This Blog is Splitting Into Two

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:14:07 -0500

On this blog, Metadata, I’ll continue to post about my main research interest, metadata.

I have a new blog where I’ll post about scholarly open-access publishing. It is called Scholarly Open Access.

It is located at http://scholarlyoa.com/

I invite you to visit the new site and leave comments.

—Jeffrey Beall

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The Story of Tahira Mughal, Assistant Professor of Botany at the Lahore College for Women University

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:48:47 -0500

The open-access movement has freed up scholarly communication. One example of this new freedom is Dr. Tahira Azziz Mughal, a young and prolific Pakistani woman researcher. She is a rising star of open access, for all of the peer-reviewed articles she has published since starting on tenure track have appeared in open-access journals.

In fact, all of her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Pharmacy, a journal published by the Intellectual Consortium of Drug Discovery & Technology Development, Inc. in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Begun in 2009, the journal is open access and does not charge author fees, making it a platinum, open access journal. Dr Mughal, rather amazingly, has published twelve articles in the journal, the first appearing in volume 1, issue one. She is the first author on five of her articles in the Journal of Applied Pharmacy and, along with her co-authors, has three articles published in a single issue, volume 2, issue 1.

The only problem is that many of the passages that appear in Dr. Mughal’s work appeared previously in other scholarly articles. Most all of Tahira Mughal’s articles contain passages, some long, from earlier publications written by others, without attribution. I include an example below. The text from the abstract of the first article matches the text in the introduction of Dr. Mughal and her co-authors’ article:

What’s going on here is this. Unlike other gold, open-access journals, the Journal of Applied Pharmacy is not a money-making venture. Instead, it is a bogus journal set up to help Pakistani scholars get the required credits to get tenure and other recognition from the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. They need publications in peer-reviewed, recognized foreign journals, and some Pakistani expatriates in Saskatoon have created the journal just for this purpose.

In her article above, Dr. Mughal concludes by saying, “These plants have anti-fungal potential. These plants are safe and have no lethality” (p. 293).

Should we believe her?

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Green to Gold: An Open Access Bait and Switch: A Case Report

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:06:24 -0500

A couple of scholars from South Asia contacted me recently to report a bait-and-switch involving the scholarly open-access Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries, based at the King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Science in Saudi Arabia.

The journal states that its 2008 impact factor was 0.43. I am unable to confirm this, as the Web of Knowledge database my library subscribes to only covers 2009 and 2010. I cannot find the title listed in Thomson Reuters “Master Journal List,” a register the company maintains on the journals it monitors.

The authors submitted an article, and then received a letter asking for US $300 to “improve” the journal’s services. The journal’s website makes no mention of any fee. It presents itself as a green (all expenses paid by the publisher) open-access journal.

One of the authors stated that they are from a developing country and unable to pay the author fee as their research is unfunded, and the fee for them is extremely high.

I have copied in below the letter the journal sent to the paper’s authors. Upon request of the authors, I have removed all identifying information.

Dear XXXXXXXXXX,

Please be informed that your paper “XXXXXXX “XXXXXXXXX CC XXXXXXXXXX” is already under review. In line with this we will provide you the review result on or before January 2, 2012.

Due to the rising number of submissions and workloads we are trying to improve the efficiency and speed-up the paper review of our journal. We are charging $300 USD fee for each ACCEPTED submission to the journal. All funds received will be used to improve JHIDC services and pay for our Administrative Assistants. We look forward to your help and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Mowafa Househ, PhD

Editor-in-Chief

Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries (www.jhidc.org)

househmo@ngha.med.sa

Ali Nasser Al-Kinani, PhD

Associate Editor

Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries (www.jhidc.org)

kinania@ngha.med.sa

This type of chicanery really gives open access a bad name. I am very suspicious of this journal both for this bait-and-switch tactic and for the apparent misrepresentation of its impact factor.

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Description of an Open-Access Scam

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:49:04 -0500

There is an academic in Pakistan who is taking an activist role in addressing the problem of faculty stuffing their CVs by publishing in journals owned by predatory open-access publishers.

His name is Q. Isa Daudpota and he works at Air University in Islamabad. Recently, he had a short article published in Dawn.com, a Pakistan-based news website.

His article describes how authors have corruptly published in the African Journal of Business Management, one of the titles published by Nigeria-based AcademicJournals.

Mr. Daudpota describes one of the abuses that take place with this journal:

This is how the most popular business journal works among Pakistani academics. Its reviewers are recommended by authors. It does not check the relationship between the reviewers and the authors, nor verify the reputation of the reviewer. If submitting a paper you can create a fake email, nominate a professor X who does not exist, and use the email address you created, where the paper is sent for reviewing, if at all. The journal gets USD 500 for an ‘accepted’ paper.

