‘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.     

Book Reviews

Information Users and Usability in the Digital Age Chowdhury and Chowdhury Facet, 2011, 304pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐85604‐597‐1, £44.95 (pbk) Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval Ruthven and Kelly Facet, 2011, 320pp. ISBN: 978‐1856047074, £44.95 (pbk)     

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.     

Why Publish?

This essay explores the accelerating trends of academic publishing, and the increasing number of academic journals, in terms of the trade-offs and paradoxes they present to academics. As more gets published, less gets read. Expectations for ‘productivity’ (defined as more publications) continue to rise. Proxy measures of quality, like impact factors, take on greater significance. This essay explores the consequences for authors, on the one hand, and journal editors, on the other hand, of coping with this regime; and asks whether there is any realistic alternative aside from continuing on the treadmill of publishing more and more.     

CACREP-Accredited Programs: Survey Results

The faculty members of counselor education programs often seek data regarding accreditation. This survey was completed in 1984 in an effort to provide information on the effects of meeting CACREP accreditation standards.     

The impact of open access publishing (and other access initiatives) on use and users of digital scholarly journals

Oxford University Press moved one of its most prestigious journals, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), to a full open access (OA), author‐pays publishing model in January 2005. A deep log analysis study was carried out in order to determine the impact of this move to OA on the use and users of the journal. Surprisingly the findings showed that although there was a 143% increase in use from early 2003 to January 2005, it was search engines and robots that accounted for a high proportion of the increased use. Robots were responsible for half of sessions in the second quarter of 2005, compared to 1% in the second quarter of 2003.     

How to Improve your Impact Factor: Questioning the Quantification of Academic Quality

A broad‐scale quantification of the measure of quality for scholarship is under way. This trend has fundamental implications for the future of academic publishing and employment. In this essay we want to raise questions about these burgeoning practices, particularly how they affect philosophy of education and similar sub‐disciplines. First, details are given of how an ‘impact factor’ is calculated. The various meanings that can be attached to it are scrutinised. Second, we examine how impact factors are used to make various ‘high stakes’ academic decisions, such as hiring and promotion, funding of research projects and how much money is to be awarded to a particular area. By focusing on a particular practice, problems with the application of the metric generally are outlined. Finally, we offer some general observations about the unintended consequences and other problems arising from the widespread use of this metric, including attempts to ‘game the system’. We argue that the use of impact factors increasingly shapes the kind of topics and issues scholars write on, their choices of methodology, and their choice of publication venues for their work. Technical measures and mechanisms tend to ‘colonise’ the qualitative and professional judgments that must also be part of the process of evaluation, and for which bibliometrics alone cannot offer a substitute.