to bring about a re-assessment of metrics for performance measurement and, perhaps, greater wariness about their use than is currently shown by some administrators.
The Harzing and van der Wal paper is likely to be somewhat contentious, since other research into the use of Google Scholar has downplayed its value. I first raised the question of using Google in performance measurement in a message to the JESSE mailing list in 2002. I commented that:
My most cited paper is "On user studies and information needs" (1981) - a Web search (using Google) revealed 118 pages that listed the title. The pages were reading lists, free electronic journals, and documents that would never be covered by SSCI, such as reports from various agencies. SSCI revealed, if I recall aright, 79 citations of the paper. The question is: is the Web revealing impact more effectively than SSCI? Citation in scholarly papers takes a variety of forms and much citation is of a token variety - x is cited because x is always cited. On the other hand citation on reading lists implies some positive recommendation of the text, and mention in policy documents and the like, implies (at least in some cases) that some benefit has been found in the cited document.
This led to an extended and interesting discussion. It was followed by a paper on the subject in JASIST by Vaughan and Shaw (Volume 54, Issue 14, 1313-1322) and by a comparison of Google Scholar and Web of Science by Peter Jasco in Current Science, v.89, no. 9, 1537-1547 - incidentally, Harzing and van der Wal reply to some of Jasco's criticisms of Scholar.
All of this suggests that interest in the application of 'metrics' in performance measurement is growing and, perhaps, there is also a growing awareness that the impact factor provided by Web of Knowledge is not necessarily the only tool that can be used. We have also seen the emergence of the Scimago analysis of impact, which I have referred to earlier and these developments, as well as providing for a new academic industry of papers on Web citation, are likely to bring about a re-assessment of metrics for performance measurement and, perhaps, greater wariness about their use than is currently shown by some administrators.
09 August 2008
Open access and scholarly neglect
Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for drawing attention to a forthcoming Communications of the ACM paper, 'Open access publishing in science: why it is highly appreciated but rarely used', by Florian Mann and colleagues. And what is holding things back? According to Mann et al. it is the "short-term performance related concerns and the wait and see attitude of the majority of researchers". One can understand, at least in the UK - because of the impact of the Research Assessment Exercise, the concerns over performance, but I am less impressed by the wait and see attitude. It speaks of a total lack of concern over the wider dissemination of scholarly information that says more about ego than it does about social responsibility.
It is not entirely clear what Mann and co. mean by the Golden route to open access: once again, as so often, there is a suspicion that they mean the use of author charging to subsidise publishers. The position would be made much clearer if the notion of the Platinum route was separated from author-charging, and, of course, by Platinum I mean publication in journals that are open access and free of author charges. Only the Platinum route gives truly open access, since it is 'open' at both ends of the process - no author charges and no subscription charges. If all the resources that are currently, in my view, wasted on supporting repositories and author charging were put to the development of Platinum journals, true open access would rapidly become the dominant mode of scholarly publishing. However, it is not likely to happen as long as university administrators remain ignorant of the potential and as long as the scholarly community remains in a wait and see posture. If you believe that open access is beneficial to society, why are you publishing in restricted journals? Instead of waiting and seeing, start getting out and doing!
It is not entirely clear what Mann and co. mean by the Golden route to open access: once again, as so often, there is a suspicion that they mean the use of author charging to subsidise publishers. The position would be made much clearer if the notion of the Platinum route was separated from author-charging, and, of course, by Platinum I mean publication in journals that are open access and free of author charges. Only the Platinum route gives truly open access, since it is 'open' at both ends of the process - no author charges and no subscription charges. If all the resources that are currently, in my view, wasted on supporting repositories and author charging were put to the development of Platinum journals, true open access would rapidly become the dominant mode of scholarly publishing. However, it is not likely to happen as long as university administrators remain ignorant of the potential and as long as the scholarly community remains in a wait and see posture. If you believe that open access is beneficial to society, why are you publishing in restricted journals? Instead of waiting and seeing, start getting out and doing!
02 August 2008
Another OA categorisation
Peter Suber, whose Open Access Newsletter is a great source for anyone interested in OA has come up with a new classification of types of open access - he suggests the term 'gratis' where 'price barriers' are removed, and 'libre' for the removal of 'permission barriers'. However, since both words mean "free", I'm not sure that the distinction would be retained in general parlance.
However, I'm not sure it is necessary - the aim seems to be to overcome the problem that so-call "Gold OA" (in terms of journals) can mean those that are completely free, like Information Research, and those that use author charging to enable free access. I distinquish between these by reserving "Gold" for the author-charging mode, since it is that mode that has become associated with the notion in the mind of officialdom, and use "Platinum" for what Peter would now call "libre Gold" (or "Gold libre") - I think :-)
The situation is confused by the association between open access publishing and institutional or disciplinary repositories. While the latter provide open access to a proportion of the total literature in any field they are at present a somewhat disorganised collection of sources - some of which provide good coverage of an institution's output, some of which merely skim the surface. A couple of years ago I surveyed the repositories in the UK and found, for example, that although the University of Cambridge had more than 30,000 items in its repository only 16 were preprints of scientific papers. I regard repostitories as an interim solution: the future, inevitably, will be the "Platinum" publishing mode. The economics will drive inexorably towards this mode of scholarly communication - not, perhaps, in what is left of my lifetime, but inevitably.
However, I'm not sure it is necessary - the aim seems to be to overcome the problem that so-call "Gold OA" (in terms of journals) can mean those that are completely free, like Information Research, and those that use author charging to enable free access. I distinquish between these by reserving "Gold" for the author-charging mode, since it is that mode that has become associated with the notion in the mind of officialdom, and use "Platinum" for what Peter would now call "libre Gold" (or "Gold libre") - I think :-)
The situation is confused by the association between open access publishing and institutional or disciplinary repositories. While the latter provide open access to a proportion of the total literature in any field they are at present a somewhat disorganised collection of sources - some of which provide good coverage of an institution's output, some of which merely skim the surface. A couple of years ago I surveyed the repositories in the UK and found, for example, that although the University of Cambridge had more than 30,000 items in its repository only 16 were preprints of scientific papers. I regard repostitories as an interim solution: the future, inevitably, will be the "Platinum" publishing mode. The economics will drive inexorably towards this mode of scholarly communication - not, perhaps, in what is left of my lifetime, but inevitably.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)