One size won’t fit all in information policy and provision

The British Library and the Research Information Network have published a report Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences.

The key conclusion of the report, “that the policies and strategies of research funders and information service providers must be informed by an understanding of the exigencies and practices of different research communities” is no surprise, but it is worth going to the report to read some of what led to that conclusion.

For example, even within what might be categorised a discipline, there can be marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange, as evidenced by the seven case studies in the report. An Information Flow map is produced for each of the case studies, each map made up of activities or concepts joined by links. Librarians will be interested in the vast array of information or data sources listed. In the Botanical curation study, for example, scientific papers and monographs are just two of the eighty-two named activities or concepts.

Academic libraries have long worked to understand the needs of their different communities, as is evidenced by the faculty librarian or subject support model in place in most libraries, increasingly complemented today by the role of research support librarian. It is interesting to see in this report, however, the recommendation that researchers should ‘reconnect’ with information professionals. The model that has worked for so long needs to be updated and made stronger.

Academic libraries need to provide more than strong disciplinary support in the provision of and access to information. There is a need for concerted efforts to be made to understand how information is produced within individual disciplines, in order to support and develop new relationships and functions, particularly regarding data curation and information sharing.

PhDs and Web 2.0 tools

Zoë Corbyn from Times Higher Education has just written that researchers aged between 21 and 27 aren't using Web 2.0 tools like RSS and social bookmarking in their work.

In my work as a research support librarian, I have been promoting Web 2.0 tools to researchers. An increasing number of researchers are using them but its very far from reaching a critical mass - they're far from being an essential part of everyone's work. I believe this is because:

1. RSS feeds from databases and journal publishers are difficult to set up. Publishers often expect users to create personal accounts and click through numerous screens before they get to an RSS icon. Every publisher does things differently - some only allow table of contents alerts, some automatically stop your feed after a year.
   
2. Social networking/bookmarking. There's a lot of startup services for researchers and academics - I've come across about ten of them - but no single one has taken off yet. Some of them, like Academia.edu, look great, but they're all stuck in a situation where no one is signing up because none of their friends/colleagues have signed up first.
3. None of these services talk to each other. I can set up a Web of Science feed on my Google Reader, but Google can't easily transfer the references to RefWorks and its just an tricky sending them on again from RefWorks to my citeulike account. The future may be with Zotero, which is trying to do all this in one service.
   

The fact is that the volume and complexity of information researchers need is on a different scale from the general public and can't be simply automated with Web 2.0 tools. That's why a good working relationship between researchers and librarians is so important. Librarians can offer hands-on help with all these technologies, and advise and train researchers on the best ways to find / manage / share / publish their information.

Open Access 101

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

To deposit your research in an Institutional Repository in an Irish university (or in DIT, WIT, RCSI or HSE) go to the IREL-Open website and scroll down to find your institution's repository.

Open Access for the Humanities?

This is International Open Access week (19-23 October 2009) with many events taking place to raise awareness of this mode of scholarly communication. However, to date, Open Access has achieved most success in the science and technology fields where the dissemination of written knowledge has traditionally taken place via journal articles and conference proceedings.

If you are interested in finding out how this model of publishing can be applied to the Humanities, where the monograph is the preferred method of scholarly communication, take a look at the OAPEN project. A new resources page has recently been added covering the latest new in Open Access book publishing.

Problems with Online Research

The act of finding and reading published research has changed so much in the last 10-20 years. Ask any old-timer - anyone over 30 ;) - and they'll tell you how literature searches used to involve looking up abstracts in hardback paper indexes and CD-ROMs; trying to find missing print journal issues from library shelves and waiting weeks for interlibrary loans from the British Library.

Now you can do everything from your desktop in your office or at home. We can search online databases, read tens of thousand of journal online and save papers to our own personal digital libraries in EndNote or RefWorks, which also automate our citing and referencing.

But things are far from perfect. Endnote, RefWorks and many databases arent intuitive and don't work as smoothly as we'd like. Advanced tools like RSS search alerts can be difficult to set up and manage. For even the most organised, technophile researcher its difficult to find all the important papers in your field and still have time for your own work.

A recent paper, Defrosting the Digital Library, offers a good, accesible review of this and looks to a future where our digital libraries will be more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places.

Hull, D., Pettifer, S.R. & Kell, D.B., 2008. Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10).

Research Assessment: Publish (in high impact journals!) or Perish

Have you ever wondered if the lead author in a collaborative paper is the brains behind it, or just lucky enough have his name first alphabetically? Or do you think that some authors have high citation counts simply because so many papers refute their work? Maybe there are even groups of researchers habitually citing each other to boost each other's rankings?

All of these questions are explored in "Communicating knowledge: How and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings" by the Research Information Network.

UK funding bodies use the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) as a metric to allocate research grants. The RAE focusses on number of works published and their number of times cited. Many researchers feel that this system unfair, and rewards those who "play the game" best, rather than those producing the best, most innovative work. Many of the researchers quoted in Communicating Knowledge feel that the RAE is having an unhealthy influence on how they work, write, cite and publish.

Some researchers' comments from the report:

• “With my collaborators and colleagues I have been organising so as to facilitate mutual citation.”
• “Head of Research in my institute actively discouraged book chapters and reviews because they were not seen as prestigious for RAE.”
• “Sadly, I find myself increasingly moving away from publishing in journals which are important and read by a lot of colleagues, to publishing in high status journals instead. This had led to much longer delays [and] thus adversely affects science, but I feel the pressure to do this in order to advance career wise.”

Would funding decisions in Ireland be fairer under an "objective" assessment like the RAE? Or is it meaningless and even damaging to try to compare research in this way?

Major Step Forward for Open Access

In a major step forward for the open access movement, Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week announced a joint commitment to provide their researchers with central financial assistance to cover open access publication fees, and encouraged other academic institutions to join them.

