A new view on heritage

Thanks to Elena Maceviciute for this interesting picture: it shows the headquarters of the Federal Agency of Construction, Housing and Communal Services in Russia. One of its responsibilities is the construction work for preservation projects.

Google's experiments

Google's October newsletter points to new search developments. At Google Experimental you can try out, and give feedback on, a number of experimental features. These include a timeline presentation of results, a map view and the additional information view. There are also some keyboard shortcuts for navigating through search output and a couple of views that provide contextual navigation bars to the left or right of the search output. Of these, the timeline presentation and the keyboard shortcuts seem the most useful to me.

ISIC-2008, Vilnius, Lithuania

The organizing committee for ISIC-2008 reminds everyone about the important dates of the international conference Information Seeking in Context 2008. The conference will be held in Vilnius on September 17-20, 2008. A doctoral workshop will be held in conjunction with the conference on September 16, 2008.

Conference paper submission deadline: February 1, 2008.

Doctoral workshop paper submission deadline: March 1, 2008.

For more information please visit the Website of the conference.

Contact person for the conference: Dr. Erika Janiuniene

The March 2008 issue of Information Research

Because of my need to make the journal publication year conterminous with the calendar year, there will be quite a long time gap between Volume 12, Number 4 (just published) and the first issue of Volume 13 in March 2008.

Consequently, I have decided that, for this issue, I shall publish the papers (and provide the index entries) and reviews on the site as they are ready and then publish the final paper(s) in March 2008 along with the contents page.

This introduces some oddities in relation to date of publication, since the formal publication date will be March 2008, but the papers will be actually published from, probably, November 2007 onwards. To overcome this, I shall add to the 'How to cite this paper' element on the page the information on when the paper was made available. A fictional example:

Carpenter, C. & Smith, P.A. (2008). "Web users' online information behaviour: marrying HCI and information behaviour" Information Research, 13(1) paper 333. [Available 14 November 2007 at http://InformationR.net/ir/13-1/paper333.html]

OA and the lobby industry

Heather Morrison has another thoughtful piece on open access in her Weblog, suggesting that the publishers' anti-OA consortium PRISM has imploded.

I'm not too sure about this: PRISM is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of lobbying. We can be sure that the publishing industry is lobbying away vigorously, with people, rather than a Website and it's that personal lobbying that makes the difference, rather than what is on public view. My suggestion is that fellow OA advocates in the USA need to lobby just as vigorously, writing to their senators and congressmen/women and generally countering the misinformation that the lobbyists inevitably purvey. We've seen time and again under this US administration that the truth does not necessarily prevail; the key is how much money the industry is prepared to spend to swing the votes of the legislators, whether it is to damage the Alaskan environment by oil drillling, open the virgin forests of the national parks to the logging industry, or run the worst medical care programme in the Western world for the benefit of the drug companies and the mis-named 'health care industry'.

Constant vigilence and persistence in telling the truth about the warped economics of the existing scholarly communication system is the only weapon we have.

Lessig moves to tackle corruption

Perhaps most readers of this Weblog are now aware that Lawrence Lessig - the motivating force behind Creative Commons - is shifting his sphere of interest to corruption in American political life. Now there's a target!

To catch up with what's going on, see an interview with him and listen to his lecture at Stanford Law School

There's interesting follow up on the Weblog.

Journal statistics

I'm sometimes asked, presumably by those who need to justify publishing in an electronic-only journal, about the journal's acceptance and rejection rates.

Fortunately, the journal management system we've adopted enables me to provide a more precise answer than previously. Under the system, we've handled 88 submissions, of which 68 went on to peer-review and of those:

24 (27%) were accepted, with revisions required;
30 (34%) were rejected, and
13 (15%) were required to be re-submitted.
(Presumably one is still in process)

Another useful statistic is that the average time to review has been 37 days - I don't know what the range is, but, certainly, some have taken much longer.

One additional point to bear in mind is that some of the papers that require extensive revision are never seen again.