Have Life Science Researchers Removed Themselves from the Mainstream Library User Population?
A report Entitled Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: Case Studies of Researchers in the Life Sciences has been released by the British Library and the Research Information Network.The report was developed by capturing the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines. The study, undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants, concluded that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and da

A Need for University Branded URL Shortening Services?
Twitter users are quite familiar with URL shortening tools as a way to include web links within their 140 character limit. URL shorting is is the process of taking a long URL and turning it into, well, a short one. For example, instead of using the long URL of http://library.osu.edu/blogs/techtips/2009/09/21/techtips-augmented-reality/ one can use the shortened URL of http://tinyurl.com/ykdkmss. Shortened URLs are extremely useful in Internet conversations such as forum threads,IM chats, etc. They are also essential in communication chan

Ohio State President Calls for Tenure Changes
As the Chair of of OSU's University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Committee, I say Thank You! to President Gee.At his annual presidential address yesterday afternoon, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee thinks it's time for faculty members to be evaluated on the quality and impact of their work.New faculty members at Ohio State University Libraries enter as assistant professors and have six years to build up their record of scholarship, teaching and service. They receive performance evaluations every year, a fourth-year comprehensive review, and in their sixth year und

Process of Tenure and Promotion a Monster That Eats Its Young?
The approach that Kathleen Fitzpatrick has taken with her new book manuscript might be one possible path that the future of scholarly communications will take.Ms. Fitzpatrick has made the manuscript of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy available online for open peer review. The 'book' is a part of Media Commons Press, who's tag line is "open scholarship in open formats."While the plan is for the manuscript to go through the traditional blind peer-review process, and is forthcoming

Peer Reviewers Get Worse, Not Better, Over Time
Almost all peer reviewers get worse, not better, over time.So suggests a study presented at the Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver, Canada, and reported by Nicola Jones in the October 2009 issue of Nature. In his paper "The Natural History of Peer Reviewers: The Decay of Quality" Michael Callaham, editor-in-chief of the Annal