The aim of the 'compact for open access publication equity' is to create a level playing field between subscription-based journals (which institutions support centrally via library budgets) and open access journals (which often depend on publication fees).
http://news.biomedcentral.com/t/13102619/100546726/1544241/0/

Irish-US fund worth $100m to be raised for tech sector. John Collins – Irish Times

A $100 MILLION (€68.6 million) venture capital fund is to be raised by a group of Irish-American businessmen as one of the key components in a strategy to rapidly grow Ireland’s technology sector. Investors in the first fund from Irish Technology Capital (ITC) include John Hartnett, chief executive of solar energy firm G24 Innovations; Richard Moran, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist; and Johnny Gilmore, chief executive of Sling Media. Mr Moran, an executive with Venrock, the VC firm founded by the Rockefeller family, said that the fact ITC would be Silicon Valley-based would allow it to “syndicate” its investments to other VC firms in the area.
Irish technology firms have traditionally found it difficult to tap into funding from the valley. ITC, which is a spin-out from a Silicon Valley-based network of Irish-American business people – the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) – is in talks with other VCs in the US and Ireland regarding possible investment in the fund. It also hopes to tap the €500 million innovation fund established by the Government as part of its smart economy strategy. The fund will make investments in the broad technology sector with a particular focus on communications, software, digital media and green technologies.
Following an agreement signed between ITLG, Trinity College, Dublin and University College Dublin last June, the three groups met at the Irish Embassy in Washington yesterday to advance details of how they can work together. They discussed plans for an innovation academy to provide PhD students with business skills, the creation of the $100 million VC fund and for a business development unit which would accelerate the transformation of university research into new companies and jobs. The group also gave a presentation to Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan by videolink. The presentation said Ireland should aim within five years to have 20 Nasdaq-quoted companies, two universities in the top 30 globally and 200,000 people working in the technology sector.
The group is building a landmark Irish Tech Centre in downtown San José, which will open next January. Development of the project will be led by Tom McEnery, a former mayor of Dublin’s twin city.
Mr Hartnett said it would not just be a physical space that could be used by Irish start-ups. “We will be able to surround those companies with a virtual services organisation to provide IT, human resources and legal advice, as well as introducing them to networks of companies they can do business with,” said Mr Hartnett. ITLG’s members are senior Irish and Irish-American executives working at major technology firms such as Cisco, Yahoo!, Apple and Intel.
Read the full article here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0911/1224254276275.html

New for PubMed®: Auto Suggest and Titles with Your Search Terms

One PubMed feature expands and another evolves. (Figures below show how these features are expected to look in the redesigned version of PubMed.)

PubMed's Also try feature was introduced to the right of the search results almost a year ago. It suggests searches previously done on PubMed. Many searchers are giving them a try. A similar feature, Auto Suggest, will soon work with the search box. Based on the terms you enter, some of the most popular PubMed searches will be displayed in a menu (see Figure 1). Click on one to run that search.There is a "Turn off" function at the bottom of the menu. This deactivates Auto Suggest for the search session. After eight hours of inactivity, it is reactivated. Future enhancements to My NCBI are expected to offer a setting to turn off Auto Suggest whenever you are signed in to My NCBI.

Titles with Your Search Terms
The PubMed discovery ad that started out as More PubMed Articles has evolved into Titles with your search terms. This ad, also to the right of the search results, displays links for article titles. Notice that your search terms are bolded. Up to three are shown and each can be expanded to see the full source information using a mouseover (see Figure 2). There is a link to "See more" which takes you to a ranked list of up to 20 titles. (Keep in mind this list is generated using your search terms, and there could be more than 20 titles in PubMed.) The ranking is based on the number of times PubMed searchers have viewed the single record display.

Read the full article and view images at the following link: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_autosuggest.html

Effective Investment in Research - the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL)

Many, many blogs, discussions and articles recently have been devoted to the subject of continued investment in Irish research. This week's Irish Times Innovation Magazine, for example, devotes several articles to the topic.

Part of the growing body of evidence providing support for continued funding for research in Ireland comes from the IReL Impact Survey, undertaken by the IUA libraries and the RCSI in Spring 2009. 5465 researchers responded to the survey.

IReL, the Irish Research eLibrary funded by SFI (Science Foundation Ireland) and the HEA (Higher Education Authority) includes such well-known names as Academic Press (ScienceDirect), Academic Search Premier, ACS, Blackwell Synergy, Business Source Premier, Datastream, IEEE, JSTOR, LexisNexis, Nature, Oxford University Press, SciFinder Scholar, Springer/Kluwer, Web of Knowledge, and Wiley InterScience.

Not surprisingly, given this content, 98% of researchers with a definite view agreed that IReL contributes to increased competitiveness of Irish research internationally, with one survey respondent commenting that in fact IReL is "by far the wisest and most important funding decision taken in Ireland for the third level sector. It truly enables research in Ireland."

Another survey respondent commented:

“This is a no-brainer. Having access to all the same information as our competitors means that we have caught up with and in many cases overtaken them. With the resources issue gone, it’s just a question of who has the best ideas.”

This last point is interesting. We have access to the resources now, but are we having the good ideas? Is there a correlation between the quality of information available, the input, and the quality of research being done, the output? Certainly, we believe that there is a link, but no study has ever managed to put figures on the link.

Until now.

In April 2009 a UK report from the Research Information Network (RIN) - E-journals: their use, value and impact - found that

“There is a clear correlation between levels of use of e-journals and research outcomes, with more usage linked to the number of papers published, number of PhD awards and income from research grants and contracts. This link is independent of institution size."

