Jakob Neilsen has published the second edition of the “Usability of Intranet Portals” report. Anyone who is developing an intranet portal should buy the report – it’s expensive at $250 but a lot cheaper than creating one without the research on what works.

Intranet portals are being pushed heavily by technology vendors, but the experience from the many portal managers contacted for this report is that technology only accounts for about one-third of the issues they had in implementing their portals. Organizational issues and company politics account for two thirds.

Intranet Portals Usability: Report With Case Studies From Real Projects.

In Neilsen’s newsletter this month, he also recommended a terrific article on how to choose software platforms for portals by Joel Spolsky. In a nutshell, Spolsky says:

What I do know for sure, though, is two things:

1. People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology. [In the article, he also suggests Python as a fourth reasonable choice.]
2. All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you'll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.

In a related article, Spolsky says:

[The software] worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more.  … So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive.

This is good practical advice, and an elegant answer to an impossible question.

The results are coming in about the impact of open access (OA) on research citations.

OA articles are freely available on the web, so that a search on Google Scholar will bring up the full text instead of a publisher’s page that demands payment before you can read it.

A ten-year research study now under way suggests that an OA article may be cited far more often than an article in the same journal that has not been posted on the web by its author.

Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.

This is such a fundamental issue for policy analysis. I’ve been frustrated yet again this week by trying to track down an article that is not available on the web, nor even in the York University online library. Apparently it’s available in University of Toronto’s online library but I have no access to it. As a result, this article will have no influence on policy. And researchers wonder why no-one listens to them!

Most scholarly journals now permit authors to self-archive their articles on the web either before or after publication. Many funders of research are beginning to demand that their researchers self-archive, or publish in open access journals, as a way to increase the impact of the findings. Given that publication is a small proportion of the cost of doing research, and most of the research is funded by public money, it seems obvious to get the information out to the public.