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/