Big Deal — good deal? Or is there a better deal?

The purchase ‘en bloc’ by library consortia of all journals published by one publisher – the so‐called ‘Big Deal’ – is bad for small publishers and for large libraries even if – in the short term – good for large publishers and for small libraries. The publishing and library communities need to find alternative purchasing models that provide better deals for those disadvantaged by the prevalence of the ‘Big Deal’ while retaining the benefit of scale in negotiation and supply.     

Publishing and the digital library: adding value to scholarship and innovation to business

Sydney eScholarship is a framework and suite of services that enables integration of digital collections, open access repositories, and research data services with scholarly publishing. The primary platform for scholarly publishing at the University of Sydney – Sydney University Press – currently operates as part of the University Library's Sydney eScholarship program. Three sets of publishing initiatives demonstrate the integration of the digital library with scholarly publishing to deliver different forms to different audiences: (i) new publishing and the literary canons – rediscovery, customisation and critical interpretations; (ii) book and web – open access publishing; (iii) publishing in the mix – data and experimental scholarly publishing.     

Publishing a well-established international environmental journal in Chinese

A Chinese-language version of Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment – published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science – has been published in China since 1994. We describe the background to the project and the processes and problems involved in its successful development.     

Learning to write through reading

Narrowing the gap between what we want to achieve as writings – publishing a report of our project – and what we achieve as readers – finding a study to inform our practice – can be challenging. One solution in enabling us to achieve this goal is to learn from close reading the writing of others, including writing in development. Close reading, appraisal in its broadest term, encourages us to articulate what we, putting us in touch with how an author has organised information, selected their words and structured their arguments.     

The effect of plot explicit,educational explicit,and implicit inference information and coviewing on children's internal and external cognitive processing

Parental coviewing – the act of being present when a child is watching television – can influence the child’s cognitive processing and emotional reactions. This study investigated the role coviewing has on the child’s cognitive processing – which is evidenced by the phasic psychophysiological orienting response to three types of information: plot explicit, educational explicit, and implicit inference. An experiment was conducted that measured the heart rate of children (N?=?88; mean age?=?9.12 years) while watching messages either with or without a parent present in the room. It was predicted, and found, that coviewing leads to greater resource allocation to encoding the message – as indicated by phasic cardiac deceleration, and that information that required internal processing, such as plot explicit or implicit inferential content, leads to greater resources allocated to internal processing – as indicated by phasic cardiac acceleration. Implications for parental mediation strategies and educational television programming are given.     

Should scholarly societies embrace open access (or is it the kiss of death)?

In assessing the role that organizations of scientists with publishing activities – such as scholarly societies – can or should play in furthering the science and practice in their chosen fields, they face a dilemma: should they primarily be fund‐raising organizations for other activities in their disciplines, using their publications to bring in the necessary money, or should they be promoters of efficient scholarly communication and use their publications more directly to that end – for instance, by embracing ‘open access‘.     

Building dynamic capabilities of an academic library: A research agenda

Though academic libraries do not compete with others in the real sense, every ambitious librarian would want his or her library to be better than the others. How would a librarian be able to achieve this? Traditionally, librarians have focused on building excellence in processes and operations. However, such processes and operations can be imitated and implemented by other libraries, resulting in those competencies being short lived. Researchers in strategic management have developed theories on how organizations can build competencies that cannot be imitated, and thus be ahead of their competitors. One such theory – referred to as the dynamic capabilities – is adapted to identify the micro-foundations including the roles, activities and competencies required to build these capabilities for academic libraries. Four themes – searching & sensing, shaping, seizing, and transforming – related to developing dynamic capabilities of academic libraries have been identified. Potential research questions have also been formulated to direct future research.     

Digitalization as a policy response to social acceleration: Comparing democratic problem solving in Denmark and the Netherlands

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change – poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases the amount of new social problems emerging on the political agenda and hence amplifies the demand for rapid and effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either the political system speeds up decision making at the cost of democracy, or it holds on to democracy at the cost of problem solving. Obviously, neither option is desirable. How do governments try to solve this dilemma and provide positive-sum solutions that are both effective and democratic? We present two so-called paradigm cases of governments, in Denmark and the Netherlands, that have developed a remarkably quick and effective digitalization response to social acceleration. By focusing on four markers – (1) awareness and timing; (2) motivation; (3) new strategic goals; and (4) goal-directed strategic policy action – we theorize how governments aim to solve the dilemma for democratic problem solving under conditions of social acceleration.     

