(emarketer.com): Social media marketing relies on sophisticated forms of word-of-mouth, a medium highly trusted by most consumers. But even social media users prefer face-to-face communication to give and receive information about products and services. A survey conducted by BIGresearch for the Retail Advertising&Marketing Association (RAMA) found that in-person communication was social media users' top impetus to start an online search for a specific item. Social media users were even more influenced by face-to-face word-of-mouth than average adults.
(publishersweekly.com): Penguin is launching a new imprint called Current that will publish science books for a general audience. Adrian Zackheim, president and publisher of Penguin's Portfolio and Sentinel imprints, will oversee Current. The new imprint will also rely on the existing editorial, marketing and publicity staff of Portfolio and Sentinel.
(aip.org): Corrosion (corrosion.aip.org), the flagship journal of NACE International, is now hosted on AIP's Scitation platform. NACE International is the leader in the corrosion engineering and science community, and is recognized around the world as the premier authority for corrosion control solutions. AIP has worked closely with NACE International to design a website that is consistent with, and accurately reflects the society's unique brand identity. A number of powerful product features will ensure that Corrosion remains a critical research tool for those in the corrosion engineering and science community. Users will find the journal's functionality greatly enhanced, enabled by an XML infrastructure that can turn granular markup into meaningful content services, reduce discovery time, connect similar concepts dynamically, and expose related content.
(ala.org): The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) has released the first of several policy briefs to be published in 2010 on the revolution in information technology and its implications for the future of libraries. The publication, titled Checking Out the Future: Perspectives from the Library Community on Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries, explores how many library professionals are recognizing the need to evolve during the digital revolution and are driving adaptations designed to ensure that libraries remain an integral part of our society's commitment to education, equity, and access to information.
(jiscinvolve.org): Yesterday the JISC Grant Funding Call 2/10 (Title: "Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research") was released on the JISC website. The two Strands in this Call are asking for separate sets of project bids. These two strands of projects will be separate in their project remits, however there is significance in our suggestion that the Web can and should act as the primary place where open content should reside. It is essential that both the process of deposit and then expose is as simple and as straightforward for the user as possible.
(bisg.org): The International ISBN Agency continues to recommend that publishers should assign ISBNs to each e-book format separately available. Publishers should supply their ISBNs to downstream intermediaries and channels if they are creating their own formats. There will, however, be instances of compressed supply chains where an e-book in a particular format is available exclusively through a single channel (e.g. Kindle). In those circumstances there is no requirement for an ISBN, unless the publisher needs it for control purposes. (A simple guiding principle is that a product needs a separate identifier if the supply chain needs to identify it separately).
(ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk): Currently there is limited knowledge of who is using Web 2.0 and for what purposes. Even less is known about why specific tools and services are chosen, especially in situations where JISC and institutionally-provided services are available. This survey has therefore focused on the current and active users of Web 2.0 tools and services in UK Higher Education institutions and identifying what they are using and why. Although mainstream use of Web 2.0 services is growing and will continue to grow over time, no specific predictions can be made regarding the rate of take-up. An increasing proportion of new entrants to HE and FE are already familiar with and using Web 2.0 services but this does not apply to everyone and there is a need to support a range of very varied learner backgrounds and expectations.
(papers.ssrn.com): The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would no longer be able to profit from reader charges. If these author publication fees would actually be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) - suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should probably be achieved by a change in law, for the "open access" movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
(oclc.org): This report examines the role of research libraries in research assessment regimes in five different countries and helps establish a new set of responsibilities that is emerging for research libraries. Commissioned by OCLC Research, the report was written by Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK library and scholarly publishing consultancy, after studying the role of research libraries in the higher education reserach assessment regimes in five countries.
(uic.edu): This paper examines the use of Web search engines by faculty and students to support learning, teaching, and research. We explore the academic tasks supported by search engine use to investigate if and how students and scholars vary in their use patterns. We also investigate the satisfaction levels with search outcomes and trust in search engines in supporting specific tasks.
(Openaccesscentral.com): This presentation, by Matthew Cockerill, Managing Director, BioMed Central, gives a summary of some of the many significant developments in Open Access over the last 12 months. This presentation was presented at the 2009 Online Information in London.
This presentation by Lee Rainai, Director - Pew Internet Project, Wisconsin Library Assiciation, covers the Pew Internet Project's latest findings and why they suggest that libraries can play a role in people's social networks in the future. Lee describes the reasons that people rely more and more on their social networks - using old and new technology - as they seek information, share ideas, learn, solve problems, and look for social support. He examines why the internet and cell phones have changed the way people construct and operate their social networks and why this opens new - sometimes "magical" - opportunities for librarians to do what they naturally do: act as "nodes" in people's networks.
Knowledge, as published through scientific literature, is the last step in a process originating from primary scientific data. These data are analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and the outcome of this process is published as a scientific article. Access to the original data as the foundation of knowledge has become an important issue throughout the world and different projects have started to find solutions. In this presentation Dr. Brase discusses the role that libraries can play in this new era of eScience. Dr. Jan Brase is with the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), and is coordinator for the DOI Registration Agency for research data sets - over 600 registered since 2005.
While today's digital data has the potential to transform our work and life, the challenges of managing it, retaining it, accessing it over the long term, using it, and sustaining it constitute some of the most difficult problems of our time. Solving these problems requires strategies that make sense from a technical, policy, regulatory, economic, security, and community perspective. This presentation by Francine Berman of San Diego Supercomputer Center, California, focusses on the opportunities presented by today's and tomorrow's deluge of data along with the challenges of creating useful information from this data accessible for the foreseeable future.
Open access combined with Web 2.0 networking tools is fast changing the traditional journals' functions and framework and the publishers' role. As content is more and more available online in digital repositories and on the web an integrated, interconnected, multidisciplinary information environment is evolving and Oldenburg's model disintegrates: the journal is no more the main referring unit of the scholarly output, as it used to be mainly for STM disciplines, but scholars attention is deeply concentrated on article level. New journal models are thus evolving. In the first part of this presentation authors discuss these new experimental journal models, i.e. - overlay journals - interjournals - different levels journals In the second part of the presentation authors drive readers' attention on the role commercial publishers could play in this digital seamless writing arena. According to the authors, publishers should concentrate much more on value-added services both for authors, readers and libraries, such as navigational services, discovery services, archiving and ex-post evaluation services.
