This special issue highlights research taking place on and about academic libraries. The role of libraries in research and higher education is evolving, adapting to the rapidly changing needs of the communities they serve. Library services are being innovated to reach out with relevant knowledge and resources at the right time. All three research papers in this issue are case studies focusing on the academic library’s contribution to the integration of students in academic life, preparation of students for scholarly discourse and digital literacy training. They all show how libraries are taking responsibility for first generation students by creating communities for their development of the tacit knowledge of the academic world or embedding literacy training in university courses.

In addition to research papers, this issue of NJLIS includes contributions in the format practice papers. In our experience, the innovation and development happening in the practice field does not always fit the format of a research paper. Nonetheless we find that in the context of academic libraries, describing the progress of practice through cases and narratives is both interesting and relevant to the community of library and information specialists. Including practice papers has allowed for the presentation, on their own terms, of development projects in research libraries that do not have the form or format of research.

Over the past decade, academic social networking sites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become a common tool in academia for accessing publications and displaying metrics for research evaluation and self-monitoring. In this conceptual article, we discuss how these academic social networking sites, as devices of evaluation that build on both traditional values, objects, and metrics in academic publishing and on social media logics and algorithmic metrics, come to fulfil a need in the current academic (publishing) ecosystem. We approach this issue by identifying key affordances that arise in the interaction between platform and user. We then position these affordances in relation to potential needs of academics in today’s publishing landscape by drawing on Hafermalz’s metaphor of the ‘fear of exile’, which provides an alternative way of understanding the importance of visibility in the networked world, as a combination of competitive exposure and existential recognition. We end by considering the grounds on which the platforms may be attributed some level of legitimacy. This is done in order to understand the inherent contradiction between the broad use of the platforms and the fact that their integrity has been questioned repeatedly. We seek an answer to a legitimacy for the platforms in the fact that a pragmatic, mutual benefit exists between them and the research community; a benefit that is enhanced by the audit society influencing current academia. 

Purpose: Institutional and commercial web profiles that provide biobibliographic information about researchers are used for promotional purposes but also as information sources. In the latter case, the profiles' (re)presentations of researchers may be used to assess whether a researcher can be trusted. The article introduces a conceptual framework of how trust in researchers may be formed based on how the researchers' experiences and achievements are mobilized on the profiles to tell a multifaceted story of the “self.” Design/methodology/approach: The framework is an analytical product which draws on theories of trust as well as on previous research focused on academic web profiles and on researchers' perceptions of trust and credibility. Two dimensions of trust are identified as central to the theoretical construction of trust, namely competence and trustworthiness. Findings: The framework outlines features of profile content and narrative that may influence the assessment of the profile and of the researcher's competence and trustworthiness. The assessment is understood as shaped by the frames of interpretation available to a particular audience. Originality/value: The framework addresses the lack of a trust perspective in previous research about academic web profiles. It provides an analysis of how potential trust in the researcher may be formed on the profiles. An innovative contribution is the acknowledgement of both qualitative and quantitative indicators of trustworthiness and competence, including the richness of the story told about the “self”. 

This paper qualitatively examines how members of a large private Facebook group view the risks of information disclosure to their privacy and the strategies they employ to navigate and manage those risks. The paper adds to an emerging interest in how privacy is managed collectively and within dynamic large groups, thus moving beyond established knowledge of privacy management on individual and small-scale levels. The work builds on semi-structured interviews with 20 members of a private Facebook group and draws on Communication Privacy Management theory. The study shows how privacy management practices are enacted at individual, intragroup, and group levels. Findings show that participants associate very high risks with sharing private information in the group, partly because it consists of a mix of known others and strangers, who are potentially geographically co-located. They adopt several strategies for managing and protecting their privacy at all three levels. The risks associated with context, time, and spatial collapse of the imagined audience are identified as important to how participants experience information disclosure in the group. The paper concludes by identifying some practical implications that serve as a call for developers to design privacy tools that support dynamic groups’ privacy challenges and needs. 

Although established forms of peer review are often criticized for being slow, secretive, and even unfair, they are repeatedly mentioned by academics as the most important indicator of quality in scholarly publishing. In many countries, the peer review of books is a less codified practice than that of journal articles or conference papers, and the processes and actors involved are far from uniform. In Sweden, the review process of books has seldom been formalized. However, more formal peer review of books has been identified as a response to the increasing importance placed on streamlined peer-reviewed publishing of journal articles in English, which has been described as a direct challenge to more pluralistic publication patterns found particularly in the humanities. In this study, we focus on a novel approach to book review, Kriterium, where an independent portal maintained by academic institutions oversees the reviewing of academic books. The portal administers peer reviews, providing a mark of quality through a process which involves reviewers, an academic coordinator, and an editorial board. The paper studies how this process functions in practice by exploring materials concerning 24 scholarly books reviewed within Kriterium. Our analysis specifically targets tensions identified in the process of reviewing books with a focus on three main themes, namely the intended audience, the edited volume, and the novel role of the academic coordinator. Moreover, we find that the two main aims of the portal–quality enhancement (making research better) and certification (displaying that research is of high quality)–are recurrent in deliberations made in the peer review process. Consequently, we argue that reviewing procedures and criteria of quality are negotiated within a broader discussion where more traditional forms of publishing are challenged by new standards and evaluation practices.

Internet med dess många publiceringsformer har inneburit en renässans för intresset för källkritik. När vem som helst kan publicera information om i det närmaste vad som helst blir tillvägagångssätt för att kunna värdera hur trovärdig en källa är av stor vikt. I många av dessa publiceringsformer finns det ingen förhandsgranskning av texter och ansvaret för att granska faller på läsaren. Det kan uttryckas som att vi i samband med många av nätets publiceringsformer går från förhandsgranskning till efterhandsgranskning av texter. I Del 4 av denna modul resonerar vi om konsekvenserna av dessa, och andra, förändringar för källkritik. Vi utgår från konkreta exempel men kan givetvis inte täcka in alla olika publiceringsformer. Vi tar utgångspunkt i frågor om vad författarskap innebär i nya medieformat och hur man kan arbeta med källkritiska problemställningar när författarskapet inte alltid är tydligt.