Open access - again

The Research Information Network (a very worthy organization which, consequently,will probably be axed under the new coalition government regime) has produced An introduction to open access.  As is so often the case, the guide (which is intended for researchers) fails to distinguish effectively between true open access, where there are neither subscription costs nor author charges and partial open access, which involves author charging.  Both of these go under the label of gold access, following a distinction suggested years ago by Steven Harnad.  But these are not identical methods of achieving open access, which is why I describe true open access as Platinum access.  So-called "gold" simply transfers the production costs to the author, from the subscriber; "platinum" calls upon neither of these sources for finance but relies upon either subsidies or voluntary work, or a combination of the two.

Governments, universities and research funding agencies around the world have been slow to see the potential of the platinum route - largely it seems (at least in the case of governments) to protect the publishers. The exceptions are countries in the smaller language groups, where publication of scholarly research has generally been through journals produced by universities, produced with subsidies, and exchanged around the world for other journals to reduce library acquisition costs.  In such cases, the transfer to free, subsidised open access has been quite logical and simple to achieve.

The economics of scholarly publishing undoubtedly support the platinum route since social benefit is maximised in this way.  It is possible, although I hold out little hope, that the current financial crisis in the UK will lead institutions to embrace the platinum method: individual universities, or, better, collaboration between universities would enable the publication of journals in specific disciplines which could be funded at very low costs, and universities could require researchers to publish in these journals, just as they mandate the deposition of papers in institutional archives.

How low are the costs?  Well, taking Information Research as an example of the platinum journal, the only direct costs of production are borne by the University of Lund and those costs amount to whatever proportion of server maiintenance costs can be attributed to the journal: I imagine that these costs are rather low.  All other costs: editing, copy-editing, reviewing, layout, production, are borne by the voluntary workers of the journal.  Is there really any economic case to answer?

Journal ranking - ISI, etc.

Following ISI's introduction of a 5-year Journal Impact Factor measure, I took another look at the position of Information Research and found that its 5-year JIF is 1.309, which ranks it 16th out of 56 in ISI's rather curious list. However, when we look at the 'general purpose' LIS journals, leaving out the niche journals, like Scientometrics, and those journals that are not really in the LIS field, like MIS Quarterly, and ARIST, which is an annual serial rather than a journal, we find IR in the fifth position, headed by Information Management, JASIST, IP&M, and Journal of Documentation.

IR's climb up the ranking lists is recognized by the Australian Research Council's draft journal ranking for its Excellence in Research initiative (which will form the basis, if I understand things aright, of its equivalent of the UK Research Assessment Exercise) - IR appears as an A* journal, along with those mentioned above.

Thanks to John Lamp of Deakin University for making the list available.

From Open Access News

Sebastian K. Boell, A Scientometric Method to Analyze Scientific Journals as Exemplified by the Area of Information Science, thesis, Saarland University, 2007; self-archived January 23, 2009. From the abstract:

A comprehensive master list of 1,205 journals publishing articles of relevance to LIS was compiled. ... Nearly 16% of all journals are open access ...

How does a 'master list' manage to omit the leading OA journal in the field?

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).

Project signing in Boras

I spend a chunk of time every year in Sweden at the Swedish School of Librarianship and Information Science. Over the past few months, I've been developing a proposal for a Delphi investigation into research needs in Swedish libraries and today we had a visit from the Svensk Biblioteksförening to sign a contract funding the project. A news story on the project was on the SBF site practically before the meeting was over. Not a very flattering photo!

Happy New Year!

A Happy New Year to all readers of Information Research - we now start on our 13th year of publication, with volume 13 no. 1 to be published in March. [One advantage of the electronic journal is that you can always publish on time, because it doesn't matter how many papers you have in an issue :-)] However, I have been putting papers on the site as they are ready, the first is paper 331 and all you do to get the next one is increase the last digit of the paper number by 1 - the contents page will go on the site in March when everything is ready and the last papers are up. The book reviews are also going up as they are ready and the list of new reviews is being continuously updated.

2007 has been a bumper year for the journal with, according to the page counter, 255,733 page views of the top page of the journal - that's about 100,000 more than my estimate for 2006. (The 2006 counter was only active for nine months, so I extrapolated). The busiest month was October, following publication of Volume 12 No. 4, with the CoLIS conference proceedings supplement - no doubt that boosted usage; and the slackest months are, as you might expect, July and August. Google Scholar tells me that eight of the papers in Volume 12 have already been cited - supporting the notion that open access gets you readers, and, hence citations.

According to Google Analytics, which I use for the InformationR.net site as a whole (which includes the World list of departments..., my home page, etc.), the top ten pages in terms of page views were:

1. Information Research: top page     175,707 page views.
2. Subject index-Information Research     20,010
3. World list... information studies, top page     15,576
4. Electronic Resources for Research Methods     14,162
5. World list of schools and departments - Europe     11,822
6. World list... USA     10,776
7. (Title not given)     10,651
8. Author index-Information Research     7,947
9. Information management (paper in TDW archive)      6,249
10. Alfred Schutz, phenomenology and research (paper in TDW archive)      5,841

I've tried without success, to track down that untitled page, but with almost 3,500 pages on the site, it isn't easy!

I also don't know why there is the discrepancy between the top page count in Google Analytics and that of the page counter - strange...

Peak usage day for Information Research

I just took a look at my counter stats and discovered that 17th October, 2007 was the busiest day ever for the top page of the journal, with 3,574 hits - the previous high peak of 2,915 hits occured in July 2006.

The counter also tells me that the top page has had almost 212,000 hits so far this year, with an average of 684 page-views a day.

Turning to Google Analytics, this service tells me that the paper with most hits so far this year is Joyce Kirk's 'Information in organisations: directions for information management' from 1999, with 3,435 hits.

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]

Information Research Volume 12 Number 4

The latest issue of Information Research (Vol. 12, No. 4) is now online. The index page for the journal as a whole is not yet online, but will be by about 22.00 GMT this evening.

An extract from the Editorial:

This is a bumper issue of Information Research as it includes a supplement containing the proceedings of the 6th Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS 6) as well as the usual clutch of papers and reviews.

I shan't say much about the CoLIS Proceedings, since they have their own introduction, except to thank the Editors, and particularly Nils Pharo, who have spent a great deal of time in getting the papers into publishable form. Without their efforts it would have been completely impossible to publish the proceedings so quickly after the conference.

It has not been possible, however, to put the papers through the usual copy-editing and revision process used by the journal, so readers may find the occasional typographic error or other blemish. It is for this reason that the papers are published as a supplement, with their own numbering series, rather than as papers in the main part of the journal.

Read the rest of the Editorial