Action Research into Online Publishing

Action research is a suitable tool for research into the management of change in an organisation or community. While it combines the researcher and the change agent, and therefore incorporates the views and opinions of the researcher, it can help to shed light on problems that are not susceptible to other approaches. In this case, the action is the change to on-line publishing of the Australasian Journal of Construction Economics and Building that had achieved a very small circulation in a conventional format. The aim is to increase the availability of the journal without increase the costs. The various actions involved in changing the mode of operation are examined through their impact, to the extent that they can be isolated. The conclusion is that the actions have been beneficial, overall and in respect of the aims of increasing availability without increases in costs

Assessment of K-12 educators’ awareness and need for online self-publishing services in the classroom

This thesis surveyed K-12 educators to gauge their comfort level and awareness with online self-publishing services along with required skill sets, testing whether K-12 educators are taking advantage of online self-publishing within the classroom. If educators were to adopt online self-publishing to create material for the students, there is a potential new market for the Print-On-Demand industry. The experimental design involved the creation of an online survey taken by K-12 educators across the United States. The survey was used to gauge respondent comfort level with online self-publishing skills for personal and school use. Their opinions on collaboration with other educators to produce material for the students benefit were also addressed. The main findings of this research were that, 15% of respondents have had personal online self-publishing experience, 61% were aware of popular online self-publishing websites, and editing was viewed as the most helpful skill to have when producing self-published book online. With school use, 44% of respondents reported their school had a student publishing assignment with yearbooks being the most commonly published item in schools. Teacher use in the classroom revealed that 58% of respondents were interested in using self-publishing, 54% of respondents had already produced material for the students benefit. Moreover 90% believed that providing the students with a more targeted and customized learning experience was a main benefit of self-publishing. However, respondents did not understand how online self-publishing could save costs in textbook orders. If educators better understood there is a potential cost savings, it would generate a greater interest in pursuing some form of online self-publishing

Reading the "Negro Bible": online access to Jet and Ebony

This article gives a very brief account of the rise to prominence of the black owned and run Johnson Publishing Company, with particular emphasis on its earlier years and specifically on the role played by its two most important publications, Ebony and Jet. The late Redd Foxx called Jet "The Negro Bible," and a character in one of poet/playwright Maya Angelou's plays said that "if it wasn't in Jet, it didn't happen.". It then describes how runs of these 2 titles, and others from the same publishing house, are now available online from Google Book Search, before looking at some potential uses of these resources as primary source material for research

Opportunities From the Digital Revolution: Implications for Researching, Publishing, and Consuming Qualitative Research

In the 1990s, the term 'online' research emerged as a new and vibrant suite of methods, focused on exploitation of sources not collected by traditional social science methods. Today, at least one part of the research life cycle is likely to be carried out 'online,' from data collection through to publishing. In this article, we seek to understand emergent modes of doing and reporting qualitative research 'online.' With a greater freedom now to term oneself a 'researcher,' what opportunities and problems do working with online data sources bring? We explore implications of emerging requirements to submit supporting data for social science journal articles and question whether these demands might disrupt the very nature of and identity of qualitative research. Finally, we examine more recent forms of publishing and communicating research that support outputs where data play an integral role in elucidating context and enhancing the reading experience

On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates

The online age has made powerful new benefits for research possible, but these benefits entail a profound conflict of interest between (1) what is best for the research journal publishing industry and (2) what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research. What is at stake is (1) a hypothetical risk of potential future losses in subscription revenue for publishers versus (2) actual, ongoing losses in current research impact for researchers. How this conflict of interest will have to be resolved is already clear: Research publishing is a service industry; it will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And what is best for research is Open Access (OA), provided through research funders and universities mandating the OA self-archiving of all their researchers' peer-reviewed research output. The conventional (non-OA) publishing industry's first commitment is of course to what is best for its own business interests, rather than to what is best for research and researchers; hence it is lobbying vigorously against the many OA self-archiving mandates that are currently being adopted, recommended and petitioned for by the research community worldwide. But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when "OA" publishers take the very same stance against OA itself (by opposing OA self-archiving mandates) that non-OA publishers do. Conventional publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded) but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been self-deluded if not hypocritical. I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of Springer's "Open Choice": Jan opposes Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they would provide OA without paying the publisher extra for it. But all publishing costs are currently being paid for already: via subscriptions. So opposition to Green OA self-archiving mandates by a hybrid Gold "Open Choice" Publisher sounds very much like wanting to have their cake and eat it too (even though that is precisely what they like to describe Green OA advocates as trying to do!)

Event distributions in online book auctions.

Current quantitative evaluations in various research areas for publish/ subscribe systems use artificially created event messages to model the system workload. The assumptions made to create these workloads are rather strong and hardly ever described in detail. This does not allow for a repetition of experiments or comparative evaluations of different approaches by different researches. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the distributions of the values of attributes typically used in online auction scenarios. In particular, we focus on auctions of fiction books. We further show our approach of creating event messages by the help of the gained information. Publishing this information on how to create a typical workload for online auctions should allow for the repetition of experiments and the comparison of different evaluations

ASIAN JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT RESEARCH Online Open Access publishing platform for Management Research

Challenges and opportunities for improving quality in teaching and learning at higher educational institution

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work