Hidden scales in statistics of citation indicators

Scholarly citations – widely seen as tangible measures of the impact and significance of academic papers – guide critical decisions by research administrators and policy makers. The citation distributions form characteristic patterns that can be revealed by big-data analysis. However, the citation dynamics varies significantly among subject areas, countries etc. The problem is how to quantify those differences, separate global and local citation characteristics. Here, we carry out an extensive analysis of the power-law relationship between the total citation count and the h-index to detect a functional dependence among its parameters for different science domains. The results demonstrate that the statistical structure of the citation indicators admits representation by a global scale and a set of local exponents. The scale parameters are evaluated for different research actors – individual researchers and entire countries – employing subject- and affiliation-based divisions of science into domains. The results can inform research assessment and classification into subject areas; the proposed divide-and-conquer approach can be applied to hidden scales in other power-law systems.     

Media and Media Related

Ronald Gottesman and Harry Geduld (eds.) Guidebook to Film: An Eleven-in-One Reference (New York: Holt, Rinehart &; Winston, 1972 – ,$6.95/3.95)

C. Edward Wall (ed.) Multi Media Reviews Index: 1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1971 – $19.50)

Dorothy I. Weil's (ed.) The American Film Institute's Guide to College Film Courses 1971-72 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1972 – $3.50, paper)

Raymond Fielding's The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (New York: Hastings House, 1972 – $18.50)     

The XML revolution

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is key to the current revolution in publishing technology. Liberating content from proprietary systems and presentational coding, XML enables content to be published efficiently in a multitude of forms – print and electronic. This article discusses XML itself – a metalanguage by which publishers can describe the particular features of their publications apart from how those features are to be rendered in specific presentations – and also surveys a number of other related technologies in the XML family for styling, transforming, and linking. The result of an unprecedented degree of collaboration among competing interests, XML is an enabling technology that greatly enriches our publishing environment.     

Do we measure novelty when we analyze unusual combinations of cited references? A validation study of bibliometric novelty indicators based on F1000Prime data

Lee et al. (2015) – based on Uzzi et al. (2013) – and Wang et al. (2017) proposed scores based on cited references (cited journals) data which can be used to measure the novelty of papers (named as novelty scores U and W in this study). Although previous research has used novelty scores in various empirical analyses, no study has been published up to now – to the best of our knowledge – which quantitatively tested the convergent validity of novelty scores: do these scores measure what they propose to measure? Using novelty assessments by faculty members (FMs) at F1000Prime for comparison, we tested the convergent validity of the two novelty scores (U and W). FMs’ assessments do not only refer to the quality of biomedical papers, but also to their characteristics (by assigning certain tags to the papers): for example, are the presented findings or formulated hypotheses novel (tags “new findings” and “hypothesis”)? We used these and other tags to investigate the convergent validity of both novelty scores. Our study reveals different results for the novelty scores: the results for novelty score U are mostly in agreement with previously formulated expectations. We found, for instance, that for a standard deviation (one unit) increase in novelty score U, the expected number of assignments of the “new finding” tag increase by 7.47%. The results for novelty score W, however, do not reflect convergent validity with the FMs’ assessments: only the results for some tags are in agreement with the expectations. Thus, we propose – based on our results – the use of novelty score U for measuring novelty quantitatively, but question the use of novelty score W.     

The second digital transition: to the mobile space — an analysis of Europeana

According to industry estimates the mobile device (smartphone and tablet) will soon be the main platform for searching the Web and yet our knowledge of how mobile consumers use information – especially scholarly information, and how that differs from desktop or ‘tethered’ users – is imperfect to say the very least. This article aims to correct this through an analysis of the usage logs of a major cultural, multimedia website, Europeana.eu, which started tackling the mobile challenge in 2011. The challenges of identifying mobile use – no easy matter – are described. The information behaviour of 150,000 mobile users is examined and compared with that for desktop users. The main findings are that mobile users are the fastest‐growing user community and that their visits are very different in the aggregate from those arising from desktops. Mobile visits are information ‘lite‘: typically shorter, less interactive, and with less content viewed per visit. Use takes on a social rather than office rhythm, with use peaking at nights and weekends.     