Professor David Nichols of the Center for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at University College London summarised the report's findings in a podcast at July's RIN event The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research:

1. Journals are the lifeblood of the UK research community.
2. The best researchers are also the best users of journals.
3. The volume of usage of ejournals is phenomenal.

The first finding matches the IReL evidence for Ireland, and the last finding is corroborated in Ireland by the detailed usage reports submitted regularly to IReL funders and IUA librarians. (In 2007, for example, over a quarter of a million articles were downloaded from just over 400 Science Direct journals across the seven Irish universities. Source: Usage of IReL Resources in 2007, Report of the Monitoring Group, October 2008, unpublished.)

Finding 2, that the best researchers are also the best users of journals, is of particular interest and merits further investigation. To that end, Phase 2 of the RIN project, to be completed in Spring 2010, is to involve interviews with approximately two hundred scientists, researchers and students.

In the meantime, Irish researchers are in no doubt as to the value of the e-resources currently available to them. Asked how a discontinuation of IReL would affect them, researchers said that it would be "a return to the stone age", "a devastating blow", "unthinkable". It is to be hoped that decision makers take note.

High Cost of Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

It costs more to publish an article in a humanities or social sciences (HSS) journal than to publish one in a science, technical, or medical (STM) journal – over three times as much, according to a report soon to be released by the National Humanities Alliance in the United States.

The full report is to be released as soon as possible, according to NHA committee chairman William E. Davis. In the meantime, a summary by Jennifer Howard in July 20th's Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has been generating much discussion and comment.

Given the high reported cost - an average $9,994 per article in HSS to an average $2,670 in STM - most conclude that the author-pays open access model that serves STM publications will not be feasible for HSS researchers, for whom less grant money is available in the first place to cover such costs. Nevertheless, the NHA chairman says that he and other HSS publishers will figure out some alternative open access model that will suit HSS. “We will,” Mr Davis said, “because we have to.”

Also mentioned in the report is the finding that acceptance rates are significantly lower for articles submitted to HSS journals - 11% for HSS, to STM's 42%. HSS researchers are thus further disadvantaged in an environment where numbers of publications are used as a measure of success.

It is on this last finding that Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the MediaCommons blog. Fitzpatrick suggests that, as the pre-publication filtering needs of HSS publications are so strong and therefore so expensive, and as we are no longer constrained by the bounds of what we can print and ship, it might be better to eliminate all but the most functional pre-publication print review. A journal's editorial staff could look over each article to ensure that it is basically appropriate, then post it online and allow the readers to do the peer review. The Houghton report in the UK, summarised here, analysed and costed this model and concluded that "Open access self-archiving with overlay services would result in a saving of over 50% on subscription publishing."

An interesting alternative response to the report comes from Cathy Davidson, co-founder of the Humanities, Arts, Science & Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Davidson suggests in this blog post that "Perhaps universities simply need to consider the cost of running humanities and social science publishing as one of the intrinsic costs of these fields, offset by the enormous number of students we teach ... and the lower equipment and technology costs".

Blogs worth subscribing to - plus how to ...

There are two great blogs, one from DCU and one from UCC, that concern themselves with Higher Education in Ireland.

The first is Ferdinand von Prondzynski’s A University Blog: Diary of a University President http://universitydiary.wordpress.com/. Blogging since June 2008, the Dublin City University President blogs about issues that interest him, some personal, some of great interest to Irish researchers. The blog has built up a good following, so comment and debate can be lively. See, for example, last week’s post on Research, economics and trench warfare.

The second interesting blog comes from Steve Hedley of University College Cork’s Faculty of Law. Ninth Level Ireland: Irish University Politics, News and Law http://9thlevelireland.wordpress.com/ mainly links to news and discussion elsewhere on the web, usefully tagging each post with the flag of the country concerned, but also includes on the sidebar some excellent overviews and links. Check out, for example, The fees issue under Politics on the blog's sidebar.

How to subscribe to a blog:
There is an excellent video from Lee LeFever of Common Craft here, describing in plain English and in under 4 minutes how to subscribe to blogs and news sites. It's well worth a look.

Graduate Junction's first ever online international poster competition

July 2009

Poster Competition Update
Greetings!

Graduate Junction's first ever online international poster competition is now well underway and posters are beginning to flood in from across the world. But don't worry there is still plenty of time to get your entry in.
The closing date is 15th October 2009 and all you have to do to enter is create an A1 poster of your research, aimed at a non-subject specific audience and then submit your poster online. The winners will be chosen by a combination of academic and non-academic judges' scores from around the world as well as votes from the members of Graduate Junction. There is the chance to win an iPod as well as a selection of fantastic cash prizes. For MORE INFORMATION please visit www.graduatejunction.org/posters

Summary of responses to query about research impact factor tools and tips

Summary of responses to query about research impact factor tools and tips - from JISC MAIL

Treat with caution – different institutions and subject areas recognise different metrics differently and some don’t recognise them as reliable measure of impact. Advise them about the tools but advise them about possible limitations too. The Sciences and Health Sciences seem to have more reliable data so tend to be able to rely on these more.

ISI suite of products is market leader. Thomson ISI is a key player and the most long-standing founded in 1960.

Web of Knowledge and SCOPUS seem to be the two main competitors for this market. Several institutions are looking at SCOPUS but it is expensive (no price given). SCOPUS enables you to see the number of citations for journal titles. SCOPUS has a better range of citations than ISI for some subjects.
Web of Knowledge is the source of all ISI citations used in other product lines. It allows you to do a citation search or to find an author’s h-index rather than just looking at the impact of a journal. The h-index is an index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output put forward in 2005 by the American physicist, Jorge Hirsch. Use the Author Finder tool in Web of Knowledge for this. The Journal Citation Reports product in Web of Knowledge includes a number of indicators including the Journal Impact Factor. You pay extra on top of your WOK sub to access JCR. JCR is published annually and comes out 6-7 months after the end of the year. In-cites can be used for looking at an institution. http://isiwebofknowledge.com/incites/.

