Controversy, takeovers and even an angry French President: that'll be the year that was 2006 in the information world. IWR's Daniel Griffin sorts the winners from the sinners

January

High: Gowers to head up IP review

Dry: Nature and Britannica fall out

Starting the year with a controversial bang, scientific journal Nature compared the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica articles and concluded that the number of errors was minimal in both. The “expert-led” investigation was carried out by 50 members of the scientific community, although Britannica branded Nature’s study as “fatally flawed”.

In another spat, we reported on the American Library Association’s president Michael Gorman’s fierce criticism of librarians being “too interested in technology”. He singled out Google’s digitisation project and the ensuing fall-out this had caused among librarians.

Elizabeth Niggemann, head of the German National Library, led the counterattack.

“More digitisation is needed,” she responded. “If things are little used, they will be used less if they are available only in print.”

As the debate on formalising the laws on intellectual property began to gain momentum, former Financial Times (FT) editor Andrew Gowers was appointed to head up the government review and decide whether current legislation could measure up in the digital age.

February

High: Chinese journal authors make their mark at Elsevier

Dry: Project Quaero lurks in the shadows

Controversy raged again in February with reports emerging of a hush-up of Project Quaero. This Franco-German initiative was intended to develop a European search engine that could take on the global might of US-based Yahoo and Google, which French president Jacques Chirac claimed favoured “Anglo-Saxon library book collections”.

However, French media tech company Thomson pulled pages relating to the project from its website and issued a news blackout when details were announc ed. By May it had emerged that no major German partner had signed up to Quaero, not even media giant Bertelsmann, which had initially been tipped to join the consortium, due to lack of pressure from the German government, supposedly angering Chirac further.

A study conducted throughout 2005 by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) revealed that universities had successfully achieved the necessary requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, satisfying 96% of requests within the statutory limit of 20 working days.

Meanwhile a study of Elsevier journals by the Robert Gordon University in Scotland reported that nearly 10% of its published articles had at least one author from China, highlighting the importance of Chinese literature in academia.

March

High: IBM invests $1bn in information management

Dry: Jobs to go at Oxford but over an extended period

Oxford University libraries confirmed to IWR that there would be no compulsory redundancies after we had run a story on our website the previous month that 100 library posts would be lost, prompting fears that up to 200 roles could go. However, it was announced by acting director Ronald Milne that these positions would gradually be filtered out of the organisation over five to seven years as the institute had an annual staff turnover rate of 20%, which would mute the impact.

IBM announced that it was to invest $1bn in information management by expanding its software development for the sector. The IT giant also revealed that it would be redeploying 15,000 staff to focus on vertical markets such as financial services, healthcare and government, bolstering its acquisitions of Ascential, DWL, iPhrase, PureEdge and later in the year Filenet.

April

High: Oracle search takes security measures

Dry: Blackwell denies imminent sale

In a pattern that was to be repeated several times during the year, emerging news of publishing companies coming up for sale was quickly denied.

First to pooh-pooh the benighted hacks was Blackwell Publishing’s CEO René Olivieri, who dismissed a Financial Times story of a possible sale to venture capitalists that would raise £600m for the company. “These articles show up from time to time,” Olivieri said, adding that the FT story had misrepresented the structure of organisation. Blackwell’s was sold six months later to John Wiley & Sons for £572m.

Oracle also waded into the enterprise search battle with its aptly named Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g standalone search engine. The IT supplier claimed that rivals such as Autonomy and Fast Search and Transfer would not be able to touch 10g for the security measures that came with the package, such as allowing end-users to view only those search results they had authorisation for.

We also reported on The Guardian’s campaign for the government to release publicly funded information, such as that held by the Ordnance Survey (OS), and make it available free of charge to companies and the public alike.

Revelations by civil servant Chris Hancox that the public was paying repeatedly for OS data when applying for planning permission added to a lively debate on the campaign blog.

May

High: An all-new IWR chomps at the bit

Dry: Proposed US open access law highlights Europe’s lack of clarity

May’s edition saw a revamped IWR with a brand-new style, size and design for the print edition. The website was similarly enhanced with the long requested backfiles of feature articles, opinion pieces, reviews, tests and sector updates all newly available online.

Job vacancies were also published and we launched our own blog service – subsequent highlights included IWR blogging up-to-the-minute coverage from the Office 2.0 and Online Information conferences.

Welcomed by the information industry in May was the appearance of Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search. Part of the Windows Live portfolio, Academic Search was intended as a rival to Google Scholar. The search facility was launched with support from CrossRef along with several other major academic publishers and 4,300 journals were initially made available on the free service. The amount was expected to grow considerably over the coming year.

A significant legislative proposal was tabled in the US this month igniting the open access (OA) debate by senators Joseph Lieberman and John Cornyn, who proposed that US-funded research papers should be freely available online within six months of publication. But the European Commission was accused of missing an opportunity in its OA report, also released in May, of matching the clarity of the OA proposals from the senators.

June

High: ScienceDirect adds strings to its bow

Dry: TSO suffers from inevitable rumours of being owned by venture capitalists

IWR managed a sneak preview of Elsevier’s new-look ScienceDirect website, which heralded a series of changes to be implemented over the next two years.

Superficial amendments included a new site layout, but significant enhancements were added, including Recent Actions and Quick Links functionality. The biggest improvement was the ability to take key tasks to the home page to reduce the trail of clicks for accessing information from the site.

According to The Daily Telegraph, The Stationery Office (TSO), a government services-focused publishing company, was up for sale. Naturally, the report was flatly denied by TSO’s PR manager James Duffield. “As a company owned by venture capitalists there are rumours about our sale all the time,” declared Duffield. Just four months later, it was announced that Williams Lea, another force in public sector publishing, had bought TSO for around £120m.