This is an example of a mutually-beneficial scam that involves both the scholarly author and the scholarly publisher. The author gets an article published without any peer-review, and the publisher pockets the $500 fee.

The entire open-access scholarly publication model is being corrupted. There is an inherent conflict-of-interest in the author-pays model of scholarly publishing. The more articles a publisher accepts, the more money it makes in author fees.

Librarians need to be aware of this and similar open-access scams and to take action to expose them. Simply promoting open-access is no longer acceptable. We must collaboratively expose and eliminate the open-access abuses that increasingly occurring.

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Is Index Copernicus a Scam?

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:15:09 -0500

As I review scholarly open-access publishers, I note that many of them boast that they are “indexed” in Index Copernicus.

Index Copernicus is a Poland-based provider of services to scholarly publishers, institutions and to scientists.

Its website is brief, but it states that it offers a subscription-based Facebook-type of networking service for scientists.

For institutions, it offers a project management service.

The largest and most popular part of IC is its journal list and rankings. The page offers a “Journals master list” that is just a large list of journals. If you’re a publisher, it’s easy to get your journals included in the list, and there is a prominent link for doing that. The site also offers an article search, but its content appears to merely be a dump from PubMed.

Similarly, the site also offers a list of publishers. This is where it gets interesting. It has a link to the “Top 20 publishers.” Several warning bells sounded to me when I saw this list.

First, the number two publisher is listed as Haworth Press. Interestingly, that publisher was sold to Routledge in 2007, with all its titles being rebranded as Routledge or Taylor & Francis journals. How is a publisher that hasn’t existed for four years able to make number two on this list?

Second, I noticed that a publisher I recently classified as a predatory publisher, OMICS Publishing Group, is listed at number nine on the top publishers list, ahead of Elsevier (no. 13) and Springer (no. 18).

Also, there’s a bunch of publishers in the top 20 that I have never heard of, including Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Bioinfo Publications. The site lists an “evaluation methodology,” but it makes little sense, especially when a publisher that began operations in 2009 (OMICS) is two years later listed as one of the world’s top scholarly publishers.

I also noticed that several Polish publishing houses made the top-20 list.

There is clearly something wrong with this list and so it seems with Index Copernicus.

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Definition: Citation cartel

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:49:12 -0500

I was looking for a formal definition of the term “citation cartel” and was unable to find one. I decided then to create one:

Citation cartel

A group of scholarly authors who agree on particular scientific or research methods, definitions, or conclusions and who only cite each other or other authors in agreement with them and who neglect to cite authors who disagree with the group’s preferred methods, definitions, or conclusions.

I’m hoping for feedback on this definition. Is it accurate, complete?

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Untitled

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:32:06 -0500

Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers

by Jeffrey Beall

2012 Edition

[Link to this document in PDF format]

Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.

An asterisk (*) indicates that the publisher is appearing on this list for the first time.

Academic Journals

This bogus, Nigeria-based publisher has been around for years, and continues to increase its journal fleet of over one hundred titles from all areas of study. Seeking legitimacy, it falsely associates itself with authentic organizations and conferences.

Academic Journals, Inc.

One of several Faisalabad, Pakistan-based publishers (likely one outfit with several brands), this publisher claims to be headquartered in New York. Its tag line is “Converting research into knowledge,” but it ought to say, “Converting research into cash” (for the publisher).

Academic Research Publishing Agency*

This publisher, caught here in its formative stage, only has two titles. The main page invites proposals for new journal titles. Full of contradictions, this site is confusing. Its content appears to be open access, but it lists a subscription fee of $400 per year. On one of its editorial board pages it says, “Elite panel members have a decision weight equivalent of two referees,” so if you know one of these elite members, you’re in luck.

ANSINetwork

Another of the Faisalabad, Pakistan-based brands of open-access journals, this one ironically describes itself saying “Asian Network for Scientific Information is a leading scientific publisher and pinior [sic] in electronic publication in Asia.” I think they mean “pioneer.” This typo is but one example of the errors and unprofessionalism this publisher presents to the world with each page view.

Bentham Open

Among the first, large-scale gold OA publishers, Bentham Open continues to expand its fleet of journals, now numbering over 230. Bentham essentially operates as a scholarly vanity press.

Center for Promoting Ideas*

A new publisher with a ridiculous name, this operation is known to list scholars on its journals’ editorial boards without their knowledge or permission.

David Publishing*

Although this publisher purports to be headquartered in Libertyville, Illinois, United States, it actually appears to operate out of China. The home page shows a view of the Libertyville Industrial Park, the supposed home of the operation, as if to prove it operates in the U.S.

