The site explains why Open Access publishing is beneficial to academic researchers, teachers and students, and how to find appropriate avenues for publishing your academic work.

The project was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). These are all USA-based organisations.

Given the Information Futures Commission’s focus on teaching and learning in the Digital Age, I would like to propose that the Project Team include the paper entitled “Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity” as a recommended resource for academic staff.

This paper has recently been published by Dr Kathleen Gray, Dr Celia Thompson (University of Melbourne), Dr Rosemary Clerehan and Dr Judithe Sheard (Monash University) and Dr Margaret Hamilton (RMIT University),in the Internet and Higher Education journal (2008).

It raises questions concerning academic integrity in relation to current referencing and citation style guides and argues that these guides are inadequate to the task. We suggest that traditional concepts of authorship need to be reformed in order to accommodate the collaborative and multi-voiced dimensions of authorship afforded by Web 2.0 authoring tools such as wikis, blogs and social bookmarking.

Please see below for the abstract. The full paper is available.

Abstract:

Web 2.0 authoring forms such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, and audio and video podcasting pose a challenge to academic authorship traditions. This paper reviews the provisions made in major academic referencing and citation style guides for acknowledging content and ideas that may be published using these new web authoring forms. It offers an overview of features of web 2.0 authoring forms and explores concepts of authoring that can help academics to understand the challenges of working with these forms. It provides examples of referencing and citation in scholarly and scientific communication, and concludes that the conceptual basis of referencing and citation as expressed in current systems and standards needs reform in order to bring academic integrity to the use of these new forms of authorship.

Thanks, Celia :-)

The Library regularly collects statistics about its activities. For example, we know how many items are checked out every year from the Legal Resource Centre – click the image below to see a larger version of the graph.

Another example: we know that in the week ending 4 August 2006 library staff received 197 telephone enquiries, of which 55 per cent were about loans or other library-related topics.

See more circulation statistics (intranet web page — UniMelb access only).

Some statistics are difficult to collect. We know how many people come into our 19 library branches each year. It’s harder to estimate how many of those people are students or staff of this University, and how many are either from other institutions or have no connection with the University of Melbourne (except that they wanted to use our library :-)

Because we want to make well-informed decisions, the Information Futures Commission will be looking for more evidence of this type — the more the merrier! We’ll also be looking for data about staff and student use of IT for scholarly activities.

So… over to you. What specific questions should we be trying to answer with statistical evidence?

Instead of selling their elegant innovation to a pharmaceutical company, they have published their method in an Open Access refereed journal called “Public Library of Science: Neglected Tropical Diseases.” Articles in this journal have a Creative Commons licence that allows free downloading, adaptation and sharing of their content provided the authors receive attribution.

Here is the paper:

• Njiru ZK, Mikosza ASJ, Armstrong T, Enyaru JC, Ndung’u JM, et al. (2008) Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) Method for Rapid Detection of Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 2(2): e147.

See also:

• Simarro PP, Jannin J, Cattand P (2008) Eliminating Human African Trypanosomiasis: Where Do We Stand and What Comes Next. PLoS Med 5(2): e55 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050055

In the Murdoch case, the ‘public good’ factor is a clear winner in the debate over whether to provide open access to a university’s research output: people in poor and developing countries need low-cost medical and health care, particularly for endemic diseases that don’t occur as widely in developed countries (trypanosomiasis is one; malaria is another). Publishing this particular research in a free, Open Access journal helps to remove economic barriers from potential users of the new technique (assuming that the researchers have not patented the technique itself).

Is the public good a sufficient reason for a university to release all of its innovations for general usage?

Should we seek to earn income from the inventions of our staff?

What about the inventions of students? (Sun Microsystems and the Google search engine both started as graduate student projects.)

In an era when universities are using multiple income streams to offset declining government/public funding, how do we decide when to commercialise and when to donate our intellectual products?

Note: This post was originally published on 6 March, then revised on 11 March. Thanks to Stephen Young for his off-line comments about the original version. As I understand it, Stephen was keen to draw a distinction between the copyright on the research paper and the ownership of intellectual property in the laboratory technique described in that paper. The copyright is covered by the Creative Commons licence; regardless of copyright in the paper, it may still be possible to patent the intellectual property.

EPIC was first released in 2005. It was made for the (fictional) Museum of Media History. It’s a timeline for the next decade, imagining what might happen to news media as the Internet became more ubiquitous. It questions the traditional notions of ‘authoritative information’ and the role of the Fourth Estate in civil society. This original video is now renamed EPIC 2014. The acronym stands for Evolving Personalized Information Construct.

Creators Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan blogged about EPIC at Poynter Online in July 2005.

The movie was released about 10 minutes[1] before podcasting burst[2] onto the interwebs. For bleeding-edge geeks, EPIC immediately lost some of its street cred.

Now a revised version of the movie is available, EPIC 2015, incorporating some of the podcasting, social networking, grid computing and other innovations that have emerged or matured in the last three years. Where Michael Wesch’s videos are optimistic about the future, EPIC strikes a more sombre tone.

Definitely worth a look, especially if you’re interested in scenario planning.

Notes:

[1] 10 Internet minutes, that is ;-) In the real world, it was about 3-6 months.