Other tools people mentioned were:
http://www.scimagojr.com/ - developed from rankings in Scopus
Sci-Bytes http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/ - gives small snapshots of the statistics from Journal Citation Reports, e.g. the "Top 10 journals in education", in the latest issue.
Essential Science Indicators
ScienceWatch.com
SciImago - a free website based on the Scopus dataset.
Google scholar plus Publish or Perish software which you can download offers better range of citations for SOME disciplines
Eigenfactor.org – free website
The Washington and Lee University School of Law http://lawlib.wlu.edu/LJ/index.aspx - a useful tool for law researchers.

Some very kind people sent lists of useful reading and further information, including introductions to the topic:
Eugene Garfield "The Agony and the Ecstasy — The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor", 2005 http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/jifchicago2005.pdf - good background information and discussion of pros and cons
From DLIST: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1030/ - a useful article with further reading listed
Thomson Reuters’ website - useful information, discussion and links to articles: http://science.thomsonreuters.com/citationimpactcenter/
http://isiwebofknowledge.com/media/pdf/UsingBibliometricsinEval_WP.pdf - introduction to bibliometrics
http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcp/0901/LCP0901.pdf - introduction to bibliometrics
http://www.inria.fr/inria/organigramme/documents/ce_indicateurs_en.pdf - includes the negative aspects
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/savvy-mcb.htm - Prof Peter Jasco, University of Hawaii. He has written extensively on the subject of citation metrics and different info resources that provide these metrics
http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569.full.pdf
PLoS Medicine Editors, & McKenna, H. (2006). Impact factor game. PLoS Medicine, 3(6), e291.

Excellent overview of the current discussions on the use of metrics compiled by Alison Robson
Alison Robson BA PGDip PGCHE
Academic Librarian (Law, Accounting and Finance)

New bloggers at Read Around Research

If you've had a look at my profile, you will have seen that I am the Research Support Librarian at the University of Limerick.

In the Irish Universities you'll find my fellow research support librarians in NUIG, TCD and DCU. I've asked those librarians to join me on this blog, and as you will see, Jessica Eustace from TCD has arrived, posting video introductions to blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. The videos were created by a great group called Common Craft.

Way back in pre-blog days I had arranged for some creative (i.e. pen and paper) writing time off this summer, so I've been remiss in posting here. I will remain largely offline and with family (it being summer!) until the end of August while my fellow bloggers settle in here. I look forward to posting on Read Around Research issues when I return.

Welcome:
Jessica Eustace, TCD
Jack Hyland, DCU
Rosarie Coughlan and Gwen Ryan, NUIG

Utube - Easy Explanation for what Blogs are for

Final one, utube video on how to use Blogs and what they are for: A video for people who wonder why blogs are such a big deal.

UTube Video on how to use WIKIS

Hi This is a great video explaining how to use wikis for collaboration:

A great UTube Video explaining staying upto date with RSS Feeds

Check out this great little utube video which explains RSS feeds in simple english - a great option to embed into training!

Introducing the Espresso Book Machine – book printing on demand

In a 29 June Boston Globe article, journalist D.C. Denison visits a traditional Vermont book shop which has invested in an ‘Espresso Book Machine’, and asks ‘Is this the future bookstore?’.

The machine, which allows staff to download books from a database while the customer waits, is from New York company, On Demand Books.

Denison suggests that such a machine might be the saving of the small book shop, that the days of ‘We don’t have it but we can order it for you’ may be on the way out. And it’s been a big hit with authors wishing to self-publish.

It’s worth having a look at the video, available at the Boston Globe link, to see the machine in operation.

For those who like the physical format of the book, and would rather not read online or from printed, loose-leaf A4 pages, this could be a perfect complement to projects like Project Gutenberg and Google Books, and to the growing e-book industry.

It will complement bookshops and libraries well, allowing users to browse through books on shelves and display stands as before, but negating the frustration when a specific book isn’t available.

And much of the guesswork will be taken out of the publishing industry’s need to calculate how many copies of a book to print at a time.

A reader commenting on the Boston Globe article guesses that the repairman will be the only one to benefit. However, the machine is probably less 'clunky' than it first appears. The video, after all, is showing us the inner workings. If the surface reality is somewhat smoother, it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Link to full article.

Google Books - where things stand ...

You will have heard of Google Books and of a settlement in the US which has unsettled a number of parties with an interest in books and in freedom of information.

This post is an attempt to summarise the history and the main points of the settlement, to look at the pros and cons, and to provide at the end a brief guide to searching Google Books.

In brief

Google Book Search aims to scan all books published in the United States and to provide full-text access to books published in the United States which are:

• Out-of-copyright (published pre-1923)
• Out-of-print and in-copyright with authors or publishers who cannot be traced ('orphan' works)
• In-print and in-copyright but with permission given by the copyright holder.

NB: If a book is designated as Commercially available (offered for sale new through one or more customary channels of trade in the United States) then Google will not be authorised to make any Display Uses of the book unless a rightsholder of the book gives express permission to do so.

History

• Google Print, renamed Google Book Search in November 2005, was launched in October 2004. Its purpose was to digitise books with the publishers' permission.
• In December 2004 the Google Print Library Project was announced. Google, in partnership with five major American Libraries, would digitise library collections, including the entire book collection of the University of Michigan. The full-text of out-of-copyright books would be made available for free. Books under copyright would be searchable, but only the basic information and a few snippets of text would be visible online.
• In Autumn 2005 the Authors Guild and 5 major publishers coordinated by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed suit against Google for copyright infringement, claiming that the scanning and indexing undertaken did not, as Google claimed, constitute 'fair use'.
• In October 2008 the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and Google announced a settlement. To date (June 2009) final approval has not been given.
• September 4th 2009 has been named as the date by which authors need to opt out of or object to the settlement
• October 7th 2009 has been set as the date for the fairness hearing.

