The Covid‐19 ‘infodemic’: a new front for information professionals

The virus, commonly known as COVID‐19 which emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has spread in 213 countries, areas or territories around the globe, with nearly 144 683 deaths worldwide on 18 April 2020. In the wake of this pandemic, we have witnessed a massive infodemic with the public being bombarded with vast quantities of information, much of which is not scientifically correct. Fighting fake news is now the new front in the COVID‐19 battle. This regular feature comments on the role of health sciences librarians and information professionals in combating the COVID‐19 infodemic. To support their work, it draws attention to the myth busters, fact‐checkers and credible sources relating to COVID‐19. It also documents the guides that libraries have put together to help the general public, students and faculty recognise fake news.     

‘Full and open access’ to scientific information: an academic's view

Stimulated by the potential of electronic distribution of information, discussions, sometimes rather tense, about the ownership and proprietary rights to scientific publications have generated something of a polarization of the communities that have stakes in this issue. There are some ‘middle‐grounders’, but the intensity of the discourse has made them less visible than the spokesmen for the extremes. In this forum, we examine these positions and then present a case for a specific policy, in light of the views of the parties.     

‘Finding’ and ‘discovering’: How understanding researchers’ search and discovery behaviour informed the building of Cambridge Core

Key points

• Researchers most often visit publisher platforms to ‘find’ a specific article or chapter after ‘discovering’ available resources elsewhere.
• Keywords in the title and author names are the two most important criteria for identifying relevant material.
• Students consider access to be an important criterion for item selection.
• For both humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology, and medicine (STM), user behaviour when identifying relevant content is remarkably similar.
• Students and researchers tend to gather content for later use rather than read it in detail as soon as they find it.

     

‘Reading’ in the digital environment

For ten years CIBER has been studying the logs of scholarly publishers, and what was clear from the very beginning was that scholars conducted very brief visits to websites and spent very little time reading when there, yet publishers envisaged they would dwell; and if not dwell, then at least deep read the PDF later. Yet CIBER's research points to the fact that ‘lite’ reading is in fact endemic: younger people prefer it anyway and older people are getting used to it for the speed and convenience it brings. PDFs are largely a means of archiving and collecting and are not the gold standard reading metric people think. User satisfaction comes not from a PDF but from the ability to deep dive into a site and snatch what you are interested as quickly as possible. Publishers are still not comfortable with that and this article helps explain why they have to be.     

‘Evidence’ within local authority decision making

Michael Cook looks at the role of an embedded Public Health Information Specialist highlighting the ways the core evidence, information and knowledge skills are used to progress Public Health activity in local government settings. Acknowledging the current pandemic, he explores how COVID‐19 has dominated all aspects of health and social care, and outlines how evidence services have work within these complex Public Health systems to lead the local response and recovery efforts.     

Museums: Fostering a Culture of ‘Flourishing’

This forum presents a personal view from a museum professional of the museum field's stake in the sustainability movement. The author takes the opportunity of a discussion within a national museum association about the possible implementation of environmental sustainability standards and argues instead for systematically engaging the entire museum field in re‐thinking and restructuring the foundations of culture in our society. The author concludes that sustainability will require rebuilding the foundation blocks of our social and economic structures, both locally and globally, and that museums have the potential to play important roles in facilitating these processes. However, as is the case with all change, new skills will have to be acquired, values will have to be reassessed and priorities will have to be reset. These are the challenges of the 21^st century.     

Time to stop talking about ‘predatory journals’

Key points

• The term ‘predatory journal’ hides a wide range of scholarly publishing misconduct.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ unhelpfully bundles misconduct with poor quality.
• The term ‘predatory journal’ blinds us to important possibilities, needs, and questions arising in the developing scholarly landscape.
• The current scholarly publishing environment cannot rely on such a simplified classification of journals into predatory or not.

     

The ‘market’ for medical and health information in transition: the case of the Hong Kong Hospital Authority libraries

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Unpublishable research: examining and organizing the ‘file drawer’

It is well known that a number of research outcomes are not reported (the so‐called ‘file drawer problem’). It is generally assumed that what is not reported are ‘negative results’. Our study approaches the issue from a new angle by exploring what researchers perceive to be ‘unpublishable’. A survey regarding ‘unpublishables’ was sent out to 2,535 faculty members at Indiana University. Forty of these individuals consented to in‐depth interviews, which more fully explored these academics' views on the issue of unpublishable work. Our results indicate that there are several types of research besides negative results that are perceived to be unpublishable yet worthy of publication. Moreover, there is a great diversity within and across disciplines as to what constitutes ‘unpublishable’ research. Respondents indicated that academic discourse would benefit from the formal dissemination of papers that included inconclusive or null results, as well as replication and refutation studies. The results of our study suggest that there is a perceived gap in scholarly communication, which is to the detriment of science. These results can be used by administrators, educators, and publishers in order to refine scholarly communication practices so as to create a more robust, accurate literature and to inform future generations of researchers.