The latest issue has been published (Vol. 29 No. 2, 2024) of open access journal Information Research. This is the final issue with Professor Emeritus Tom Wilson as Editor in Chief. He founded the journal in 1995, and it a tribute to his hard work and inspiration that it remains a high quality publication with no charges for either author or reader.
He notes in his editorial
"I thought when I started the journal that the new technologies would bring about major changes in the scholarly publishing arena: it was now possible for a single academic, like myself, to create a new journal independently of the commercial publishers who dominated the field, much to the economic costs of academic institutions. Sadly, that potential future has not been realised and the commercial publishers are as much in control as ever, and there are even fewer, as a result of mergers and acquisitions.
"There are obvious reasons for this: on one hand academics have increased teaching loads and pressure to research and publish, and the institutions are (at least in the UK) "marketised" and in competition, with a reduction in the possibilities of cooperation. On the other hand, governments are more interested in preserving their publishing industries than in genuine freedom of information. They would rather see publishing companies making massive profits from their so-called "open access" policies than support the development of genuinely open access in universities. How "open" can publishing be if authors and/or their institutions are required to pay?"
There are two parts to this issue: regular contents and also the proceedings of the 15th ISIC conference. I will cover the latter in a future post. The regular peer-reviewed papers include:
- Reasons to fight: preliminary results on motivations to combat fake news by Wenting Yu
- ‘Alexa, play metal’: exploring music selection and personal information management via voice assistants by Jochen Steffens, Jesse David Dinneen, Sascha Donner, Tom Potthoff
- Cognitive authorities of COVID-19 information: educational differences and outcomes of trust in health experts and social media influencers in Finland
Sanna Malinen, Aki Koivula
- Developing expertise and managing inaccessibility: a study of reading by listening practices among students with blindness or vision impairment by Anna Lundh
- Health information-seeking on Reddit, by people who use opioids by Margaret Sullivan, Jonah Hancock, George Shaw, Chaoqun Ni
- Approaching information-seeking habits and their contextual features by Reijo Savolainen
Go to https://informationr.net/infres/issue/view/37
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bandstand (June 2024) in Sheffield, original home of Information Research (that is: the university, not the bandstand)
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