Google Book Settlement

The Google Book Settlement of October 2008 agrees that Google will:

• establish a Book Rights Registry which would provide 63% of revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books.
• pay copyright holders a flat fee of $60 for the initial scanning of their work. This would include a 'reasonable and practicable' effort to find copyright holders of 'orphan' works and give those copyright holders the option to a) claim the fee and manage how their work would, or would not, be displayed or b) opt out of the settlement.
• have the right to digitise and to make available for a fee what are known as 'orphan' works, books which are in copyright but out of print, and for whom the copyright holder cannot be found. University libraries can purchase the collection of these books for a fee based on number of students enrolled; the collection will be made available for free on a single computer in each public library; and any person may purchase an individual copy of a book from the collection.

Arguments against the Google Book settlement:

• Google will have a monopoly on the digitising of orphan works. The agreement is therefore anti-competitive.
• While Google's intentions at present are honourable, the cost of a subscription could potentially be raised in the future to the extent that libraries would be forced to cut costs elsewhere.
• Because the case was settled, the question of fair use was not resolved, nor was the broader question of privacy.

Arguments in favour of the Google Book settlement:

• Out of print books will once again be available, and authors will get some revenue from books which were no longer in print and no longer commercially available.
• The direct link from each Google Book record to local library catalogues and to booksellers online may result in increased use of libraries and an increase in book purchases.
• A recent agreement means that the libraries who have made their books available to Google will have a say in pricing, thus potentially avoiding unreasonable price rises.
• The initiative may in time remove the problem of orphan works, as copyright holders come forward to claim their books.
• Improved and increased access to an enormous research collection.

Europe

At present discussions re Google Book Search centre on the United States. However, the issue is a matter of concern worldwide. On May 28th an Irish Times article reported that the European Union's executive body will be studying Google's plans. Google management said that it would be happy to engage in constructive dialogue on the future of books and copyright.

See here for articles from the New York Times about Google Book Search.

Step-by-Step Guide to using Google Book Search

google books

Citation Analysis - how to ...

All researchers will be familiar with calls to measure or prove your impact through citation analyses. Whether you agree or disagree with such measures of quality, these Step-by-step guides to citation analysis for UL researchers using Web of Science (ISI) and Publish or Perish (Google Scholar) will be useful.

Guide to using Web of Science
Guide to using Publish or Perish

Journals
If the Web of Science does not cover the journals or books in which you publish (check the Master List here), you can apply to have a journal included. Click here for selection criteria and an application form.

Conference Proceedings
For those disciplines where Conference Proceedings are primary publications, the recent inclusion of Conference Proceedings in Web of Science should improve citations.

Books
Books are not covered by Web of Science, nor are there plans to begin coverage of books. Those researchers who publish mainly in books may be interested in this post suggesting alternative measures for assessing impact in the AHSS.

Publish or Perish , a Google Scholar citation analysis tool from Anne-Wil Harzing, can be useful where Web of Science results do not appear to give a fair reflection of your research output.

For more information on Citation Analysis, the h-index and Journal Impact Factors see the library webpage (www.ul.ie/library) at Supporting Research -> Research Publication & Dissemination here, or go directly to the site here.

The articles linked to in the first paragraph above are:

Agree
Garfield, Eugene (2006) The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor. JAMA 295: 90-93.

Disagree
The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Med 3(6): e291. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291.

Book Launch 2.0

Launching a book in the Web 2.0 world! - from Denis Cass on YouTube.

Industry Collaboration and Academic Research

Researchers benefit from a reasonable level of collaboration with industry, not only bringing economic benefit to their institutions, but also increased publication levels.

That's according to findings presented by City University London economists at the Royal Economic Society conference in May. Cornelia Meissner outlined how she and her colleagues analysed the publications, research funds and patents of researchers in the engineering departments of Imperial College London and City University London between 1985 and 2006, and concluded that:

Researchers with no industrial involvement are likely to be those with the least research outcome ... Nevertheless, high levels of industrial involvement affect negatively research productivity in terms of number of publications.

The authors recommend that universities should, through Technology Transfer and Knowledge programmes, encourage collaboration with industry, while continuing to provide incentives to encourage publishing.

See the full report here.

Meanwhile, at the Times Higher Education’s Employer Engagement conference in May, David Sweeney, director for research, enterprise and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, argued that the pursuit of IP distracts from other areas of engagement with business which could potentially bring more income. HEFCE's policy, said Sweeney, will be to focus on what he termed 'shared investment' workforce development schemes, where taxpayers and employers share the cost of upskilling workforces through collaboration and exchange of expertise with higher education institutions.

For Hannah Fearn's report on a conference which involved much heated debate, see here.

Assessing Research Impact in the Social Sciences and the Humanities

“If we wish to resist the mechanical imposition of standardised citation measures then we need to suggest reasonable grounds for exempting certain fields from metric assessment and propose alternatives.”

So writes Professor Tom Lodge, Assistant Dean Research AHSS, UL, in a memorandum which urges Social Sciences and Humanities researchers to publish, where possible, in formats that lend themselves to comparable, if not statistical, indications of impact. Professor Lodge goes on to outline some of the alternative measures that might be used to indicate the standing and quality of published work in AHSS, including:

Books
o Consider the status of the publisher, perhaps compiling lists of top ten publishers in various fields
o Pay attention to review coverage, noting the standing of the reviewing journals as well as the content of the reviews
o Distinguish between refereed and non-refereed books
o Consider a book’s publishing history e.g. reprints and second subsequent editions may be considered to signal impact
o Consider a book’s sales figures, allowing for adjustments where a publication is in a very specialised field

Journals not indexed by Web of Science
o Consider using Publish or Perish, a citation analysis tool which analyses Google Scholar
o Refer to the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) for journal ratings
o Gather information from publishers

Other
o Consider work that shapes public policy debates
o Consider the status of conferences, and ranking of conference participation

Professor Lodge’s full memorandum can be accessed here, or on the library webpage (www.ul.ie/library) under Supporting Research -> Research Publication and Dissemination -> Citation Analysis.

