Fytton Rowland

Benchmarking knowledge management in a public organisation in Malaysia

There is relatively very little information on knowledge management in the public sector, and even less in developing countries. This paper investigates and examines the availability of a knowledge management strategy in a public organisation in Malaysia. This paper also examines perceptions on the benefits, problems, responsibilities and technological aspects that are entailed in managing knowledge in an organisation. Issues that encourage and restrict knowledge generation and knowledge sharing are also discussed. To achieve an in‐depth study, the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development of Malaysia was chosen for a case study. A questionnaire was used as the main instrument in gathering data, and a total of 154 respondents were involved in the survey. Although the Ministry does not have any specific knowledge management strategy, the study reveals that knowledge in the Ministry was available in the Ministrys procedures and policies, job manual procedure, ISO 9002, desk file, work flow and databases.

Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education

A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject‐based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e‐print provision (by authors) can be achieved – an essential factor for an effective e‐print delivery service (for users). A ‘harvesting’ model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented.

The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing.

This paper provides an extensive survey of the recent literature on scholarly publishing and its conversion to the electronic medium. It then presents the results of a questionnaire survey of the UK‐based scholarly publishing industry. The results of this survey suggest that the publishers are moving quickly towards the use of the Internet as a major medium for the distribution of their products, though they do not expect an early print publication. They also do not expect that any alternative system, based on scholars providing their results free of charge at the point of use, will seriously threaten the future of the commercial scholarly publisher. They do, however, perceive several significant difficulties in the near future. These include a shortage of appropriately trained staff, uncertainties about pricing mechanisms, lack of adequate budgetary provision by universities for library purchases, and unrealistic expectations on the part of scholars that electronic information should be inexpensive.

Finding open access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of a range of search tools in finding open access (OA) versions of peer reviewed academic articles on the world wide web.Design/methodology/approach – Some background is given on why and how academics may make their articles OA and how they may be found by others searching for them. Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR were used to try to locate OA versions of peer reviewed journal articles drawn from three subjects (ecology, economics and sociology).Findings – Of the 2,519 articles, 967 were found to have OA versions on the world wide web. Google and Google Scholar found 76.84 per cent of them. The results from OpenDOAR and OAIster were disappointing, but some improvements are noted. Only in economics could OAIster and OpenDOAR be considered relative successes.Originality/value – The paper shows the relative effectiveness of the search tools in these three subjects. The results indicate that those wanting to find OA ...

Electronic journals: myths and realities

Considers the preliminary findings of the Cafe Jus research project, investigating end user reactions to electronic journals. Issues explored include: access to e‐journals; reading habits; human factors; financial implications; and the future roles of librarians, subscription agents and publishers in the electronic environment.

An Evaluation of the Information Needs and Practices of Part-Time and Distance-Learning Students in the Context of Educational and Social Change through Lifelong Learning.

The information needs and practices of part‐time and distancelearning students in higher education (HE) in the UK outside the Open University (OU) have been evaluated. In recent years, the government has pointed out the importance of individuals engaging in lifelong learning initiatives, in order to remain competitive in a globalised economy which draws increasingly on cumulative knowledge creation. In response, the HE sector in the UK offers a growing number of its programmes on a part‐time and/or distance‐learning basis for students who can remain in full‐ or part‐time employment while studying for their qualifications. We trace the history of adult education with its corresponding study modes, and set the experience of students within the wider framework of educational change in the information society. We distributed a questionnaire and conducted telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with a substantial sample of part‐time and distance learners. Based on our research findings, we question whether the i...

Electronic publishing: non-commercial alternatives

A considerable variety of new non‐commercial models for the electronic publication of quality‐controlled scholarly articles have been suggested and in some cases implemented over the last ten years. These models are connected, but vary in various parameters. This paper briefly describes them, and speculates that the most promising model is one where the modest initial costs are paid by the authors institution, quality control is imposed by editorial boards responsible to learned societies, and the journal is published in print at a subscription but published electronically free of charge.

