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Medical librarians believe that it is necessary to build better mechanisms for information retrieval, due to the current bulk of unorganised information that is “searchable” but not easily “findable” in web 2.0. That is why we need web 3.0 – the semantic web. Information retrieval in web 3.0 should be based less on keywords than on intelligent ontological frameworks, such as Medline’s trusted MeSH vocabulary. Web 3.0 should help find information more effectively and cut through the information glut, creating new knowledge through semantic technologies. It should bring order to the 21st century web in the same way that Dr John Shaw Billings’s Index Medicus brought order to medical research back in the 19th century. Clinical knowledge: from access to action [editorial]. The Lancet 2008;371(9615):785. (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)60351-7) Harvard is making an institutional commitment to open-access publishing, and several leading universities are now preparing to follow its example. Traditional publishers responded to the research community’s interest in wider access to medical science with a strategy that is unlikely to send a positive signal to the medical research community, such as cost-cutting and job losses. Confronting a future in which the next 20 years may change more than the past 200, editors and publishers should instead join doctors in working to achieve the highest standards of health for the community. Esposito JJ. The nautilus: where – and how – OA will actually work. The Scientist 2007;21(11):52. (www.the-scientist.com/article/home/53781/) Discusses the new phase of the debate over open access to the scientific literature, listing pros and cons of open access within the landscape of scientific publishers. It presents scholarly communication as a the spiral of a nautilis, with the inner spiral representing the researcher’s intimate colleagues; the next spirals scientists in general, highly educated individuals, universities, policy-makers; on to the outer spirals, which represent the consumer media, whose task is to inform the general public. The article concludes by identifying a fundamental tension in scholarly communications today, between the innermost spiral of the nautilus, where peers communicate directly with peers, and the outer spirals. In this landscape OA advocates sit at the centre and attempt to take their model beyond the peers, and at the outer spirals traditional publishers attempt to extend their reach into the inner spirals. Johnson JM, Cano V. Electronic publishing in librarianship and information science in Latin America – a step towards development? Information Research 2008;13:1. (http://informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper331.html) Draws on the results of studies carried out between 2004 and 2007 as part of Project REVISTAS, supported by the European Commission’s ALFA Programme. Through a variety of methods and results, it points out the weaknesses of the printed scholarly publication process for library and information science. The emergence of electronic publication is identified and the potential it presents is discussed. If scholarly publication in this discipline within Latin America is to achieve its potential in the dissemination of research and in the education of students, the opportunities presented by electronic publication and archiving must be grasped, but the full benefits cannot be achieved without attention to the need for peer review and other quality control methods. This article also points out the major information networks of Latin America. Stringer MJ, Sales-Pardo M, Nunes Amaral LA. Effectiveness of journal ranking schemes as a tool for locating information. PLoS ONE 2008;3(2):e1683. (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001683) Electronic publishing, preprint archives, blogs, and wikis raise concerns among all stakeholders in the editorial chain about the relevance of traditional peer reviewed journals. These concerns are increased by the ability of search engines to identify and sort information. This article points out that the distribution of the number of citations to a paper published in a given journal in a specific year converges to a steady state after a journal-specific transient time, and demonstrates that in the steady state the logarithm of the number of citations has a journal-specific typical value. A model was developed to enable quantification of both the typical impact and the range of impacts of papers published in a journal. A journal-ranking scheme is proposed to maximize the efficiency of locating high impact research. © Copyright 2008 by European Association of Science Editors Top of Page |
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