A move to open access could bring significant system savings

A move to open access publishing could potentially bring system savings of around £215 million per annum in the UK, according to a report on the costs and benefits of alternative scholarly publishing models. An online model provided by the report authors runs as an executable application for those wishing to calculate national or institutional costs and benefits elsewhere.

John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University is the lead author of the January '09 JISC commissioned report Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits.

Three publishing models are analysed and costed per article (e-only):
1) subscription or toll-access publishing (reader pays) : £2337
2) open access publishing (author pays to publish in an open access journal) : £1524
3) self-archiving with overlay services (author self-archives in an institutional or subject repository, with overlay services provided by the publisher to include peer review management, editing, production and proofing) : £1125

Open access self-archiving with overlay services would result in a saving of over 50% on subscription publishing. Significant additional savings could be made if acquisition cost savings were to be included.

Potential savings of 30% per title for open access monograph publishing are calculated, but a recommendation is made for more research as that area develops.

The report further recommends that:

• Appropriate metrics should be used when evaluating research.
  
• Institutions and funding bodies should ensure the availability of funding for author or producer side fees. (The analysis suggests that “under the rather conservative modelling assumptions, funding agencies or institutions might be able to divert up to 3.5% of research funding to author-side payments before net benefits were exhausted.”)
  
• The development of institutional and subject repositories should be encouraged and supported.

The report, including an Addendum, the online model, and commentary, can be found at http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/. Under ‘Commentary’ see especially the JISC response to the joint comments issued by the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

Piled Higher and Deeper - PHD for short!

Jorge Cham’s comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper centres on the life (or lack thereof) of a group of overworked, underpaid, procrastinating postgraduate students and their terrifying advisers.

It’s been going since 1997, and Cham still posts new comics "approximately 2.718 times a week". The comic strip is available for free on the website where it has 4.7 million visitors a year, and is syndicated for free in university newspapers.

Enjoy! at http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

Click here for more on Jorge Cham and his comic ideas in Science's Career Magazine.

Mr Bean visits the Library

A 'what not to do' for researchers in Special Collections.

EndNote support online and on-campus

Those of you who have attended EndNote classes in the past may find these useful. They're the latest EndNote class slides fully indexed. If you want to refresh your memory, just click on the relevant section.

If it's been some time since you attended a class, you'll find that there's lots new. EndNote X2, the latest version of EndNote, is particularly good on using the Groups function to organise your library, on linking to full-text, and of course on working with EndNote Web.

EndNote classes on-campus, run by Research Support Librarian Aoife Geraghty, are on-going. Contact Aoife with EndNote questions, or contact Anne O'Dwyer in the Graduate School to book a place in class.

Impact Factors, Citations and the h-index

As impact factors, citation analyses and the 'h-index' are used increasingly to measure research impact (see last week's post on university rankings), it is worth posting a reminder of what these are and of how the measurements are made.

Journal Impact Factors
Journal impact factors provide an objective measurement for differentiating between journals by measuring the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. An impact factor of 1.5 for a journal would mean that, on average, articles published in that journal during the previous two years have been cited 1.5 times. In the University of Limerick you can find a journal's impact factor in ISI's Journal Citation Reports (see the library list of databases).

Citation Analysis
A citation analysis measures the number of times an author, article, journal or institution is cited in academic literature. In the University of Limerick a citation analysis can be done in ISI's Web of Science (see the library list of databases). Do a search for the author, giving 'Univ Limerick' as the address. At the top right of your results list click 'Create Citation Report'. The citation report will provide graphs and statistics of the author's publication and citation trend, including the average number of times an item has been cited.

h-index
Included in the Web of Science citation report, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. A h-index of h signifies that the author has published h papers each of which has been cited at least h times. So, for example, a h-index of 4 signifies that the author has published 4 papers each of which has been cited at least 4 times. The author may in fact have published 5 or even 100 papers, but papers 5 -100 have less than 4 citations and are therefore discounted. For further information on the h-index see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number

Rankings using the measures above are based on the premise that if an academic or institution shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that the academic or institution has made a significant impact on the academic world. However, it is important to note that the reverse is not necessarily true and that an academic or institution with weak citation metrics may, for example, be working in a small field, publishing in a language other than English, or publishing mainly in books.

Don't devalue the insight or 'What are the humanities for?'

John Armstrong, philosopher in residence at the Melbourne Business School, argues that the answering of the question in the title above has serious implications for how the humanities are studied, how they are funded and how their success – or failure – is measured.
While the choice politically often seems to be whether to a) honour (and fund) the humanities for their own sake or b) demand that the humanities contribute something more tangible to society, Armstrong suggests that both sides have something to offer.
The mistake, says Armstrong, has been to look for a side benefit (e.g. studying Latin helps you to deal with abstractions) and then to try to justify a whole discipline on that slender basis.
Instead we should look to life's most difficult practical questions - 'What are we really trying to accomplish and why, in the long run, would it be so good to do that?’ - and at how a discipline helps us to answer those questions. What is it that is of intrinsic benefit?
The humanities, Armstrong concludes, become more practical not by disavowing their core concerns but by understanding them more clearly and by seeing them as being in the service of life, not in the service of academics.