Dove Press

This New Zealand-based medical publisher boasts high-quality appearing journals and articles, yet it demands a very high author fee for publishing articles. Its fleet of journals is large, bringing into question how it can properly fulfill its promise to quickly deliver an acceptance decision on submitted articles.

GlobalOpenJournals.org*

Late to the party, this publisher currently has nine titles, but I fully expect it to expand its fleet. The site says that all of its journals will publish their inaugural issues in July, 2011, but as of this writing (late November, 2011) all remain devoid of content.

Insight Knowledge

This publisher purports to be headquartered in the U.K. with offices in North America and Singapore, but it really is a storefront type operation based out of Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Institute of Advanced Scientific Research*

This bogus publisher of 12 journal titles says it’s headquartered in Irvine, California. Its fleet of journal titles all begin with “Journal of Advanced Research in …” The domain name registration does show an Irvine address, but at an apartment. Only a few of the titles have any content, but to view what little content there is, one must register with the site and agree to its terms and conditions, which I refused to do. Is a publication still considered open access when the hosting site requires registration? An organization that self-identifies as an institute when it is really just a money-making scheme is fraudulent.

InTech Open Access Publisher*

The subject of much recent debate, this Croatia-based publisher looks and acts like an innovative, scholarly publisher. However, looking under the clever disguise reveals only a sophisticated vanity press, an enterprise where anybody can, for a price, get their work published in a journal or as a monograph.

International Digital Organization for Scientific Information*

I only recently was alerted to this open-access publisher. Its fleet has 82 journal titles, including — perhaps appropriately — the “International Journal of Nuts and Related Sciences.” Based apparently in Dubai, the “instructions for authors” page warns, “After Acceptance authors have to pay the processing handling charges,” but the charges aren’t listed. More information may be available from an unnamed editor at idosi_editor@yahoo.com.

International Research Journals

Another Nigeria-based operation, this publisher is notable (in a negative way) for its interesting journal issue covers (most are created from pirated photographs), and for the Gmail addresses its employees all use. The absurd banner on its main page shows a picture of part of a duckling swimming in a lake.

Internet Scientific Publications

If you love advertising, you’ll love this site, for its main purpose is to make money from click-through ads. A one-man operation based out of Texas, its journal titles all begin with the phrase, “The Internet Journal of …” It claims to be the largest independent, online medical publisher, but that claim conveniently ignores article quality, which is quite low.

Knowledgia Scientific (formerly Knowledgia Review)

Another Pakistan-based publisher (with some possible ties to Malaysia), this firm has around a dozen titles, but some have very little content. Also, some of its journals lack editors and list only a few people on their editorial boards. Currently, this publisher’s website claims the firm is waiving all author fees, but I remain suspicious. Are there hidden charges? The lack of content, skipped volume numbers, and the waiving of author fees are indicators of a publisher that is failing.

Libertas Academia

The tag line under the name on this publisher’s page is “Freedom to research.” It might better say “Freedom to be ripped off.” Based in New Zealand, this medical and scientific publisher boasts about the number of page views and downloads the articles in its eighty journals have had. Its author fees are high.

Medwell Journals

Another Pakistan-based outfit, this one makes its 34 journals open access but also offers print subscriptions, if you desire to pay for them. A slick operation with an online manuscript submission system, this publisher has been successful at attracting submissions. It’s “contact us” page only yields a form, and no contact or geographical information is given. Always be wary of open-access publishers that give less than full contact information, including location, telephone numbers, email addresses, etc. At the same time, be aware that many publishers misrepresent their true business locations.

OMICS Publishing Group

This publisher’s name plays off the terms “genomics” and “proteomics.” It hosts about 200 journal titles, many lacking any articles. As a side business, the publisher also organizes and hosts conferences. The contact page lists offices in the United States, Australia, and India. Its pages have Facebook “LIKE” buttons and its home page falsely claims an association with EBSCO Publishing and with other publishers and organizations.

ScienceHuβ *

This new publisher of five journals purports to be from “P.O. Box 3423, CT, 06460, United States of America” and cleverly uses the Greek letter β (beta) to indicate the English letter b in its title. A check of the domain name registration does indicate a Milford, Connecticut address. Still, the unidiomatic use of English throughout the site points to a non-U.S. operation: “Call for the papers,” “Instructions for the authors,” etc. Many of the papers deal with Nigeria, so it’s likely this publisher is yet another Nigeria scam.

Science Publications

This publisher has a fleet of 28 journals, and most of their titles begin with the phrase, “American Journal of …” Its “contact us” page is merely a web form, and no contact or geographical information is given. The journal titles lead one to believe the publisher is North America-based, but it could be from almost anywhere, and in fact is likely not from North America.