There was no let-up in the battle for search supremacy. In June, Google launched a salvo against Microsoft in the enterprise search arena, with Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s “Don’t be evil” search giant launching OneBox to take on Microsoft’s re-engineered SharePoint collaborative software.

July/August

High: Higher education institutes given key to Freedom of Information gateway

Dry: Nature criticised for expanding into emerging nano market

Six months after its journal Nature’s ding-dong with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nature Publishing Group found itself on the receiving end of a critical onslaught when it was accused by information professionals such as Glasgow University Library’s assistant director Tony Kidd of being opaque with its pricing models and potentially diluting its journal publishing market. The criticism was provoked by the company’s entry into the profitable nanoscience journal sector. “Before we launch a journal, we always go out to the scientific community for their response to an idea first,” said Jason Wilde, Nature’s publisher of physical sciences.

In a £200,000 investment announced by the JISC, higher education institutes were to receive their own gateway to information about the Freedom of Information Act. A survey of higher education institutions had revealed a demand for a centralised information bank of compliance with government legislation.

Official guidance, best practice, relevant journals, blogs, magazines and books to provide consistency of information and reduce the effort involved were also cited as “must-haves”.

September

High: Google Co-op gets cautious welcome from information professionals

Dry: Proquest and the government suffer for information errors

Education publisher Proquest was rocked after it emerged that US financial regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was investigating the company after misleading financial statements had been made by a senior executive.

Proquest lawyer Kevin Norris complained to IWR that “they

[the SEC] walked into my office unannounced, took my laptop and copied it”. But with the embarrassment of having to restate corporate earnings because of a vice-president’s inappropriate journal entries aimed at making the organisation appear to be more profitable than it actually was, Proquest duly “terminated” the offending employee.

On an equally dour note, the government’s plans for data sharing between public sector bodies received robust criticism from the Social Market Foundation think-tank. The think-tank rubbished the plans as doomed to failure as public bodies continued to hide behind the Data Protection Act. With the terrible failures of information sharing between public bodies in the Soham and Victoria Climbié cases still relevant, the harshness of the criticism didn’t seem unfair.

But some optimism prevailed after Google invited those with specialist knowledge to help improve internet searches through its Google Co-op initiative. The idea was for experts to recommend links to reliable web pages in their chosen fields. Although cautioning that certain “experts” might just be hawking their wares, IWR urged experts to get involved in a project with huge potential.

October

High: Changing of the guard – IWR editor gauntlet picked up

Dry: US academia split on open access legislative proposals

In a continuing year of change for the magazine, IWR’s news editor Mark Chillingworth took over the editorial hot-seat from outgoing head Bobby Pickering.

In the meantime, the intellectual property debate ramped up another gear or three when the British Library joining forces with Microsoft and Google. The big pals act followed the release of the library’s manifesto and talks conducted at both the UK’s major political party conferences. With the appearance of the Gower report drawing ever closer, the library called on the government to make radical changes to the law on intellectual property.

The US-led open access debate also gathered pace with academics firmly drawing lines in the sand marking out their positions. The Oberlin group of liberal arts college libraries threw their weight behind the proposed legislation while the DC Principles for Free Access to Science coalition mooted its worries that the proposed legislation would damage scientific publishing.

A furious war of words erupted, with senior academics from 10 US institutions co-signing a letter to senators Lieberman and Cornyn warning that the “free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record”.

November

High: Dow Jones purchases Reuter’s stake in Factiva

Dry: Freedom of Information access in danger of dilution

Reports emerged that the government was minded to reform the Freedom of Information Act, following recommendations in a report from the Department for Constitutional Affairs by consultancy Frontier Economics.

The recommendations were intended to curb the amount of information that could be accessed on the basis of time and cost. The report proposed that if any organisation or individual exceeded their Freedom of Information request cost limit over a three-month period, then they would have to wait for the next three-month period before they could make another one. The proposal held serious implications for journalists, campaigners or any member of the public searching for public-based information.

Reuters announced that it intended to sell its 50% stake in news service aggregator Factiva to development partner Dow Jones for over $153m in cash and $7m in shares. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move came in a year that saw licensing agreements change, with the FT introducing a 24-hour delay to its news feeds, and the growth of free news services such as Google’s News Archive. Thomson also announced the sale of the Thomson Learning wing of its business as the educational information provider no longer fitted with its long-term strategy.

December

High: AOL moves into news aggregation service with Relegence buy

Dry: US open access debate exits limelight during mid-term elections

The year ended with the news that AOL had moved into the growing news management market with its acquisition of Relegence.

This followed moves earlier in the year, with Google’s News Archive service taking on more established content providers such as Factiva and Lexis Nexis.

We also reported that the rapid development of the web had led to the emergence of skills gaps that were not being filled by either information professionals or computer scientists. The news prompted MIT and Southampton University to team up to develop a new discipline, web science, in order to bridge the divide. The Web Science Research Initiative is intended to develop an understanding of the scientific, technical and social challenges that influence the web’s growth.

After the announcement of Wiley’s acquisition of Blackwell, Wiley president William J Pesce said: “The combined business will publish approximately 1,250 scholarly peer-reviewed journals.”

When asked why Wiley had not bid for rival Springer, Susan Spilka, director of communications at Wiley, shot back: “It’s not about size; it’s about quality.”

Finally, the mid-term elections for the US Congress put the brakes on the progress of the open access bill. The bill’s backers in the Senate, Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican John Cornyn, will need to refile the proposal in 2007. But with support continuing to grow, it could just be a matter of time before the debate is partially resolved – Stateside, at least.

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