Link to the full The Australian article

Leading from the front: SFI’s Frank Gannon

Dick Ahlstrom in the Irish Times this week reminded us that even with the economy tanked and the filleting knife out for virtually every State programme, the science budget has so far remained intact. Frank Gannon, Director General of SFI since 2007, has had no small part to play in this.

"Careful lobbying by Gannon and others has helped keep the Government onside", writes Ahlstrom, "and allowed them to 'hold their nerve' through these difficult times. The highest levels of Government remain committed to the 'smart economy', believing that our engagement with scientific research will help pull us out of recession when the tide finally turns."

Gannon outlined just why we need to remain committed to the smart economy at the launch on March 25th this year of Powering the Smart Economy, SFI Strategy 2009-2013:

"While most of the focus in economic commentaries of late has, understandably, been on the short-term, it is essential that we prepare for the new global environment that will exist after this recession. We need to look closely and critically at how Ireland will then be positioned after the recovery. Ireland will have to be able to win exports by being the location from where new, essential and complex products originate. This can only happen if we give the necessary support, even in these difficult times to our high quality research and development. The realisation of the interdependent objectives set out in the strategy will deliver the basis for a prosperous and sustainable smart economy."

Link to the full Irish Times article
Link to Powering the Smart Economy, SFI Strategy 2009-2013
Link to SFI Press Release, March 25th 2009

The book everyone wishes they’d written

Times Higher Education today launched a new series where leading scholars explain which books they believe are definitive in their field. Writers were asked to choose a key text that “defined their subject, set their personal academic agendas or even changed their lives.”

This week’s books are from disciplines ranging from anthropology and architecture to social policy and international relations. It is anticipated that in time the weekly series will cover most of the academic landscape.

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON by Immanuel Kant
Recommended and reviewed by Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy, University of Cambridge.
Available in UL Library at 121/KAN

THE SECOND SEX by Simone de Beauvoir
Recommended and reviewed by Mary Evans, visiting fellow, Gender Institute, London School of Economics.
Available in UL Library at 305.42

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE: PLACES, PATHS AND MONUMENTS by Christopher Tilley
Recommended and reviewed by Timothy Darvill, professor of archaeology and director of the Centre for Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage, Bournemouth University.
Available in UL Library at 936.29/TIL

THE GREEKS AND THE IRRATIONAL by E. R. Dodds
Recommended and reviewed by Mary Beard, professor of Classics, Newnham College, Cambridge.
Available through UL Library as an e-book

ANTHROPOLOGIE ECONOMIQUE DES GOURO DE COTE D'IVOIRE by Claude Meillassoux
Recommended and reviewed by Jeremy Keenan, professorial research associate, department of social anthropology and sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Available as an inter-library loan

ON WAR by Carl von Clausewitz
Recommended and reviewed by Alex Danchev, professor of international relations, University of Nottingham. His latest book is On Art and War and Terror (2009).
Available in UL Library at 355

THE USES OF LITERACY by Richard Hoggart
Recommended and reviewed by Fred Inglis, emeritus professor of cultural studies, University of Sheffield.
Available in UL Library at 302.22440941/HOG

THE NAZI SEIZURE OF POWER: THE EXPERIENCE OF A SINGLE GERMAN TOWN 1922-1945 by William Sheridan Allen
Recommended and reviewed by Richard Evans, Regius professor of modern history, University of Cambridge.
Available in UL Library at Store 943.085/ALL

LEVIATHAN by Thomas Hobbes
Recommended and reviewed by Alan Ryan, warden of New College, Oxford.
Available in UL Library at 320.1

GENDER TROUBLE by Judith Butler
Recommended and reviewed by Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
Available in UL Library at 305.3/BUT

THE EYES OF THE SKIN: ARCHITECTURE AND THE SENSES by Juhani Pallasmaa
Recommended and reviewed by Flora Samuel, reader in architecture, University of Bath.
Available in UL Library at 720.1

ON RELIGION: SPEECHES TO ITS CULTURED DESPISERS by Friedrich Schleiermacher
Recommended and reviewed by Keith Ward, Regius professor of divinity emeritus, University of Oxford.
Available at Mary Immaculate Library at 200/SCH

THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE by Erving Goffman
Recommended and reviewed by Anthony Giddens, Labour peer in the House of Lords.
Available in UL Library at 302

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: THE BORDERS OF VISION by Jonathan Wordsworth
Recommended and reviewed by Duncan Wu, professor in the English department, Georgetown University.
Available as an inter-library loan

OF GRAMMATOLOGY by Jacques Derrida, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Recommended and reviewed by Derek Attridge, professor of English at the University of York.
Available in UL Library at 401

THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES VOLUME VII: THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
Recommended and reviewed by Michelle Baddeley, fellow, college lecturer and director of studies in economics, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Available in UL Library at 330.156

COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GENERALE by Ferdinand de Saussure
Recommended and reviewed by Roy Harris, emeritus professor of general linguistics, University of Oxford.
Available in UL Library at 410

ORIENTALISM by Edward Said
Recommended and reviewed by Claire Chambers is senior lecturer in postcolonial literature, Leeds Metropolitan University.
Available in UL Library at 950.07

Click here for the full Times Higher Education article, including reviews of the books listed.

SFI and Open Access

From 1 February 2009 Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) joined with other research funders worldwide to mandate that research publications arising in whole or in part from their funding must be lodged in an open access repository as soon as possible (maximum 6 months) after publication. See funder policies here.

The SFI policy
• confirms the freedom of researchers to publish first wherever they feel is the most appropriate.
• allows that the protection of intellectual property arising from the publication takes precedence over open access depositing and indeed over any form of publication.
• recommends that institutional and disciplinary repositories should be used in preference to an author’s own website.
• specifies that the publication to be deposited is to be the publisher’s version, if permitted, or the author’s final version. See publisher permissions here.
• Where a publisher charges an author to enable open access, SFI will allow this as an Eligible Cost and it should be charged against the Miscellaneous budget line. See publisher charges here.