ScienceDomain International*

This publisher’s fleet of 18 journals all try to show legitimacy by having titles that begin with “American” or “British” or “International.” Any journal that begins with these terms must be respected, right? The “contact us” page is chiefly a web form, but the site does list three offices, one in the U.K., one in the U.S., and one in India. The site uses the “pool reviewers” method of peer review. Although the journals do have nominal editorial boards, there is really just one big editorial board for all the publisher’s journals and reviewers are supposedly selected from that big list to review each submission. Looking at individual articles, I notice that the period between submission and acceptance is generally two weeks, an indication of bogus or nonexistent peer review.

Scientific Journals International

This Saint Cloud, Minnesota-based publisher is essentially a one-man operation that employs many non-standard publishing practices. For example, the entire site has an ISSN number, and the large editorial boards are organized not by journal but by broad discipline. Also, individual journals lack editors in chief. It was reported earlier this year that the entire operation is up for sale.

Scientific Research Publishing

This publisher, like the Institute of Advanced Scientific Research, claims to be based in Irvine, California (it lists a PO box number and an email address, but no telephone number). It has over one hundred journal titles, most having started publication in 2009, and has managed to attract numerous article submissions. This high number may be because of the publisher’s relatively low author fees: $300 for the first ten pages, and $50 for each additional page, a policy that also encourages shorter papers. The journals each list large editorial boards, with members from all over the world, especially China. Indeed, the pricelist (for those desiring hardcopies of the journals), lists the prices in both U.S. and Chinese currency. This publisher also publishes books and conference proceedings. I found its servers to suffer from a slow response time.

Recommendation: Do not do business with the above publishers, including submitting article manuscripts, serving on editorial boards, buying advertising, etc. There are numerous traditional, legitimate journals that will publish your quality work for free, including many legitimate, open-access publishers.

If you are involved in any form of scholarly evaluation such as, hiring, tenure / promotion review, or grant funding, be skeptical of articles published by any of these publishers listed above. Reading a list of publications or a vita, it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate journals from the illegitimate ones. One of the tricks the sham publishers use is to assign authentic-sounding and appearing titles to their journals. The presence of these bogus publishers has changed the task of scholarly evaluation, which now needs a keener eye to discern articles published in fraudulent journals.

Watchlist: We do not consider the following publishers to be predatory, open-access publishers, but they may show some characteristics of them, and we are closely monitoring them.

Hindawi

Based in Cairo, Egypt, this publisher is now on its own after its collaboration with the publisher Sage ended in 2011. This publisher has way too many journals than can be properly handled by one publisher, I think, yet supporters like ITHAKA boast that the prevailing low wages in Egypt, as well as the country’s large college-educated, underemployed workforce, allow the company to hire sufficient staff to get the job done. Still, this publisher continues to release new fleet startups of journals, each group having titles with phrases in common: Advances in … (31 titles) and Case Reports in … (32 titles). It appears that Hindawi wants to strategically dominate the open-access market by having the largest open-access journal portfolio.

MedKnow Publications

This publisher was on the main list last year. It is the publisher for many well-respected Indian professional societies and is disseminating abundant, high-quality research. However, its business model is vague and unproven: it provides free HTML versions of articles but charges for the PDF version. Also, it needs to improve its web presence. Many of its journal websites referred to the publisher as a publisher of “Sports, technology, and medicine” (STM) journals, instead of “Science, technology, and medicine,” the correct term.

PAGEPress

This Italian publisher has some of the qualities of a legitimate publisher and some of a predatory one. It has about fifty journal titles, some with intriguing names like Wine Studies and Antiqua. On the other hand, visitors to the publisher’s website will encounter sloppy housekeeping in the form of dead links, and a prominent link to PayPal on every journal’s home page, supposedly for the author fees but giving the publisher’s real motive away. The publisher claims its content is “indexed” in SherpaRomeo, but that isn’t an indexing service. PAGEPress needs to clean up its act.

Versita Open

Based in Poland (with a contact address in London, U.K.), this publisher claims to be the second-largest open-access publisher in the world, with over 200 open-access journals in its fleet. Versita Open publishes some of its titles on behalf of learned societies in Central and Western Europe. The frightening thing about an operation this large is the amount of time and resources it takes to edit a single peer-reviewed journal is multiplied in this case by 200. Versita also has for-profit publishing operations, but it appears to be slowly flipping its model to gold open-access for journals. Moreover, Versita Open also sells its open-access titles in print form, by paid subscription. Versita Open claims that there are no author fees for most of its open-access journals, so its business model is unclear. Are its for-profit titles subsidizing its open-access ones? Do the societies pay all the cost of publishing the society journals on the Versita Open platform? We think few in the U.S. have even heard of this firm, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses, and we hope it evolves into a respected open-access publisher.

About the author: Jeffrey Beall is an academic librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on library and information science. His email address is jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu.

