RE: Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

["Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@uncc.edu>]

Ease of use I would argue is at least as important as quality of 
publication.

I suspect we've seen this in some of our databases--where we know 
quality has been problematic for particular publishers still we 
are seeing important levels of usage. I'm not sure marketing has 
much to do with it either.

Some publishers with negative public information concerning their 
products are doing quite well in the usage arena. And if their 
platforms go down, we get plenty of complaints. I'm sure 
librarians on the list can mention title and verse of this 
phenomena.

If it's not quality of publication or marketing, what drives 
usage? I suspect its ease of use. Those sites that have put money 
into easily navigable access get more use per article available 
than other sites is my guess. Content is important too, but 
quality, I'm no longer sure of. I used to believe that all we 
needed in order to be successful as librarians was quality 
decision making about content.

I think faculty are susceptible to ease of use as a catalyst for 
use. We know students take that route, I think faculty do too.

I'm not so sure anymore that quality will out.

Chuck Hamaker
UNC Charlotte, Atkins Library



-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J.
Esposito
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2008 8:26 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and
Scholarship

People will have different views of this study, but mine is, Why 
is this news?  The Long Tail of mythology cannot hope to compete 
with the Short Head of the marketplace.

Thus the critical point:  To raise the impact factors for 
research *and any other media* is not a matter of online vs. 
print or open access vs. toll-access, but about marketing vs. 
marketing:  a competition for the attention of the targeted user 
base.  In such competition, there are winners and losers, as 
attention is not distibuted equally across all members of a set.

One implication of this is that anyone involved with the 
dissemination of scholarly information is going to have to make 
bigger and bigger investments in the technologies that enable 
Internet marketing.  We have seen champions of low-cost 
technological solutions argure their case on this list.  I don't 
think they will be with us very long.

Authors publish with the services that give them broadest 
distribution. Currently that primarily means the most prestigious 
toll-access journals, but if open access journals can demonstrate 
that they do a better job, toll-access publications will decline 
in importantce.

The best strategy for any publisher, traditional or open access, 
is deep *and ongoing* investments in technology designed to 
increase the discoverability and usability (which leads to 
further discoverability) of published materials.  Simply putting 
an article up on a Web site and praying that Google will find it 
isn't going to cut it.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@uncc.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 7:29 PM
Subject: Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and
Scholarship

> Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship
> James A. Evans
> Science 18 July 2008:
> Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
> DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473
>
> "Online journals promise to serve more information to more
> dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and
> recalled. But because they are used differently than
> print-scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and
> follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse-electronically
> available journals may portend an ironic change for science.
> Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to
> 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as
> more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended
> to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and
> more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The
> forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists
> and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present
> scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following
> hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing
> opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range
> of findings and ideas built upon."
>
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;321/5887/395