How IT Investments Help Hospitals Gain and Sustain Reputation in the Media: The Role of Signaling and Framing

Practice- and Policy-Oriented Abstract Understanding how IT investments help organizations to build and sustain reputation is of particular relevance for healthcare practitioners and policy makers because patients are often unable to assess the quality of care, relying instead on the reputation of health service providers in the media, such as newspapers. As information intermediaries, journalists detect, aggregate, and translate the weaker signals for quality, such as state-of-the-art IT, that a hospital emanates. Our analysis of 152 hospital organizations in England, complemented by interviews with healthcare journalists, shows that journalists write less negatively about hospitals when healthcare organizations’ IT equipment investments are high. This implies that investments in IT equipment can buffer hospitals from negative press, thereby helping them to gain and maintain a strong reputation in the media. Practitioners and policy makers may incorporate the reputational effect of IT when making investment decisions and further amplify such IT investment through press releases, corporate reports, and media interactions.

Privacy Within the Private Order: A Critical Evaluation of the Market-Based System Governing Data Collection in the United States

This paper critically evaluates the market-based system governing data collection in the United States. The discussion is centred around Big Tech, a group of information intermediaries responsible for the ongoing extraction and exploitation of consumer data. The exploitative system is enabled by the ubiquitous privacy policy, which ostensibly offers data subjects ‘notice’ of data collection and the ‘choice’ to consent to said collection. This paper critiques the ‘notice and choice’ model, concluding the combined ambiguity and opacity of the privacy policy fail to offer subjects meaningful control over their data. To substantiate this argument, the paper evaluates the suitability of the market-based system in a broader sense, arguing that data collection practices precludes the knowledge parity necessary for an operative and fair market-based system. The paper concludes by ascertaining the suitability of state-based regulation, identifying data’s intrinsic relationship with ideals that are core to the Western tradition: equality, democracy, and autonomy.

Incentive and Coordination in the Two-Sided Market: Evidence from the P2P Lending Market

Two-sided markets serve as information intermediaries by connecting participants on both sides. In this study, we focus on the coordination of participants in the P2P lending market using a coupon strategy as an incentive to attract investment. Using a two-sided market model, we find that when a platform adopts the coupon strategy, (i) the platform utility and participants’ utility are both greater and (ii) the number of participants is greater. In addition, as most research on two-sided markets and coupon strategy focuses on theoretical models, our study provides empirical support using data from Renrendai.com over 2018 to 2019.

Information literacy as a site for anticipation: temporal tactics for infrastructural meaning-making and algo-rhythm awareness

PurposeThe article makes an empirical and conceptual contribution to understanding the temporalities of information literacies. The paper aims to identify different ways in which anticipation of certain outcomes shapes strategies and tactics for engagement with algorithmic information intermediaries. The paper suggests that, given the dominance of predictive algorithms in society, information literacies need to be understood as sites of anticipation.Design/methodology/approachThe article explores the ways in which the invisible algorithms of information intermediaries are conceptualised, made sense of and challenged by young people in their everyday lives. This is couched in a conceptual discussion of the role of anticipation in understanding expressions of information literacies in algorithmic cultures. The empirical material drawn on consists of semi-structured, pair interviews with 61 17–19 year olds, carried out in Sweden and Denmark. The analysis is carried out by means of a qualitative thematic analysis in three steps and along two sensitising concepts – agency and temporality.FindingsThe results are presented through three themes, anticipating personalisation, divergences and interventions. These highlight how articulating an anticipatory stance works towards connecting individual responsibilities, collective responsibilities and corporate interests and thus potentially facilitating an understanding of information as co-constituted by the socio-material conditions that enable it. This has clear implications for the framing of information literacies in relation to algorithmic systems.Originality/valueThe notion of algo-rhythm awareness constitutes a novel contribution to the field. By centring the role of anticipation in the emergence of information literacies, the article advances understanding of the temporalities of information.

“Free libraries for the free people”: How mass-literature “shadow” libraries circumvent digital barriers and redefine legality in contemporary Russia

Shadow mass-literature online libraries in Russia developed during the early Post-Soviet years. They are a phenomenon rooted in both the practice of circumventing constraints caused by state censorship, and a book production process of insufficient quality. Since the fall of the USSR, Russian legislation has aligned itself with international standards, adopting their strictest instantiation. In 2013, “anti-piracy” legislation made “information intermediaries” responsible for illegal content, introduced an “eternal” blocking of sites, made pre-trial negotiations more difficult. Successive amendments have sought to respond to the circumvention tactics developed by shadow libraries. In this context, for a library which is not part of the book market, remaining in the legal realm means freezing its own content or becoming a self-publishing platform. Libraries that become illegal have to ensure the sustainability and growth of their collections by multiplying their dissemination means, to provide personal security to administrators through a “safe” geographical location or strict anonymity, and to guarantee an access to their collections on the Russian Federation territory through inventive circumvention techniques. They leave the public struggle against state and industry regulation of the Internet to digital rights advocates, and promote a particular vision of “freedom” anchored in the mastery of technical tools and in uncensored cultural practices.

When peril responds to plague: predatory journal engagement with COVID-19

PurposeThe academic community has warned that predatory journals may attempt to capitalize on the confusion caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to further publish low quality academic work, eroding the credibility of scholarly publishing.Design/methodology/approachThis article first chronicles the risks of predatory publishing, especially related to misinformation surrounding health research. Next, the author offers an empirical investigation of how predatory publishing has engaged with COVID-19, with an emphasis on journals related to virology, immunology and epidemiology as identified through Cabells' Predatory Reports, through a content analysis of publishers' websites and a comparison to a sample from DOAJ.FindingsThe empirical findings show that there were 162 titles related to these critical areas from journals listed on Cabells with a range of infractions, but most were defunct and only 39 had published on the pandemic. Compared to a DOAJ comparison group, the predatory journal websites were less likely to mention slowdowns to the peer review process related to the pandemic. Furthermore, another 284 predatory journals with COVID-19 engagement were uncovered from the initial exploration. These uncovered journals mostly centered on medical or biological science fields, while 42 titles came from other broader fields in social science, other STEM or humanities.Originality/valueThis study does not prove that predatory publications have released misinformation pertaining to COVID-19, but rather it exemplifies the potential within a complex academic publishing space. As these outlets have proven to be vectors of misleading science, libraries and the broader educational community need to stay vigilant as information intermediaries of online research.