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Just published: Humanities Research, Book Digitization, and the Problem of Linguistic Change.

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:47:15 -0400

My colleague Karen and I just had an open-access article published in the Journal of Library Innovation:

Humanities Research, Book Digitization, and the Problem of Linguistic Change

Karen Sobel, Jeffrey Beall

Abstract

The good news is that millions of books have been digitized and are freely available over the Internet. The bad news is also that millions of books have been digitized and are freely available over the Internet. Linguistic change presents one of the greatest hurdles to information retrieval in databases of digitized books because keyword searching of digitized materials does not guarantee discoverability. This article examines the problem of linguistic change in humanities research in full-text databases and describes the innovative solution offered by two proprietary library content providers.

Full Text: PDF

ISSN: 1947-525X

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Jane Burke: The OPAC is Dead -- Now Buy Our New OPAC

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:54:41 -0400

Since 2009, Jane Burke of ProQuest has traveled around the world stridently proclaiming that the OPAC is dead and offering a purported replacement, the Serials Solutions Summon product.^[1]

In June 2011, Serials Solutions issued a press release announcing that it would be developing a new OPAC for libraries, a product that would be available “by the end of 2012.”

Naturally, they are not calling the product an OPAC. They are calling it a “new web-scale management solution.” The press release says, “Built entirely new from the ground up, Serials Solutions will provide librarians with a single, comprehensive service that will eventually eliminate the need for integrated library systems.”

Translation: Serials Solutions is entering the ILS (integrated library system) market. Its product will compete with products currently on the market by Innovative Interfaces, Inc., Ex Libris, WorldCat, and others.

The product’s description confirms that the product will be an ILS: “Serials Solutions will develop a solution that enables the cohesive management of a libraries’ collection, including the ability to select, purchase, catalog, circulate, compare, manage, fulfill, assess and report on their content, regardless of format.” Such products have been on the market for decades; my library uses one today.

My library is in the process of implementing the Summon product, and — don’t get me wrong — it’s a fine product. But I can hardly wait to hear Jane Burke’s angry tag line for her new product. Perhaps it will be something like, “The ILS is dead.”

^[1]For a summary of one of her presentations, see: Wolverton, Jr., Robert E. and Burke, Jane (2009). “The OPAC is Dead: Managing the Virtual Library.” The Serials Librarian, 57:3: 247—252.

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Article Review: Lost in the Cloud : Research Library Collectionsand Community in the Digital Age / by Dan Hazen.

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:41:53 -0400

Hazen’s piece is a semester’s worth of learning packed into a single scholarly article and is among the best articles I have read this year. It stands out because it reflects the author’s years of experience as a collection development librarian, and it accurately and succinctly describes the status quo of research library collection development.

Even if you are not a collection development librarian, and even if you don’t work in a research library, you’ll likely find the article of value.

Instead of merely being a long lit review, the article breaks new ground by boldly and confidently describing the current state of collection management in research and other libraries.

The title “Lost in the Cloud” cleverly refers to research libraries’ lack of direction in collection development, a lack caused by the internet.

To give a taste of the article, below I share via screen shots some of the passages I underlined as I read the paper.

I particularly found interesting his assessment of the Semantic Web. Also, if you read closely, many of his comments state the value of descriptive cataloging, though he doesn’t call it that.

—Jeffrey Beall | 2011-10-12

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Article: Class with Fred Kilgour

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:47:41 -0400

Twenty years ago I had an article published in the OCLC Newsletter entitled “Class with Fred Kilgour.” Here’s the formal citation:

Beall, Jeffrey. (1991). “Class with Fred Kilgour.” OCLC Newsletter 190, March/April: 13-14.

Now I am researching an article about Fred Kilgour, and I unearthed the original print version of the article. It spans three pages, so I scanned it and saved it as three separate .JPG files, which I include below.

My article has a lot of stuff that I had forgotten about, so my work of twenty years ago will be helpful as I write the new article.

Click on any section to make it bigger:

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Just published: Abbreviations, Full Spellings, and Searchers’ Preferences

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:46:37 -0400

My article “Abbreviations, Full Spellings, and Searchers’ Preferences” has just been published in the journal Cataloging & Classification Quarterly.

Here is the abstract:

This study examined ten, selected word pairs, each containing a word’s full spelling and its abbreviation, to determine which form search engine users preferred in searching. Using seven search logs gathered from several Internet search engines with approximately 608 MB of data, the study measured the occurrences of the twenty terms. The selected words are important in library cataloging, for some are prescribed abbreviations in metadata content standards. The study found that in eight of the ten word pairs users preferred to search words’ full spellings over the abbreviations, often by a high margin.

The article is available online here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639374.2011.595886

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What is Automatic Entity Recognition?

