The Global/Local Book Publishing (R)evolution

In the decades since the Second World War, interest in Western-style children’s books has expanded in tandem with the growth of a literacy-minded global middle class. Now, as publishing for young people takes root for the first time in nations as economically and culturally diverse as Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and China, the opportunities for rights exchanges, co-editions, and other forms of industry cooperation across national and cultural borders are greater than ever.     

Format Choice for Popular Fiction Books in Japan

In Japan, comic plays a leading role in electronic publishing, whereas e-book sales generated from novels are small. This study investigates format choice, such as pocket-sized paperbacks and e-books for popular novels on bestseller lists in 2010. The results show that almost half of novels are not released as e-books and Japanese authors who already have strong sales performances are not positive about releasing e-books, whereas all foreign novels are released as e-books. One reason that electronic publishing other than comics has not developed in Japan may be that many novels written by popular authors are not provided as e-books.     

The New Role of the Managing Editor at Large Companies in Argentina

The purpose of this work is to address the changes in the role of the publisher, based on the analysis of the dynamics and performance of the major publishing houses in Argentina today. Based on a number of interviews, we will seek to identify and analyze the tension occurring between the cultural and business logics among stakeholders with a particular interest in the field. These actors share a “publisher’s practical sense” that outlines their habitus and refers to a series of dispositions for action consisting of technical and theoretical knowledge, intuitive processes which, together, make up the publisher’s practice.     

The Complexity of Measuring the Impact of Books

The purpose of this study was to discover whether there are scholarly evaluation metrics that can be applied to a wide range of books’ types and contents. We analyzed over 70,000 books and collected various metrics per each title including traditional and altmetrics measures. The analysis in this paper depicts the top books showing the highest rates of citations, reviews, readership, downloads, twitter and more. Our results show that books display different impact in each of the measurements and vary by types and content. There isn’t one measure that captures the impact of books across the board. We conclude that books should be evaluated by types and contents while using different measures per each.     

An Error is an Error… is an Erratum: The Ethics of not Correcting Errors in the Science Literature

This essay provides an unpalatable perspective on classifying the reluctance of authors, editors or publishers to correct their erroneous literature as being unethical. Authors who publish papers that carry errors and who take laurels for such publications, but who then fail to correct reported errors at a post-publication stage should be classified as unethical, and their act or irresponsibility as misconduct. Similarly, editors and publishers who fail to revise erroneous literature when claims are factually correct, independent of the volume of claims, are also in violation of their codes of conduct and professional responsibilities towards the scientific community and society. This essay provides a critical outlook on this issue which has begun to plague the post-publication movement in science, and which deserves urgent attention and focus.     

Methods for linking EHR notes to education materials

It has been shown that accessing the patients’ own electronic health records (EHR) can enhance their medical understanding and provide clinically relevant benefits. However, languages that are difficult for non-medical professionals to comprehend are prevalent in the EHR notes. The valuable and authoritative information contained in the EHR is thus less accessible to the patients, who ultimately stand to benefit the most from the information. To address this challenge, we are developing a system to retrieve EHR note-specific online consumer-oriented health education materials. We explored several query generation methods to convert long EHR notes to effective queries, including topic models and key concept identification. Our experiments show that queries using key concepts identified by a learning based model with pseudo-relevance feedback significantly outperform the baseline system of using the full text note.     

Predicting relevance based on assessor disagreement: analysis and practical applications for search evaluation

Evaluation of search engines relies on assessments of search results for selected test queries, from which we would ideally like to draw conclusions in terms of relevance of the results for general (e.g., future, unknown) users. In practice however, most evaluation scenarios only allow us to conclusively determine the relevance towards the particular assessor that provided the judgments. A factor that cannot be ignored when extending conclusions made from assessors towards users, is the possible disagreement on relevance, assuming that a single gold truth label does not exist. This paper presents and analyzes the predicted relevance model (PRM), which allows predicting a particular result’s relevance for a random user, based on an observed assessment and knowledge on the average disagreement between assessors. With the PRM, existing evaluation metrics designed to measure binary assessor relevance, can be transformed into more robust and effectively graded measures that evaluate relevance towards a random user. It also leads to a principled way of quantifying multiple graded or categorical relevance levels for use as gains in established graded relevance measures, such as normalized discounted cumulative gain, which nowadays often use heuristic and data-independent gain values. Given a set of test topics with graded relevance judgments, the PRM allows evaluating systems on different scenarios, such as their capability of retrieving top results, or how well they are able to filter out non-relevant ones. Its use in actual evaluation scenarios is illustrated on several information retrieval test collections.     

Environmental impact assessment of ecological migration in China: a survey of immigrant resettlement regions

Implementation of ecological migration (eco-migration) policies may improve the fragile ecological environment of emigration areas; however, it also places enormous pressure on the human-environment systems in immigrant resettlement regions. Via the application of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods, ecological footprint (EF), and stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence, and technology (STIRPAT) models, 21 villages of Huanjiang County in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China were used in this research as a case study area for the environmental appraisal of eco-migration policies in immigrant resettlement regions. Results show: (1) In the past 20 years of implementing eco-migration policies, the EF per capita constantly increased, the biocapacity (BC) per capita constantly decreased, and the ecological deficit gradually increased, indicating an extremely negative impact of eco-migration projects on the ecological environment in the immigration areas. (2) Cropland and forest land are the most important components of the per-capita EF. The per-capita EF of cropland experienced overall a first increasing and then decreasing trend, and the per-capita EF of forest land constantly increased and showed the most rapid increase among all types of EF in the last two decades. (3) The proportion of per-capita EF of different types of productive land is in the order of forest land > cropland > carbon uptake land > built-up land > grazing land from high to low, and this is a significant change from the original order of cropland > forest land > carbon uptake land > grazing land > built-up land. (4) Because of unequal possession of ecologically productive resources, the overall per-capita EF, overall per-capita BC, overall per-capita ecological deficit of productive land use by migrants, and their component values of different types of productive land use are all lower than the corresponding values of the natives. The ecological deficit of natives is more severe than that of migrants. (5) Whereas population growth and overexploitation of resources lead directly to the increased pressure on the ecological environment in the immigration areas, increasing nonagricultural income and improving the consumption structure can reduce the dependence of farmers on the land, thus inhibiting the increase of EF.