What do users want

At a recent ALPSP seminar on The Article Economy, I was asked to contribute a paper with this title, ‘What do users want?’, and I looked at a number of pieces of evidence – some new, some older; some from my own department, some from elsewhere – to try to find an answer. It is an old rhetorical trick to answer a question with another question, and my second question is ‘Who are the users anyway?’ Often observers of the scholarly publishing scene assume that scholarly journals are a researchto-researcher medium with a large degree of overlap between the community of authors and the community of readers of a given journal title. Often it is also assumed that these researchers are predominantly based in academic institutions. I am sceptical about these assertions. I am particularly sceptical about them in the realm of STM journals, which make up the bulk of the output of the scholarly publishing industry. At the Article Economy seminar, several of the speakers referred to the importance of the corporate market for their journals, and its particular promise for new sales of separates. Of course, some journal articles are written by researchers working in commerce and industry, but generally they are in a minority, for reasons of commercial confidentiality. As a sweeping generalization, academic authors have to publish to advance their careers, while authors in the corporate sector may be positively discouraged from doing so by their employers. Thus academics write but corporate researchers read. Many more readers of scholarly journal articles are practitioners: this is particularly true in biomedical fields, but practising engineers, architects, lawyers, management consultants, and many other professions also read the scholarly literature. These people work for clients and are expected to be well informed and to possess advanced skills in their professional fields. So they have to read the literature, but they do not necessarily contribute to it. The ‘journals crisis’ largely affects academic libraries, which will continue to wish to buy through subscriptions, site licences, and consortium deals. Speakers at the seminar seemed to conclude that it is the corporate sector that will provide the main market for ‘the article economy’, and will be willing to pay substantial prices for quality separates. Another group of users mentioned a lot in the evidence that I reviewed was students. They featured particularly in the JISC-funded JUSTEIS (JISC User Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services) study undertaken at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. JUSTEIS found that students’ use of electronic information resources was unsystematic and haphazard. This coincides with many anecdotal observations that students (even information science students who should know better) nowadays regard the World Wide Web as the source of first resort, expect material on the web to be available free of charge, and find it hard to distinguish authenticated material from that which is not quality controlled. JUSTEIS found that students make little use of subject gateways or JISC-supported secondary services, preferring to go straight to the main web search engines. Some of what students consume is another kind of separate – book chapters – which was the main subject of another JISC-funded project, PELICAN at Loughborough. However, PELICAN’s respondents kept straying into the journal area in their comments. It is clear that the ‘market’ for articles includes many students at both the underand postgraduate level. PELICAN was concerned mostly with devising a workable model for the provision of materials from lecturers’ reading lists electronically to students, with relatively trouble-free permissions systems, probably through a centralized co-operative body along the lines of the CLA. The evidence from my own study undertaken for Ingenta (which I now have to learn Guest Editorial 83

Who will buy my Bells and Whistles? The True Needs of Users of Electronic Journals

Two different debates about electronic journals have been going on more or less independently, one assuming continuation of commercial publishing and the other advocating various free or inexpensive models. The provision of sophisticated facilities in commercial electronic journals is a major reason for the cost differences between the two models. Do users want these bells and whistles? Authors, not the readers or the buyers, are the key users of the scholarly literature, and authors want eyes, not pennies. If authors mount all their papers on their own web sites, commercial publication of specialised scholarly journals will be difficult to maintain.

E-JOURNALS IN AN INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENT

Surveys of both Information Services staff and research staff at a large pharmaceutical company have revealed considerable enthusiasm for the use of electronic scientific journals. Research staff seemed more knowledgeable about electronic journals than Information Services staff thought they were, and perhaps more so than some Information Services staff themselves were. This finding contrasts with the situation found in universities. Research staff tended to prefer the electronic versions of established journals to newly founded electronic-only journals. Despite some concerns among Information Services staff about their future status, research staff expressed firm support for a continuing gatekeeper role. Both groups of staff agreed that journals would probably continue to be funded through Information Services, but differed on continued visits to the library.