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 08:12:00 -0400

I am trying to understand automatic entity recognition (AER) and its connections to libraries and to metadata.

The basic concept is simple, I think: A computer processes documents or text and “recognizes” all the entities that are mentioned in it and marks them up semantically.

Entities are anything that can be named as a noun: mayonnaise, radio antennas, Kentucky, the Super Bowl, epistemology, etc.

Recognition, in this context, means to match the entities named in the text to a standard representation or surrogate for that term, such as an authority record or a linked data uniform resource identifier (URI).

I know that my smart phone is able to recognize telephone numbers in emails that I read on the device, and I guess this is an example of automatic entity recognition: the phone numbers are indeed entities, and the machine recognizes them as such — automatically — and allows me to make a phone call simply by clicking on the hotlink it creates when it recognizes a phone number.

Of course, not all ten-digit numbers are telephone numbers, so my smart phone will occasionally mark up non-telephone numbers as telephone numbers, but to be honest, this error almost never happens.

The future of automatic entity recognition is tied to the wide application of linked data, and specifically library linked data, as libraries (especially digital libraries) are repositories of machine-readable text and documents.

The goal of AER, I think, is to process objects stored in digital libraries by marking up the words that represent entities within them using linked data structures. For example, if the word mayonnaise occurs in text, the system will mark it up, say, with the string for that entity in DBpedia: http://dbpedia.org/page/Mayonnaise (or some other semantic web ontology).

In marked up text, it might appear like this:

Aioli is, like mayonnaise, an emulsion or a suspension of small globules of oil and oil soluble compounds in water and water soluble compounds.^[1]

… except that all the other entities in the passage would also be marked up with their own linked data URI.

I see two problems — or perhaps hurdles — to this approach. The first is that linked data is also supposed to express relationships among things, and simple entity recognition doesn’t accomplish that. For example, what’s the relationship to the entity mayonnaise in the text above? Is it the subject of the piece? No. Entity recognition alone doesn’t help with context or relationships among entities.

The second problem is what in my research I have called the homonym problem.^[2] Artificialintelligence hasn’t advanced enough to find and identify entities in text successfully and unambiguously. For example, mayonnaise can be a condiment, and it can also be a Filipino alternative rock/pop-punk band, according to Wikipedia.

But there are better examples. Computers still cannot successfully disambiguate homonyms like the word abstract in text. It can be a summary (an article abstract) or something vague, like an abstract concept. Thousands of other homonyms occur regularly in text, and systems won’t be able to identify them correctly all the time. Even the best search engines today can’t always get this task correct; for example, Google Scholar has listed authors such as “N. Vietnam” and “V. Conclusion.”

In theory, automatic entity recognition is a great idea, and work that leads to a successful implementation of this idea is worthy. In practice, artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it works well, especially across all domains of knowledge and across all languages.

^[1].http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aioli

^[2].Beall, Jeffrey. (2008). “The weaknesses of full-text searching.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 43.5: 438-444.

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Librarians and the Threat to Free Political Speech (Opinion piece)

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:13:51 -0400

I know this doesn’t have much to do with metadata, but I wanted to announce that an open-access, online pre-print of my upcoming “On My Mind” opinion column is now available on the ALA web site.

Here is the link: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/my-mind/librarians-and-threat-free-political-speech

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Article Review: "Birger Hjørland's Manichean misconstruction of Marcia Bates' work" by Marcia J. Bates

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:00:00 -0400

Manichean means “Pertaining to a strongly dualistic worldview,” and in this article Bates complains that Birger Hjørland misinterprets her work by saying he is right and she is wrong.

After a long and desultory explanation, Bates then concludes that she is right and Hjørland is wrong.

I have never seen a scholarly article quite like this. It is a defensive piece that attempts to save the reputation of a woman at the end a long career in information science and psychology.

Bates patronizes her critic: “Hjørland has a gift for making provocative statements … ” She also makes excuses about her own work: “age and health issues will probably prevent me from completing that larger project on information”.

I have found Hjørland to be among the most interesting writers in library and information science alive today. For example, he recently wrote an article with a fresh and unique perspective on evidence-based librarianship, a perspective that dared to take a politically incorrect stance and analyze EBL in a new light.

I hadn’t ever heard of Marcia Bates before but have read several of Hjørland ‘s articles. I look forward to hearing more from Hjørland in the future.

Endnotes:

1. The pre-print is here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21594

2. The quotations lack page numbers because at the time of this writing the article is in pre-publication.

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Article Review: "Birger Hjørland's Manichean misconstruction of Marcia Bates' work" by Marcia J. Bates

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:59:59 -0400

Manichean means “Pertaining to a strongly dualistic worldview,” and in this article Bates complains that Birger Hjørland misinterprets her work by saying he is right and she is wrong.

