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