So this picture pretty much summed up my day. I had one long task which I just got on with, but more on that later.
The day began with me sitting about waiting for people to get back from a meeting so they could tell me what to do. But I didn't just sit there on Twitter (for the whole time at least), I worked through the new submissions to the Journal of Small Animal Practice to earn my keep. This was the correct answer.
When people did get back I was told to carry on with a task I began last week which was to collate the answers given in an online survey on Open Access in nursing journals the department had run. I basically had to work my way through 800 odd answers, making a list of what everyone had said.
It wasn't the most exiting thing I've ever done. Once I had finished the question asking people to name the individual journals they have used I moved onto what I thought would be the much more straight forward question of where do you live. I was wrong. Considering the people answering this questionnaire are all
The day began with me sitting about waiting for people to get back from a meeting so they could tell me what to do. But I didn't just sit there on Twitter (for the whole time at least), I worked through the new submissions to the Journal of Small Animal Practice to earn my keep. This was the correct answer.
When people did get back I was told to carry on with a task I began last week which was to collate the answers given in an online survey on Open Access in nursing journals the department had run. I basically had to work my way through 800 odd answers, making a list of what everyone had said.
It wasn't the most exiting thing I've ever done. Once I had finished the question asking people to name the individual journals they have used I moved onto what I thought would be the much more straight forward question of where do you live. I was wrong. Considering the people answering this questionnaire are all
academics/medical professionals you'd assume they could answer a simple question, and to be fair most could but when people got it wrong they really got it wrong.
To start with people didn't read the list of options before putting their country of residence in the "Other" field. Well at least this is what I assume had happened unless there is a second, identically spelt Canada out there I haven't heard of. And while I respect their patriotism, the one person who decided to ignore the UK option in favour of writing England did not make my life easier. But my absouloute favourite answer to the question "In which country do you live?" was "none" - no ellaboration, no explanation, just "none".
So once I had finished sorting through the many responses I began to work back through the survey from the start, presenting the information collected using graphs and tables and what not. I enjoyed this. I felt very businessy and proper. I had no hand in orchestrating the survey but I am very proud of the basic graphs I used to present the results in a way that is hopefully useful to those who did.
While all this wasn't the most exhilirating way I've ever spent a day, I actually didn't mind doing it and the time passed faster than I expected. I think the reason for this is that while I was doing these semi-tedious tasks I was able to learn about how those who submit and subscribe to journals feel about open access and could see how this information was going to be useful to Wiley.
Many people, it turns out, have massive negative prejudices towards Open Access assuming that the content will be poor even though they themselves admit that they have no evidence for this theory. Similarly some people say that they actively avoid Open Access journals or showed that they just didn't understand the ins and outs of the model. The biggest uncertainty for all though was the question of funding. Many didn't know how much they were expected to pay, to whom and where they were going to get this money from. All this should prove interesting come April 2013.
Even though I spent most of my day on this nursing journals survey, I did get a break to go to this week's work experience talk on Digital Publishing. We started with a whistle-stop tour of the history and evolution of technology relevant to the publishing industry before turning out attention to the future, and specifically the digital future of Wiley.
Whereas before publishers would just put content online and draw users to it by letting them know it was there, now the focus has shifted to getting the content to the user, through the many different platforms available. This demonstrates how digital publishing is entirely geared towards the user, a shift pinpointed by our speaker to 2006 when Time Magazine named "You" as person of the year. It is all about the user. And this means lots of user research and feedback to make the right products, the products the user wants. But you don't have to just know you user but know how to get your user so discoverability and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are also big factors in any digital team's mission statement. It was interesting to see how important these issues are and how publishers are adapting and addressing them.
So overall not the most exiting day in the world but I learnt a lot and kind of enjoyed myself. I also got some more ideas for my possible dissertation/major project which I'm thinking of doing on Open Access. So the morale of the story is, do what the mug says.
To start with people didn't read the list of options before putting their country of residence in the "Other" field. Well at least this is what I assume had happened unless there is a second, identically spelt Canada out there I haven't heard of. And while I respect their patriotism, the one person who decided to ignore the UK option in favour of writing England did not make my life easier. But my absouloute favourite answer to the question "In which country do you live?" was "none" - no ellaboration, no explanation, just "none".
So once I had finished sorting through the many responses I began to work back through the survey from the start, presenting the information collected using graphs and tables and what not. I enjoyed this. I felt very businessy and proper. I had no hand in orchestrating the survey but I am very proud of the basic graphs I used to present the results in a way that is hopefully useful to those who did.
While all this wasn't the most exhilirating way I've ever spent a day, I actually didn't mind doing it and the time passed faster than I expected. I think the reason for this is that while I was doing these semi-tedious tasks I was able to learn about how those who submit and subscribe to journals feel about open access and could see how this information was going to be useful to Wiley.
Many people, it turns out, have massive negative prejudices towards Open Access assuming that the content will be poor even though they themselves admit that they have no evidence for this theory. Similarly some people say that they actively avoid Open Access journals or showed that they just didn't understand the ins and outs of the model. The biggest uncertainty for all though was the question of funding. Many didn't know how much they were expected to pay, to whom and where they were going to get this money from. All this should prove interesting come April 2013.
Even though I spent most of my day on this nursing journals survey, I did get a break to go to this week's work experience talk on Digital Publishing. We started with a whistle-stop tour of the history and evolution of technology relevant to the publishing industry before turning out attention to the future, and specifically the digital future of Wiley.
Whereas before publishers would just put content online and draw users to it by letting them know it was there, now the focus has shifted to getting the content to the user, through the many different platforms available. This demonstrates how digital publishing is entirely geared towards the user, a shift pinpointed by our speaker to 2006 when Time Magazine named "You" as person of the year. It is all about the user. And this means lots of user research and feedback to make the right products, the products the user wants. But you don't have to just know you user but know how to get your user so discoverability and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are also big factors in any digital team's mission statement. It was interesting to see how important these issues are and how publishers are adapting and addressing them.
So overall not the most exiting day in the world but I learnt a lot and kind of enjoyed myself. I also got some more ideas for my possible dissertation/major project which I'm thinking of doing on Open Access. So the morale of the story is, do what the mug says.
RSS Feed