Because authors prefer the publisher copy to the ‘author’s own’ version allowed by most publishers, there is a natural reluctance to lodge work in an open access repository. However, policies like the one above make the necessity for some culture shifts in interactions between authors, publishers and librarians clear.

UL researchers can meet the SFI requirement by lodging their work in the University of Limerick Institutional Repository (ULIR).

University rankings don't tell the whole story

Prof Ellen Hazelkorn, Director of Research and Enterprise at Dublin Institute of Technology and leader of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), argues in this Irish Times article that too much focus on global rankings means that we risk transforming our higher education system to conform to metrics designed for other purposes.

Professor Hazelkorn looks at the various rankings, including the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (SJT), the Times QS World University Ranking and the Taiwan Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for Research Universities, and concludes that sometimes “global rankings focus on what is easily measured rather than measuring what counts”.

Stressing that “it is the total investment that is important”, she recommends that Ireland could usefully look to Australia and to Norway for models which recognise and reward excellence wherever it occurs, developing benchmarks which reflect our societal and innovation needs and assessing performance accordingly.

Links to Rankings information
Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (SJT)
Times QS World University Ranking
Webometrics – Ranking Web of World Universities
Wikipedia – College and University Rankings

Australia - the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative
Norway - the Stjerno Commission

Link to the full Irish Times article

Brush up your writing skills if you want to get published

At a Society for Research into Higher Education workshop on "Academic Writing Skills and Getting Published", session leaders stressed the need for new academics to develop good writing habits.

Simon Lygo-Baker of King's College London said that while researchers must get used to the fact that rejection by leading journals is the norm, they should also be aware that many rejected submissions don’t make the cut not because of a fault in the research, but because the submissions read like drafts rather than final papers. Scholars who apply some of the basic principles of good writing, including principles generally seen to apply to other forms of writing, will be putting themselves ahead of the game.

Academics are no different from other writers in their need for people to read and to remember what they write, said Lygo-Baker, and so they should “Give readers a hook or incentive at the start to grab their attention and get them involved” and “Summarise your central claim at the end, so that people take away something concrete."

Some basic principles of academic writing that Lygo-Baker said editors find to be too often forgotten include the need to pay attention to the style of a particular journal, to get to the point as succintly as possible, while addressing the major theoretical issues, and to offer conclusions that clearly arise from what has gone before. And of course, the work must be relevant or, as a reader of the article remarks online, “The best way to get published is to produce good work.”

Dr Rowena Murray of the University of Strathclyde was anxious to get the new academics at the workshop writing, stressing the importance of scholars being able to write on demand, of getting into the habit of grabbing any spare time and using it to write. She demonstrated how "writing to prompts" can help people to develop the behavioural techniques to get them started as academic writers, and how drawing consciously, for example, on set phrases such as "Some will argue that ..." or "Possible interpretations include ... " can help writers to package research in the most appropriate way.

So ... If you want to be an effective and productive writer, you should start writing now - just don’t let your first draft be your last.

Link to the full Times Higher Education article

Journal authors' rights

A report from the Publishing Research Consortium Journal authors' rights: perception and reality, highlights some of the challenges ahead for anybody interested in access to research output.

Over half of the authors surveyed for this report thought that their agreements with publishers sometimes or always allowed self-archiving of the published version of their paper.* This report tells us that, in reality, just 11.7% of publishers permit self-archiving of the published version of a paper. 62% will allow some form of self-archiving, but this usually means that the author has permission to self-archive their own 'pre-publication' copy, not the publisher's 'post-publication' pdf.

With the majority of research funding bodies now mandating the deposit of funded research outputs in subject or institutional repositories, there is a need for authors to overcome the reluctance to self-deposit mentioned in this report, and to look beyond their understandable preference for publisher versions only.

The findings of a 2005 Key Perspectives survey cited in the report clearly demonstrate a need for improved communications regarding self-archiving, and for authors, publishers and librarians to work together to ensure that Open Access initiatives improve the dissemination of information while maintaining high quality scholarly publishing standards:

In 17% of cases authors believed that they required publisher permission to self-archive; 47% believed that they did not need to ask permission, and 36% did not know. However only 16% said that they did in fact ask permission and 84% did not. 95% of those who believed that permission was not required went ahead and self-archived without it, as did 93% of those who did not know; just under one-third of those who thought it was required also went ahead without asking.

*Self-archiving includes making the article available on a personal or department website, or depositing the article in a subject or institutional repository.

Professor Wikipedia

I love this YouTube 'College Humour' video. It's how research on the web can feel sometimes - constant distractions and sidetracks, struggling to remember what it was you were wanting to know in the first place ....

Why I Blog

As this is my first ever blog posting I cannot write from experience, but I can link you to an excellent article from Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic Online, November 2008, called Why I Blog. In the article Sullivan* shows how this form of instant and global self-publishing differs from traditional journalism in its immediacy, its colloquialism and its accountability.
Sullivan likens the role of a blogger to that of the host of a dinner party, where the host "can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate."
That's what I like about blogging. It's the acknowledgment that each blogger is one person with a limited but unique perspective. Where readers know more about a subject than the blogger does, they can easily, by sending links, stories, and facts, add "context and nuance and complexity to an idea."
As a librarian I like to be able to link to references and sources, while at the same time acknowledging that there's a vast world of information out there. I hope that, in time, others will add to what I post, and the upshot for us all will be a more complete picture of what's around and worth reading in Research.

*If I were a true blogger I might use 'Andrew' instead of the more formal 'Sullivan', seduced by what Sullivan refers to as the 'faux intimacy' of the medium. But I'm not there yet!