Social justice and an information democracy with free and open source software

This paper includes some thoughts on the implications of proprietary software versus free and open source software with regards to social justice, capital, and notions of an information society versus an information democracy. It outlines what free and open source software is and why it is important for social justice, and it offers three cases that highlight two salient themes. This includes a case about preference ordering and decision-making and two cases about knowing and knowledge

Google Scholar and free or open access scholarly content: impact on academic libraries

This poster was presented at the 2013 Association for Library and Information Science Education conference in Seattle, Washington.An updated version of this poster can be found in the file GoogleScholarFreeOpenAccessCorrected.This study examines the bibliographic references that users of a social computing web application collect in order to measure the probability of the use of non-library electronic discovery services and open access content. The purpose is to understand the strategic future of academic libraries

Characteristics of a Megajournal: A Bibliometric Case Study

The term megajournal is used to describe publication platforms, like PLOS ONE, that claim to incorporate peer review processes and web technologies that allow fast review and publishing. These platforms also publish without the constraints of periodic issues and instead publish daily. We conducted a yearlong bibliometric profile of a sample of articles published in the first several months after the launch of PeerJ, a peer reviewed, open access publishing platform in the medical and biological sciences. The profile included a study of author characteristics, peer review characteristics, usage and social metrics, and a citation analysis. We found that about 43% of the articles are collaborated on by authors from different nations. Publication delay averaged 68 days, based on the median. Almost 74% of the articles were coauthored by males and females, but less than a third were first authored by females. Usage and social metrics tended to be high after publication but declined sharply over the course of a year. Citations increased as social metrics declined. Google Scholar and Scopus citation counts were highly correlated after the first year of data collection (Spearman rho = 0.86). An analysis of reference lists indicated that articles tended to include unique journal titles. The purpose of the study is not to generalize to other journals but to chart the origin of PeerJ in order to compare to future analyses of other megajournals, which may play increasingly substantial roles in science communication

Academic Libraries and Automation: A Historical Reflection on Ralph Halsted Parker

This paper provides a historical account of Ralph Halsted Parker and his work to automate libraries in the early to middle parts of the twentieth century. One of Parker’s motivations to automate stemmed from a desire to professionalize academic librarianship, and this is evident in his administration as library director at the University of Missouri. Importantly, the motivation implies a simple means of judging the critical use of technology: that any substantive technology should be evaluated by how well it benefits librarians. Parker’s additional contributions included consulting and coauthoring, with Frederick G. Kilgour, the report that led to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the world’s largest bibliographic database

Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies

With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively

Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies

With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively

Academic Libraries and Automation: A Historical Reflection on Ralph Halsted Parker

This paper provides a historical account of Ralph Halsted Parker and his work to automate libraries in the early to middle parts of the twentieth century. One of Parker’s motivations to automate stemmed from a desire to professionalize academic librarianship, and this is evident in his administration as library director at the University of Missouri. Importantly, the motivation implies a simple means of judging the critical use of technology: that any substantive technology should be evaluated by how well it benefits librarians. Parker’s additional contributions included consulting and coauthoring, with Frederick G. Kilgour, the report that led to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the world’s largest bibliographic database

Functional Search Problems among MEDLINE Databases

The National Library of Medicine\u27s (NLM) MEDLINE database is the most important bibliographic database in the bio and related sciences. MEDLINE is freely accessible via the PubMed web interface, but NLM also licenses MEDLINE data to information service providers including EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Ovid, and Web of Science. The talk covers a longitudinal study of these five MEDLINE-based bibliographic database platforms. The goal of the study is to identify where and how these platforms differ when searched with semantically and logically equivalent search queries. The results have implications for literature searches, including systematic reviews

An Analysis of Bibliographic References Collected by a Social Computing Group

This research presents an analysis of references collected by an established group of users who share a common interest on a social computing website. The purpose is to demonstrate how social computing functions as an instrument for measuring scholarly communication. The goal is twofold: to reveal how an analysis of the references collected by interested users compares to and complements citation studies

The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma in Open Science

A talk about the role that knowledge management (and sub areas) might play in open science. The open science movement has the goal of making transparent as much of the scientific process as is possible. This entails making publicly available (open source, access, etc.) the parts of the scientific workflow, such as the data, the software code, the manuscripts, that are used or generated in the process of doing research. However, Michael Polanyi\u27s theory of tacit knowledge raises a dilemma that knowledge management researchers might be able to address. Specifically, if we accept the theory of tacit knowledge, the idea that we can know more than we can tell, is generally true, and if we accept that it is true for scientists, then this entails that scientists rely on a knowledge of science in their scientific pursuits that cannot be codified. By implication, this suggests that there is something unscientific about doing science itself and that not all science can be opened