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

Information Research - reader survey

I've been conducting a survey of Information Research readers. For various reasons the respondents are largely self-selected, so no thorough statistical analysis is possible. However, 58 persons report having published in Information Research and one of the things I was interested to learn about was the extent to which authors are being pressured in their institutions into submitting only to certain 'high quality' (i.e., high Impact Factor) journals.

Twenty-six of the respondents said that they were subject to such pressure (51% of those responding to the question) and, of these, twenty-one, or 81%) said that Information Research was on the list of recommended journals.

I am fundamentally opposed to the idea that only high Impact Factor journals publish 'high quality' papers, but, given the trend, it is good to know that the quality of contributions to the journal is recognized. Perhaps the availability of this kind of information will provide a lever to exert some pressure on those institutions that do not at present recognize the quality of the journal.

The Apple Maps disaster

What on earth possessed Apple to dump Google Maps in favour of its own system, which they appear to have bought from a Canadian company without any due diligence? If any quality testing had been done it would have revealed the numerous problems that people have already experienced. Apparently, if you live in New York, or San Francisco, it's fine. Anywhere else and you are likely to find that noted local landmarks don't exist, or have moved 20 miles down the road. I'm no apologist for Google and there is always the problem, as we have seen with iGoogle, that the company can pull a service without any regard for how many people depend upon it, so perhaps Apple is right to find an alternative. But finding an alternative without adequate testing is so sloppy as to make one wonder whose decision it was. As an example of the problems: the city of Boras in Sweden is about the 7th biggest in the country and yet Apple Maps can't locate the public library - although it does so without difficulty in other parts of the country, and it does locate the art gallery, which is in the same building. (It has to be said, however, that Google Maps locates it about a kilometer away in a temporary location it moved from a year ago.) The restaurants and cafes shown are out of date and the university is shown in three locations, one of which is completely wrong - the location of one of its schools, the Textilhogskolan is not shown at all, although it is the leading textile school in Sweden and is in a separate location. In other words, if you live in New York - fine; if you live pretty well anywhere else in the world, go back to Google Maps in your browser and wait until they have their own app for the iPad.

Information Research and browsers

Not being an Internet Explorer user it has taken me some time to discover that this browser doesn't render the Information Research pages correctly. It seems that IE is not fully compatible with HTML5. I use a Mac and find that the pages are fine with Firefox, Safari and Chrome - but I can't account for what happens with IE . Both Firefox and Chrome are OK in Windows, so get yourselves a better browser if you find problems with IE :-) Given Google's attitude towards its iGoogle users, I can't recommend Chrome, but Firefox is fine. Unfortunately, Safari 6 is not supported for Windows and it seems that Apple is not going to produce a Windows version - a pity, I find it a very good browser for the Mac and use it in preference to anything else.

Why isn't everyone using genuine open access?

I have just been writing the editorial for the new issue of Information Research, to be published on Thursday. In the course of doing this I decided to take a look at the Google Analytics data for the site and I find that the top page of the site (http://informationr.net) had almost half-a-million hits in the past twelve months, while the top page of the journal (http://informationr.net/ir/) had close to 800,000. The most hit issue was volume 8 number 1, with more than 50,000 hits, and the most hit paper was one by Chun Wei Choo, on environmental scanning - more than 31,000 hits. According to the counter on the page, the paper has had a total of 190,345 hits and Google Scholar tells me that it has 158 citations, giving a cites/hits ratio of a little more than 1,200. Some day I must do a thorough study of this relationship :-)

However, what is the point of this? Well, in total, Information Research and its individual papers, plus the book reviews (which aren't counted in the process) must be totalling more than two million hits a year. Individual papers are getting thousands of hits and in some cases tens of thousands of hits and, if we can generalise (which we can't!) from the Choo case, for every 1200 hits you are getting a citation. And you can check on this with the counter information and the link to Google Scholar provided on the site.

Can any other journal in the field boast this kind of exposure? If not, why aren't you and other academics demanding the genuinely free and open mode of access that I call platinum! No author charges and no subscription charges give you maximum exposure of your work to a world-wide audience - and yet you continue to publish in commercially managed journals that close off your work from the world at large unless you pay for it to be open. Is this crazy economics or what?

E-books

When I was teaching (it seems aeons ago!) I used to share with students the little conceit that photocopying was an alternative to reading. I proposed that some osmotic process meant that when a photocopy was put in a bag or a briefcase to be "read at home", something strange happened. Although the photocopy was never actually read, the information content leaked into the bag, and migrated through the handle up into one's brain.

The same thing may be happening with e-books: it is so easy to download all those books you feel you ought to have read, from the Gutenberg Project site. There they nestle (if that's what the zeros and ones can be thought of doing) in the memory of your iPad or e-readers and, because you know that they are immediately available for reading, you never actually read them. But you know them, because you've read about them. Somehow, also, there's an information leakage from the device into your brain and before long you find yourself deleting them because you no longer need to read them.