After a long and desultory explanation, Bates then concludes that she is right and Hjørland is wrong.

I have never seen a scholarly article quite like this. It is a defensive piece that attempts to save the reputation of a woman at the end a long career in information science and psychology.

I hadn’t ever heard of Marcia Bates before but have read several of Hjørland ‘s articles. I look forward to hearing more from Hjørland in the future.

Endnotes:

1. The pre-print is here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21594

2. The quotations lack page numbers because at the time of this writing the article is in pre-publication.

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A Libertarian Perspective on Scholarly Open Access Publishing

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:35:23 -0400

1. There is nothing wrong with publishing scholarly works for profit. Corporate bodies, including companies, institutions, and associations, are free to acquire articles, datasets, monographs, and other scholarship and to make the works available for a fee.

2. An individual is free to conduct his own research and keep it private, publish it openly on the internet, or license or sell it to a publisher or to any other organization. The same is true for groups of individuals, who may either conduct their own research or sponsor others’ research. Any attempt to limit this freedom is a violation of human rights.

3. It is wrong and unethical to compel an individual to make his intellectual property open access when he has not entered into an agreement to do so. The same is true for groups of individuals and corporate bodies.

4. Governments should generally not sponsor research. Instead, the private sector should sponsor and conduct research. A government may, however, sponsor its own research that assists in maintaining national security, criminal justice administration, etc. that it keeps private.

5. Governments have a necessary role in protecting the intellectual property rights of the owners of research and scholarly content, and this role should be exercised rigorously.

6. Access to scholarship, even medical research, is not a civil right. All individuals or associations of individuals have the right to own intellectual property and to do with it as they please.

7. The high cost of scholarship does not justify the denial of intellectual property rights or the freedom to sell or license intellectual property. Limiting others’ intellectual property rights is always wrong because it constitutes a taking away of one’s freedom.

8. An unrestricted and non-subsidized marketplace for the creation and publication of intellectual property is the best and most productive way to generate and disseminate scholarly research for the benefit of all.

—Jeffrey Beall

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Two Positive Things about Library Linked Data. Part 1: Precision and Recall

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:06:12 -0400

One of the things I find positive and appealing about library linked data is the potential for the almost-perfect precision and recall that it promises.

The advent of Google and other full-text search engines have caused information scientists to mostly ignore these two formerly-important measures of success in information retrieval.

Today, relevance, however undefined it is and however it differs from search engine to search engine, is the standard. Things that appear near the top of your search results are relevant; the stuff on the second page is not.

But we all know that the stuff on subsequent search results pages can indeed be relevant and valuable.

Library linked data will bring back the important measures of recall and precision.

Precision relates to the homonym problem and is a measure of the proportion of relevant results retrieved in a search to the total number of results in the search.

For example, if you search for “springs,” you will retrieve hits about springs (water coming from the ground) and springs (mechanisms that are round, stretch, and bounce back). You probably only want one of these, but the search engine delivers them all, lowering the precision of your search results.

Recall relates to the synonym problem and is a measure of the proportion of relevant results retrieved in a search to the total number of relevant items in the database being searched.

For example, if you search for “leprosy,” you will retrieve documents that contain that term, but you will miss the ones that only use the term “Hansen’s disease.”

These problems occur because human language is at once ambiguous and rich. A single word can mean different things and there can be many different ways to say one thing.

Because it substitutes computer language (uniform resource identifiers) for human language, library linked data has the potential to completely eliminate these two problems and to generate search results with perfect precision and recall, an ideal of library science since before card catalogs even existed.

Any system that has this potential is certainly worthy of further study and open prototypes. I would love to see a prototype set up in a library information retrieval context.

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Review of Eric Hellman's Talk at ALA Annual 2011

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:46:55 -0400

At ALA Annual in New Orleans in June, 2011, I attended a LITA-sponsored presentation entitled “Linked In: Library Data and the Semantic Web,” with speakers Eric Hellman and Ross Singer. This is a critical review of the Hellman segment of the meeting.

Hellman’s talk was among the most arrogant and flippant I had ever attended at an ALA conference. His talk was supposed to be about linked data, but he exploited his position as speaker to unwarrantedly trash libraries, library standards, and librarians.

For example, he merely talked about libraries in terms of spaces, people, and community. In the first half of his talk, he played the sociologist and tried to explain why libraries were so behind and how library standards and practices are so out of touch with the rest of the developed world.

Referring to metadata records, he insisted, “We don’t need surrogates.” He boasted that full-text searching is sufficient for all information seeking and retrieval needs. But when asked by an attendee about things in other languages and things like images that lack language content, he just blew her off and stated, “We have to manage abundance,” in a way that made it seem like he had heard the phrase elsewhere and was just parroting it back as his defense against the very valid question.