Review

The Attitudes of Chinese Academics to Foreign Scholarly Journals; Part 1 – Report, Part 2 – Appendices. Global Publishing Information (Publishers Association and the British Council) March 2005. Free to ALPSP and PA members; £249 to others.     

Sub-field normalization in the multiplicative case: Average-based citation indicators

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) – at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several sub-fields among a set of 219 Web of Science categories. We follow a multiplicative approach in which every article is wholly counted as many times as it appears at each aggregation level. We compute the crown indicator and the Mean Normalized Citation Score (MNCS) using for the first time sub-field normalization procedures for the multiplicative case. We also compute a third indicator that does not correct for differences in citation practices across sub-fields. It is found that: (1) No geographical area is systematically favored (or penalized) by any of the two normalized indicators. (2) According to the MNCS, only in six out of 80 disciplines – but in none of 20 fields – is the EU ahead of the U.S. In contrast, the normalized U.S./EU gap is greater than 20% in 44 disciplines, 13 fields, and for all sciences as a whole. The dominance of the EU over the RW is even greater. (3) The U.S. appears to devote relatively more – and the RW less – publication effort to sub-fields with a high mean citation rate, which explains why the U.S./EU and EU/RW gaps for all sciences as a whole increase by 4.5 and 5.6 percentage points in the un-normalized case. The results with a fractional approach are very similar indeed.     

Medical library services in Switzerland: catching up with EBM

The feature is a part of the series about medical library services in various countries. It gives an overview of medical library services to support research, education and clinical practice in Switzerland. Data were collected by means of an online survey and set in the wider context of the Swiss healthcare system. Key findings are that library services, including support by academic librarians, are provided to health care staff in hospitals – both university and others, while there is no information service infrastructure to serve the large number of GPs and specialists who mostly run their own practice. The authors recommend that – if the health authorities take EBM seriously – information services should be introduced for these small practices. J.M.     

General Media Works

Ida Oswald and Susanne Wilson, This Bag Is Not A Toy: A Handbook for The Use of Videorecording in Education For the Professions (New York: Council on Social Work Education, 1972 – (price not known), paper.

Thomas R. Giblin (ed.) Popular Media and the Teaching of English (Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Publishing Co., 1972 – $3.95, paper)

Charles Boeckman's And the Beat Goes On: A Survey of Pop Music in America (Washington: Luce, with distribution by David McKay of New York, 1972 – $5.95)

Donald R. Gordon's The New Literacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971 – $10.00/2.75/10.00 (hard, paper, microfiche editions)

Jess Ritter and Grover Lewis (eds.) Focus/Media (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972 – $5.00, paper)

Otto Lerbringer (of Boston University's School of Public Communication), Designs for Persuasive Communication (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972 – $8.95/4.95)     

On synthetic technologies: the book,the university,the Internet

This article examines the ‘synthetic’ – i.e. constructed and recombinant – histories of the book, the university and the Internet to argue that the vitality of the institution that links them all, the university press, will depend on yet further syntheses. These will include, in particular, an increasing commitment to the collaborative development of innovative digital technologies.     

Empty calories? A fragment on LIS white papers and the political sociology of LIS elites

White papers – reports conveying research or recommendations on a complex issue – arrive in the inboxes of academic librarians, along with an obligation to monitor them if they can help one's library or university. They seem to invariably disappoint, the written equivalent of empty calories. This paper asks: is this true? If so, how so? And why? To answer, a selection method produced a modest subset of current, topical white papers to analyze – hence this article as a fragment on recent, topical white papers. A simple discourse analysis was performed to find if there was a broad pattern the documents followed, and if a more analysis was required. A clue as to why this pattern prevailed came from criticisms of prognostications about the current pandemic (as of this writing), leading to a return to the reports: who authored them, and how they are situated in political-sociological terms in LIS discourse? The concluding findings fit with earlier analyses, suggesting much about prestige in LIS and how that is maintained, how practices are (and are not) formulated – and what that has to do with the white papers.