Archive for October 2009
2009 State of the Blogosphere by Technorati
Some findings:
Who are the Bloggers?
- 72% of the respondents to this survey, hobbyists say that they blog for fun
- 75% of them blog to share their expertise, while 72% blog to attract new clients for their business
- The smallest cohort, representing just 4% of respondents, pros say they “blog full-time for a company or organization
- Only 3% of Bloggers themselves comment other blogs!
- Shortcut to: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009-int roduction/
Quote: “Any idiot can start a journal on the web”
No comment!
Alex Williamson, a former publishing director of the British Medical Journal, quoted in: Editor quits after journal accepts bogus science article, guardian.co.uk, 18 June, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/18/science-editor-resigns-hoax-article
What is the future role of InfoPros?
A French study shows that
Their increasing activities are linked to :
- watching functions (monitoring solutions, crawlers, etc.)
- Intranet-web sites development
- End-users training
- Projects management
- Knowledge Management
- Records Management, etc.
Decreasing functions are: search on behalf of end-users, physical
library management, etc.
In French:
http://www.archimag.com/fileadmin/archimag/images/Etudes/Marketing/Synth
ese_Et_nouveaux_horizons_repondants.pdf
ManyEyes: an amazing visualization tool
A wonderful vizualisation tool, provided at no charge (after
registration) by IBM.
Upload a data set(a text, Excel sheets, etc.) and it will give you
powerful graphs, tags clouds, world maps, etc.
It might help Researchers to read faster dozens of articles, to
interpretate raw datas, to edit wonderfull graph, to communicate
better…
Applications for bibliometrics are also numerous.
Be careful: everything you publish is visible by everyone on the Web!
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
Are Science web sites popular?
Not so much, apparently!!!
According Alexa Internet (combination of average daily visitors and pageviews each month):
- PubMed (incl. NIH) is the most popular science-related web sites, with a 404 th place
- ScienceDirect, the biggest ejournals platform: 1,147 th
- Nature.com, the most awarded scientific journal, is ranked 3,128 th!
- ScienceBogs, the largest conversation about science on the web, is ranked 4,908 th!
- INIST, the French Research body: 4,923 th
- Connotea, the historical social bookmarking: 6,679 th
- Web of Science (incl. ISI Knowledge): 14,882 th
- BioMedCentral, the major open access resource: 22,678 th
- Scopus, the largest bibliographical database: 25,187 th
- Scirus, the best search engine for science: 38,353 th
- BioMedExperts, SciTopics, NovoSeek, 2Collab, Research Blogging, etc. don’t appear on this database!!!
On 21rst of October 2009, Source: www.alexa.com
Web 2.0 fails to excite today’s researchers
An excellent article from David Stuart about low adoption of web 2.0 technologies by academics:
“It is hard to imagine a group more suited to the opportunities of Web 2.0 technologies than academics (…) Unfortunately there are few signs that academics are really embracing the new opportunities offered by Web 2.0.
Many academics’ idea of online collaboration is still emailing the findings they have arrived at independently to one another (…)
Despite all the innovation though, the embracement of new technologies is mostly underwhelming. Elsevier’s survey of academic faculty last year showed an expectation amongst the scientific community that social media will play an increasingly important role in the coming years. However, there seems to be a long way to go“
The indications are that, in general, academics are a rather conservative group who despite the potential benefits of new technologies are reluctant to risk the status quo” (…)
Although academics seem to want to benefit from open access, they do not want to have to go to the trouble of depositing their papers in repositories” (…)
“However, looking at a few of the many social networking sites you will quickly realise how small a proportion they actually are, with the same faces appearing on site after site“
The author explains also why big scientific publishers invested a few of these technologies: “New methods of publishing not only potentially threaten their current business model, but could potentially transform the very nature of the research process and the journal article“
Stuart, David. Web 2.0 fails to excite today’s researchers. Research Information, October/November 2009. pp. 16-17
Online:
http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=236
Real success for BioMedCentral
BMC, now owned by the commercial Springer, claims over 1,000,000
registered users.
The BioMed Central Online portfolio offers a rich and diverse range of
electronic products. With scientific and medical databases, review
journals and 202 peer-reviewed research journals, BioMed Central
publishes an extensive online platform of products for the biology and
medical research community
Researchers spend 10.7 hours per week
“Researchers spend 10.7 hours per week in 2009 finding information compared to 5.5 hours in 2006″
According an Outsell study: STM End-User Survey Part 1 – Scientists and Engineers:
http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/838
(reported by Elsevier Marketing into:
)
STM Publishing in 2009
Everything you must know about Science publishing is in the STM report 2009: the STM market figures, readers’ behaviors, new trends, web 2.0 impact, etc.
It is a follow up to the 2006 report, ‘Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments,’ ‘The STM Report’ collected the available evidence and provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication.
Ware, Mark and Mabe, Michael. The stm report : An overview of scientific and scholarly journals publishing. September 2009. Online:
http://www.stm-assoc.org/news.php?id=255&PHPSESSID=3c5575d0663c0e04a4600d7f04afe91f
Some facts and findings:
- The annual revenues generated from English-language STM journal publishing are estimated at about $8 billion in 2008, up by 6-7% compared to 2007.
- There were about 25,400 active scholarly peer-reviewed journals in early 2009, collectively publishing about 1.5 million articles a year.
- Although this report focuses primarily on journals, the ebook market is evolving and growing rapidly.
- Despite a transformation in the way journals are published, researchers’ core motivations for publishing appear largely unchanged, focused on funding and furthering the author’s career.
- Reading patterns are changing, however, with researchers reading more, averaging 270 articles per year, but spending less time per article, with reading times down from 45-50 minutes in the mid-1990s to just over 30 minutes. Access and navigation to articles is increasingly driven by search rather than browsing.
- The research community continues to see peer review as fundamental to scholarly communication and appears committed to it despite some perceived shortcomings. The typical reviewer spends 5 hours per review and reviews some 8 articles a year.
- The vast majority of STM journals are now available online, with 96% of STM.
- Social media and other “Web 2.0” tools have yet to make the impact on scholarly communication that they have done on the wider consumer web. Most researchers do not for instance read blogs regularly or make use of emerging social tools. This may be for a variety of reasons: a reluctance to introduce informal processes into the formal publication process; because the first wave of tools did not take sufficient account of the particular needs of researchers; a lack of incentives for researchers, including the lack of attribution for informal contributions; a lack of critical mass; and simply a lack to time to experiment with new media.
- There are between 3400 (according to the Open J-Gate directory) and 4300 (DOAJ) open access peer reviewed journals. It is estimated that about 2% of articles are published in full open access journals, another 5% in journals offering delayed open access within 12 months, and under 1% under the optional (hybrid) model.
