Friday 26 April 2013

"Add value or die" - listen to our first podcast!

The March issue of Business Information Review includes this year's Business Information Survey.

Researched and written by Allan Foster, and now in its 23rd year, the latest survey has been given the rather challenging subtitle "Add value or die".

You can hear Allan discussing his findings with Sandra Ward on our very first podcast which you can access here.

Some of the key findings of the Survey include:

·         Very mixed fortunes of respondents, from modest expansion to disbandment
·         Serious senior management scepticism of the traditional centralized information services model
·         Outsourcing, on or offshore, still a popular organizational model, with notable successes and failures
·         The professional development pipeline for IM/IS personnel has been damaged by, amongst other factors, outsourcing
·         The notably successful services are finding new and imaginative ways of adding value, sometimes well outside traditional IS/IM boundaries
·         The more removed the head of the IS/IM service is from the senior management and Board, the more vulnerable is the service

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Confirmed - Elsevier buys Mendeley

Publishing giant Elsevier has bought the social and research collaboration platform Mendeley.

Rumours of the acquisition began to emerge earlier in 2013, causing concern in some circles.  Some academic institutions had been calling for a boycotting of Elsevier products following increased subscription prices.

More on this story from Research Information.