[2] When I say burst, I’m choosing the word carefully. You could almost hear the whooshing. On 28 September 2004 there were 526 Google results for “podcasts”, up from about 24 results just days earlier. On 1 October 2004 there were 2750 Google results for “podcasts”. By18 October 2004 there were more than 100,000 Google results for “podcasts”. From May 2005 to April 2006, the number of podcast feeds managed via Feedburner increased from 6000 to 45,000 — more than the number of radio stations worldwide. Feedburner said there were more than 1.6 million subscribers to its podcast feeds. In mid-2007, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation alone was serving up 5 million audio and video downloads per month.

When you participate in such online communities, you give up some of your right to privacy and some aspects of control over the intellectual property you create in that environment. In return, the service provider makes money by selling advertising or other spin-off goods and services that are targeted to fit (their idea of) your particular interests and desires. Somebody’s making money from this deal, and it probably is not you.

So why do we cheerfully hand over our private information? Fister observes:

“Here’s the interesting paradox: The only way to increase the intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and recognized by others. Trading a little personal information for a public platform, whether for personal expression or self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.”

Fister draws a parallel with the Open Access movement, which seeks to make academic publications (journal articles, books etc) freely available online.

The “privately owned digital public sphere is a fertile if febrile commons where millions of people play out their identities and share ideas… Scholars and librarians champion the value of free and open exchange of ideas for the public good. It’s time to take those values beyond the academy. If we made an effort to help the public understand the tradeoffs we make to be part of the digital social sphere, maybe we’d all think more critically about how our public identities are formed and exploited – for what they are worth.”

The award recognises “significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.”

Michael was a keynote speaker at the VALA 2008 conference in Melbourne earlier this month.

We at the Information Futures Commission were delighted to welcome Michael to the Melbourne University campus, where he delivered the second Information Futures Forum lecture for 2008 — a video of Michael’s presentation is available online.

Critiquing the study this week, Steven Johnson observes that the USA’s current crop of 9-year-olds are more proficient readers than were the equivalent age group in 1999. (thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link)

Johnson points to a bias for print-based literacy in the NEA report:

Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink? According to the NEA you’re not, because in almost every study it cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data. This is a preposterous omission, because of course the single most dramatic change in media habits over the past decade is the huge spike in internet activity.

People who participate in the online world are both reading and writing, says Johnson: the only reason we don’t know about the literacy skills of ‘digital natives’ is that we haven’t yet measured them.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available online for a fee, and republished with free access by The Australian), Matthew Kirschenbaum observes that the NEA report focuses on a single model of reading that is appropriate to understanding a 19th century novel but may not apply in other situations or to other texts.

The kind of reading we do online “values comparison and cross-checking as much as focus and immersion: lateral reading as much as reading for depth,” says Kirschenbaum.

Kirschenbaum suggests the NEA’s emphasis on ‘voluntary reading’ is misplaced: “How many of us who count ourselves as avid readers are able to maintain clear boundaries between work and leisure any more?” Reading is reading is reading.

The NEA report tends to treat ‘the computer’ as the venue for a single type of reading activity, says Kirschenbaum. He suggests that “we are not going to talk responsibly or well about what it means to read online until we stop conflating genre with value… There is a spectrum of writing online, just as there is a spectrum of reading, and more and more applications blur the line between the two.”

For higher education institutions, this new emphasis on ‘lateral’ literacy raises questions about the kinds of learning environments and skills-development services we offer to students and academic staff.

How will we help people to develop the information literacy skills they require to be adept at learning in a range of ways, including online and through virtual environments?

What technologies must we make available to students in our learning spaces? In our teaching spaces? How do we support a diverse student body who come to us with different skills and differing levels of access to emerging technologies?

How do we ensure that scholarly information is accessible to people with disabilities?

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Notes

Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: how popular culture is making us smarter.

Matthew G Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland at College Park.

This month, they passed the million mark. The commemorative web page provides information about the digitisation project:

• a PDF showing the steps involved in digitising a book
• presentation slides explaining the size and shape of the digitisation project
• photos of the library staff who are involved in the project
• a description of the millionth book, which is about 19th century astronomer Maria Mitchell
• links to the online catalogue and the project web site

The digitisation effort is part of a partnership between Google Book Search and several leading university libraries.

1. Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
2. Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
3. Rich files: Number of PDF, Postscript, Word and Powerpoint documents published, based on results from the four search engines.
4. Scholar: Number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.

Based on this ranking, Melbourne University is 6th in Australia and 128th in the world for the online profile of its research output.

Restricting the comparison to institutional repositories, our ePrints repository ranks 157th in the world. (what is an institutional repository?)

Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

From the About Webometrics page:

The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community…

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Given our relatively low ranking, does Melbourne need to change its approach to making research output available online? How committed are we to making the outcomes of our research freely available?

What level of rigor, if any, do we wish to exert in verifying the quality of what is published on University servers?

What is our commitment to making the underlying research data accessible to support our research? Our teaching? Our knowledge transfer obligations? If the research data is of national or international significance, who will ensure its long-term preservation and access? How will this be funded?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these curly questions — just click the ‘comments’ link below and start typing!
(tip o’ the hat to Library Intelligencer for the Webometrics link, and to the Information Futures Commission project team for the list of questions)