Who are the independent editors,how did they reach their role and what are their associated job satisfactions?

This paper presents new evidence on the world of the independent editor in the publishing industry, analysing their demographic background, education and training, working practices, links with professional organizations, motivations for ‘going it alone‘, and job satisfaction. The results help contribute to the understanding of this important and growing segment of the publishing industry, challenge some of the commonly held beliefs about their role in the industry and set these within the broader context of changes in work organization in publishing. Contrary to the assumption that self‐publishing largely takes place without the involvement of an editor, research into the processes of self‐publishing (previously published in this journal) found that editors (and other providers of publishing services) were in fact often involved. The results are significant for the traditional publishing industry, the users of independent editorial services, and the editors themselves.     

Do they want it? Do they use it? The ‘Demand-Side’ of e-Government in Australia and New Zealand

Drawing on 435 telephone interviews in Australia and 498 in New Zealand, this paper investigates the ‘demand’ side of e-government. That is, we examine the use of and support for e-government measures. Whilst respondents were generally supportive of e-government on a number of measures, we find that the majority were reluctant to use some of the more sophisticated ‘transactional’ e-government measures, and less than half had even visited a government website. High users of information and communications technologies (ICT) were more likely to use e-government measures, and are more positive towards e-government in general across several measures. Similar to a number of U.S. studies, we find a ‘digital divide,’ where older age, and less education were associated with lower ICT and e-government use and support. Income level was not a statistically significant predictor in all cases however, and gender was not significant for e-government support.     

What do they want? Millennials and role of libraries in Pakistan

The present study is aimed at determining the future role of libraries in Pakistan as perceived by the Millennials (people born during the 1980's and late 1990's) considering the current ongoing digital development. The quantitative research design, based on survey has been used for the study. The population consisted of students from large and medium sized general universities of Lahore, Pakistan. Stratified purposive sampling technique was carried out to select the pool of the subjects e. A self-constructed and validated instrument was used to collect data. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS (16.0). The results revealed that Millennials want future libraries to allow easy access to a wide range of reading material in both print and digital form. They want to be able to round the clock access to electronic and print resources.     

Increased Publication in Predatory Journals by Developing Countries' Institutions: What It Entails? And What Can Be Done?

Recently, there has been an alarming increase in the number of “academic” papers published in vanity journals and publishers. Such journals, dubbed predatory because their main objective is making money out of authors, compromise or completely abandon the peer review system. An increase in publishing with such journals, which is common in developing counties, will affect the quality of science, excellence, development, and individual researchers' and institutions' professional reputation. In this article, the author discusses strategies for individual researchers and institutions for identifying and discouraging publishing in predatory journals. Moreover, suggestions on how to deal with faculty who have published and already bestowed positions on the grounds of papers published in predatory journals are also given. Strategies and suggestions discussed in this article can provide insights to librarians and publication officers on how to curb the problem of predatory publications.     

If we built it,would they come? Creating instruction videos with promotion in mind

This article reports on a video project done in an academic library where faculty were included in the production and marketing of the library instruction videos. The videos allowed the librarian to provide a shorter presentation and spend most of her time working individually with each student. The results showed that 97% of the students watched the videos and were able to benefit from the content. The implementation of the videos was a success due to the collaboration of the professors teaching the three courses and the buy-in of the course coordinator; both factors were essential in the success of the video project.     

Including cited non-source items in a large-scale map of science: What difference does it make?

Cited non-source documents such as articles from regional journals, conference papers, books and book chapters, working papers and reports have begun to attract more attention in the literature. Most of this attention has been directed at understanding the effects of including non-source items in research evaluation. In contrast, little work has been done to examine the effects of including non-source items on science maps and on the structure of science as reflected by those maps. In this study we compare two direct citation maps of a 16-year set of Scopus documents – one that includes only source documents, and one that includes non-source documents along with the source documents. In addition to more than doubling the contents of the map, from 19 M to 43 M documents, the inclusion of non-source items strongly augments the social sciences relative to the natural sciences and medicine and makes their position in the map more central. Books are also found to play a significant role in the map, and are much more highly cited on average than articles.