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Marcie Granahan,
NFAIS Executive Director
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"Fake news" has hit mainstream media headlines, tarnishing the field of journalism with false and misleading information. Scholarly communication is facing similar challenges, as bad science seeps into the scholarly literature, causing some to re-examine information literacy, the reproducibility crisis, and peer review.
In this week's issue of NFAIS Advances, check out The challenge facing libraries in an era of fake news; Scientists have outlined an 8-page plan to fix what's wrong with science; and How academia, Google Scholar and predatory publishers help feed academic fake news. Also check out this week's NFAIS Community Forum, where I further explore the causes.
If you haven't registered yet, I want to personally invite you to the 59th NFAIS Annual Conference, The Big Pivot: Re-Engineering Scholarly Communication, February 26 – 28, 2017 in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. Among the many topics covered will be how open science and open data are changing the scholarly record, research behavior and discovery; emerging solutions that prevent fraud and plagiarism; and new technologies enhancing the user experience.
We hope you enjoy reading this week's issue of NFAIS Advances! As always, feel free to share with colleagues and friends.
American Library Association
Librarians—whether public, school, academic, or special—all seek to ensure that patrons who ask for help get accurate information. Given the care that librarians bring to this task, the recent explosion in unverified, unsourced and sometimes completely untrue news has been discouraging, to say the least. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of U.S. adults are getting their news in real time from their social media feeds. These are often uncurated spaces in which falsehoods thrive, as revealed during the 2016 election. To take just one example, Pope Francis did not endorse Donald Trump, but thousands of people shared the "news" that he had done so.
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The Conversation
Imagine, for a moment, the technology of 2017 had existed on Jan. 11, 1964 — the day Luther Terry, surgeon general of the United States, released "Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States." What would be some likely scenarios?
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Forbes
In a week in which not an instant has gone by without a headline somewhere blaring the phrase "fake news," it is important that we not lose track of the journalistic and societal underpinnings that have allowed false and misleading news to flourish. Both the academic and journalism communities have stepped forth into the fray to tout their unique expertise and professionalism as the sole solution to the scourge of fake news. Yet, as I wrote yesterday, neither appears to be particularly up to the challenge.
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Science Alert
The time has come for bad science. An international team of researchers just released an eight-page "manifesto" on how to improve the quality of scientific research, and it's pretty heavy stuff. In 2016, there was widespread concern among the scientific community that we're now in the midst of a "reproducibility crisis", meaning many results that are being published can't be replicated — even when scientists repeat the exact same experiment. And today's "publish or perish" research culture is only making the problem worse.
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The New York Times
The caller ID on my office telephone said the number was from Las Vegas, but when I picked up the receiver I heard what sounded like a busy overseas call center in the background. The operator, "John," asked if I would be interested in attending the 15th World Cardiology and Angiology Conference in Philadelphia next month.
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NFAIS
The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS™), a global nonprofit membership organization serving the information services community, today announced Judith Russell, the Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida, has been selected to receive the NFAIS 2017 Miles Conrad Award.
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NFAIS
Named by Forbes magazine as one of the top 30 young scientists changing the world, Dr. David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, FCPP, who is revolutionizing the way medical research is conducted, will deliver the Keynote Address at the National Federation of Advanced Information Service's (NFAIS™) 59th Annual Conference, Feb. 26-28 at Alexandria, VA's Hilton Old Town.
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Open Research Funders Group
Eight highly-visible organizations announced the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership designed to increase access to research outputs. With nearly $5 billion in combined annual grants conferred, these organizations are committed to using their positions to foster more open sharing of research articles and data. This openness, the members believe, will accelerate the pace of discovery, reduce information-sharing gaps, encourage innovation and promote reproducibility.
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NFAIS
Though 83% of librarians agree that information literacy affects college graduation rates and 97% believe that this skill set contributes to success in the workforce, 44% think that their library does not support information literacy instruction as much as it should.
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University of London
The School of Advanced Study (SAS) will take a bold further step into the field of digital humanities with the launch of its new open-access scholarly books platform on January 17. Called Humanities Digital Library, it is an initiative of SAS and the University of London, and is led by two of the School's research centres — the Institutes of Historical Research (IHR) and Advanced Legal Studies.
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IEEE Standards Association
IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), announced its collaborative role in the publication of a joint white paper entitled Semantic Interoperability for the Web of Things in conjunction with organizations closely tied to the advancement of the IoT ecosystem.
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Research information
Broken pact in scholarly communication motivates shifting locus of control, writes Daniel Berze. In decades past, there existed a tacit "pact" between the academic community and academic publishers; namely that the academics would conduct the research, create the content, perform peer review to ensure quality and the publishers would disseminate it. This sounds like a sensible arrangement. The advantage to the academics is that they do not have to invest their precious time and money in an area that is not their core raison d'être.
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Wired
Somewhere between 65 and 90 percent of biomedical literature is considered non-reproducible. This means that if you try to reproduce an experiment described in a given paper, 65 to 90 percent of the time you won't get the same findings. We call this the reproducibility crisis.
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The Wire
Peer-review had a role to play when journals were all in print and competing for subscription real estate, but today it may be little more than a vestige of the print era.
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Business Wire
Yewno, a provider of a new inference engine that mimics the human brain and increases knowledge discovery, announced its partnership with top publishers and other research providers including Wiley, Harvard DASH, American Society for Microbiology and BioOne. Content from these distinguished publishers will produce new insights and inferences giving knowledge seekers access to important content across various verticals to enhance discovery.
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Netimperative
Multi-channel marketing is nothing new, but new channels continue and will continue to proliferate. In 2017 the next big channel drawing marketers' attention will be voice search and voice recognition — including the possibilities offered by offerings such as Cortana and Siri, and now Amazon Echo and Google Home. Without a traditional screen, how will the major search players respond to marketers and advertisers who have historically relied on ads and clicks for their promotional tactics? It will be fascinating to see how this new channel can be used for effective marketing.
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AdvertisingAge
Chatbots are the next phase in the migration from a desktop-dominant world to a mobile one. While bots are still nascent, as technology improves they are poised to replace brand websites and individualized apps. Of course, chatbots aren't a new phenomenon, but they generated buzz this year when Facebook opened its Messenger platform to third-party developers. Facebook went from having zero bots in February to 18,000 by July, according to research firm Forrester. And in the first seven months that Kik introduced promoted chat, its 300 million registered users exchanged 350 million messages with bots.
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Inside Higher Ed
PLOS ONE, the largest scholarly journal in the world, continues to shrink. The open-access mega-journal's output, measured by how many articles it publishes a year, last year fell to 22,054 — its lowest since 2012 and down about 30 percent since its peak in 2013. Last year brought the most precipitous drop yet. PLOS ONE published 6,052 fewer articles in 2016 than it did the year before — a drop of about 22 percent.
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University World News
Five key European research organisations have called on legislators to modify current European Union copyright reform proposals, including broadening exceptions from copyright on text and data mining, to facilitate research and innovation in a digital environment — or risk impeding progress in one of the most dynamic parts of the economy.
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ScienceLine
Mark Kaganovich kept running into the same problem as he worked toward his graduate degree in cancer genomics at Stanford University. He wanted to spend his time determining genetic factors contributing to cancer. Instead, he ended up worrying about the quality of the genetic data he was analyzing.
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NFAIS
The NFAIS Career Center is the premier one-stop place for employers and job-seekers in the information services field to make the right connections. Click here to view all job opportunities or to post an open position.
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