One of his slides stated, “The #1 purpose of library data in the digital information age is SEO.” This was a revealing statement because it shows how little he actually knows about library data and the functions of libraries. He ignores information organization, mediation, and preservation, still vital functions of libraries. He appeared completely ignorant of the weaknesses of full-text searching.

Hellman praised what he called microdata and schema.org, even though earlier in the talk he’d flippantly dismissed all metadata in favor of full text searching. He gushed over these two inchoate technologies, revealing the typical techie weakness of liking things just because they are new and rejecting things just because they are old.

Moreover, by promoting these metadata standards, he completely contradicted his earlier statements that full-text searching was sufficient for all information finding.

There is a logical fallacy called “appeal to the people” that Hellman tried to use to convince his audience that libraries are all wrong on metadata. The fallacy is described like this:

“If you suggest too strongly that someone’s claim or argument is correct simply because it’s what most everyone believes, then you’ve committed the fallacy of appeal to the people.”

This is the approach Hellman used to the extreme. And not only did he employ the logical fallacy, he also used disrespect, derision, and sarcasm to make his points. For instance, at one point, seeking laughs, he said that after nuclear Armageddon there would only be left cockroaches and MARC records.

When OPACs began to replace card catalogs, there were no fools giving poisonous talks about the older technology. Over time, libraries recognized the newer and better technology and migrated to it. Hellman would insult people for taking trains instead of going by air. If he were truly confident in the new technologies he believes in so strongly, then he would not reveal his insecurities by mocking the earlier ones.

Epilogue: In contrast, the talk by Ross Singer was excellent. He gave an upbeat and positive presentation about the benefits of linked data and the Semantic Web and how libraries might effectively use them. Suzanne Graham did an excellent job organizing and moderating the talks.

Eric Hellman.

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What I learned at ALA

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:56:25 -0400

2011 Annual ed.

Linked data: The many library consultants speaking at the conference believe that we are fools for continuing to use the MARC format. They did lots of evangelical work about library linked data, saturating us with quotes from Sir Tim and old slides with circles and connecting lines.

Discussion questions: If linked data is so great, why do you have to sell it to us? Why are the freelance consultants promoting linked data so strongly? What do they have to gain from it? Why do we not see wide adoption of this perfect solution in other domains?

A healthy skepticism is not a weakness. Librarians are critical thinkers and have learned not to adopt new technologies just because they are new.

Harrah’s Casino: It is not generally a good idea to go to a casino during ALA, except perhaps for the breakfast buffet or as an air-conditioned shortcut between two places. I learned this.

Eric Miller: The president of Zepheira was the speaker at the PCC Participants’ meeting. Sounding like a Baptist preacher, he tried to save the audience from their MARC sins and to convert the audience to linked data. Miller spoke as a general in the linked-data, full-frontal assault that the Semantic Web groupies carried out at Annual.

Roger C. Schonfeld, director of research at Ithaka, again gave the results of his latest, extremely-low-response-rate survey of college faculty and again concluded that universities and colleges really don’t need academic libraries anymore because Ithaka can supply everything colleges and universities need in the way of information.

RDA: Many had prepared extensive presentations about RDA, only to learn a week before the conference that the “big three” libraries will institute it no sooner than in 18 months if at all, taking the wind out of the sails of their talks.

The main thing causing RDA to fail is a bullying article published in 2007 in D-LIB magazine and written by Diane Hillmann and Karen Coyle. They used the article to pressure the Joint Steering Committee to poison RDA and to make the code conform to their needs (as consultants) and to make it MARC unfriendly and library unfriendly. Had they not interfered so much, the code would likely be successfully put in place by now.

Jay Jordan: He announced his retirement and will be departing with the multi-millions of dollars he got from OCLC in both current and deferred compensation. We expect to see a building on OCLC’s Dublin (Ohio) campus named after him soon: The Golden Parachute Building, and I have dibs on making the SACO proposal for it.

Dewpoint: The weather in New Orleans was Venusian: very hot and very humid. The people on Huron Street need a much better location scout. The poor climate makes it harder to benefit from the conference. ALA should stop using its conferences as profit engines for the organization and pay a little extra for more suitable locations.

—-

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Article Review: "Birger Hjørland's Manichean misconstruction of Marcia Bates' work" by Marcia J. Bates

Article Review: "Birger Hjørland's Manichean misconstruction of Marcia Bates' work" by Marcia J. Bates

A Libertarian Perspective on Scholarly Open Access Publishing

Two Positive Things about Library Linked Data. Part 1: Precision and Recall

Review of Eric Hellman's Talk at ALA Annual 2011

What I learned at ALA