David Stern, now at Illinois State University after scientific information positions at Yale and Brown, presents a modified or partial peer review model (“post e-print”) in an SLA professional development presentation, “Alternatives to journal subscriptions,” a detailed analysis of alternative journal subscription models. After considering the finer pricing points of editing peer review, discovery, and subscriptions (useful to libraries considering their own e-journal platform efforts), he proposes a moderation model (moderated peer review) where junk is filtered out, submissions are placed in an open repository, and needed level of peer review services are determined. Such moderation would be a volunteer activity.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers has just released the winning entries from their recent video competition. The clips (only a few minutes long) range from amusing to staid, but avoid delicately the obvious answer, “Make money!” Open Access publishers probably wouldn’t have displayed production values any skimpier. For-profit publishers do put money into glitz, but they apply more of their business acumen (also not mentioned in the videos) to direct resources to classier displays in conference exhibit areas.
Jer Thorp, Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times, develops data visualizations answering humanistic questions (modeling sharing, questions during conversations, looking for narrative structures, laying out names in a 9/11 memorial according to relationships among the people). By creating “human contexts” for primitive data points (latitude and longitude of landing in New York for the first time, where one met one’s girlfriend, etc.), he attempts to bring more participants into “dialogs” about the data points (or chains of events or consequences), which, by widening the scope of additional viewpoints, can enhance creativity or at least address needs or mitigate hazards (by giving data stories, or creating empathy). In a TED Talk, he invokes the role of artists and poets to work at the convergence of science, art, and design, add meanings and promote a deeper relation between humans and data. OpenPaths, a site for uploading and sharing (thus “owning”) one’s own location data, is an example.
An 8 1/2 minute no-nonsense summary of the salient features of Open Access, illustrated with characters from the strip.
Google Analytics less useful
According to a 16 November 2012 story in econtentmag, Google started encrypting transactions from signed-in users in SSL, so “organic search” queries can’t be captured.
The problem may be greater for commercial entities concerned with “search engine optimization (SEO),” i.e., manipulating characteristics of different search services so that a page’s meta tags, header, and other such ranking features to get higher placement on results pages or otherwise drive searchers to a “conversion” (viewer decides to buy something on the page and thus transmutes into a customer). As the article says, “The change to SSL has also made it impossible to deliver to targeted landing pages based on organic keyword searches. But Google still allows advertisers to see data related to paid search terms ‘to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.’ In other words, Google wants you to fork over some cash.”
This is more of a lesson possibly to be inferred from the commercial world to academic authors who don’t usually try to increase readership by such devious means–and whose pages are less likely to have some of the more sophisticated features that a commercial page uses to shape the “user experience.” But it is worth noting, just to keep up with what’s going on, and possibly available, in the field of persuasive Web page design.