We should start with a bit of clarity about Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule. It is of course not a rule, nor indeed is it Gladwell’s. It is a phrase that he popularised in his rather enjoyable book Outliers. Neither is it the first time somebody has made an attack on it. Last year there was some spirited discussion when David Epstein of Sports Illustrated gave the example of two high jumpers in the Olympics, one with over 20,00 hours of practice and  one with hardly any, and humorously reframing the rule as 10,000 hours plus or minus 10,000 hours. 

Behind the claims are rather fundamental arguments as to whether genetics (born with it) or practice (developed the skill) explain performance, and of course both play a role. In response to Epstein Gladwell properly pointed out that there is a difference between physical domains of excellence and those with significant cognitive elements. That is, developing expertise in chess is not the same as developing excellence in high jumping. One, has the potential to be heavily influenced by genetics, the other needs to be learned. One may have an inherent talent for chess, but the moves and strategies do not reside in our genetics. 

The academics who undertook the recent study used an approach called meta-analysis. Rather than study performance themselves, they review the academic literature to collect relevant studies and provide an overview of what we know about, as academics term it, deliberate practice. Their study included 111 independent samples and a sample of 11,135 participants. To conduct the analysis they look for variance in performance that is correlated with different inputs. In this case effect of deliberate practice on performance. The results are extremely interesting. In summary they find deliberate practice explains the variance in performance as follows

• Games 26%
• Music 21%
• Sports 18%
• Education 4%
• Professions 1%

A suggested explanation for the lack of variance accounted for in Education and Professions is the difficulty properly defining deliberate practice in these domains and that some in the study may have already had significant expertise before starting. For training and education professionals, it underpins the difficulty associated with trying to assess the return on investment that might come from interventions. 

In the other domains the findings are significant and substantial, but do not meet the hurdle of supporting a view that performance is predominantly explained by deliberate practice. So in that sense there is some debunking done. What the study doesn’t do (it didn’t set out to) is look at extreme elites. Those only at the very top of their domains, the outliers, to isolate the impact of deliberate performance. In that sense the research is talking about something different to Gladwell. So, it’s not a rule, but we knew that already and practice may not make perfect, but it does have an impact.

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Publishing in peer reviewed journals is the primary means to disseminate quality controlled ‘knowledge’ in most academic disciplines. Through an accumulation of articles, each adding a small element to the body of knowledge, the field develops and grows over time. Journals then become the record of the academic conversation in a field. The importance of publishing has taken on a more explicit perspective in recent years as university/school/department rankings (see links below) have grown in prominence as proxies for performance measurement. The introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its sucessor the Research Excellence Framework (REF) added even more impetus to publishing in the UK. Whether these drives are in the best long term interests of science and the societies they serve is an argument for another day. The pressures are here now, and they have implications. At a micro level the implications for academics are that they have to, if they wish to progress in their careers, play the game and publish.

At the same time, as this pressure to publish increases, there is a growing backlash against profit making journal publishers and a drive for more Open Access. The argument for Open Access, in its simplest form, is that the public paid for the research to be done and so it should not have to pay again to read it.The big system shift here is that the author/institution pays to fund the publishing costs, rather than the publisher charging to cover the costs (and profit). The drive for Open Access received a significant boost this year when Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council sent an email to all staff explaining that the costs were now prohibitive and asked them to consider resigning fom some journals that wouldn’t play ball. Harvard have their own Open Access portal (DASH) Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (NUI Maynooth has a similar repository eprints repository). There is even a list of 13,000 academics who intend to boycott Elsevier, a major academic publisher, because of their ‘business practices’. Some institutions will of course embrace the change more whole heartedly than others and it is worth listening to Yale’s librarian to get an insight into some of the nuanced issues this initiative creates for academics but, generally, this initiative is gaining momentum.

The changes are bringing a number of particular conditions to bear on the “market” for Open Access journal. One, the concept of Open Access (and indirectly by default the concept of author pays) has been legitimised through the endorsement of the concept by Harvard and others. While this is an endorsement of the concept, it is easy, particularly in the early days, for publishers to equate all Open Access as being good – the small independent publisher taking on the giants for the benefit of society. It is little surprise then to see most Predatory Publishers make statements about being ‘fair to the authors’ and adhering to ‘principles’ of Open Access to create the air of an honourable organisation. Two, the increased pressure to publish has created an increase in the supply of articles without an equivalent growth in traditional publication outlets. As a consequence, authors then start to move further afield to look for publication outlets. Three, academics under increasing pressure to publish for career advancement and even job retention, may be less selective when choosing the journals they publish in and also look for quicker routes to publication. Four, Open Access is new and it is not always easy to be clear about which which journals are credible high quality outlets and which are less so. Five, technology advancements have created an opportunity to, at little cost, create a counterfeit presence with back office systems and then mass mail potential victims. The ability to create very credible looking websites at low cost makes this all too easy. These forces have lead to conditions for the emergence of what are now being called Predatory Publishers. Jeff Beall, Professor and librarian at the University of Colorado has a very active blog discussing the issue. The blog provides a list of questionable journals and I used it as a starting point for some investigating.

Just an evening of research and a few emails brought up examples worth sharing. Jeff’s journal list brought me directly to the Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and  and Information Technology (JKMEIT). This quite impressively designed site proudly notes that it is indexed in EBSCO (an extremely well known academic database). Many journal websites fraudulently make a similar claim but, JKMEIT is indeed indexed on EBSCO. (EBSCO is subscription access only – those with access can see the journal here). So, how do you get your paper into the EBSCO database? According to the submission process on the JKMEIT website you simply email the paper, receive an ID after review (no details are given on the process and no indicative time-lines are provided), and then send the money (€125). So, is it really that simple to get a paper in a recognised academic database? Well, actually it seems to be. This absolute gem on the subtotal button in Excel made it in. There is another issue though, the journal, JKMEIT, is on EBSCO but, not all of  the ‘scientific’ publications on the JKMEIT website are indexed and there is no indication on the website which ones are or are not indexed. This dreadful example of what is described on the website as a “scientific paper” will give you some idea of the quality criteria for publication. It is listed with others that are in the ‘real’ JKMEIT journal without explanation of the difference (and it has a cover page with the JKMEIT logo). The site also shares that it is now listed on EconLit, which it is. The site statement reads that “We are proud to announce that since August 29, 2011 Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology is listed in EconLit. “…the journal has been evaluated and accepted for listing in EconLit” (Liz Braunstein, Production Editor, EconLit)”. I have written to EconLit to get there views on the example article above. I will update the blog if I get an answer.

So what JKMEIT seem to have done is to create a journal with some substance, publish it online,  and have it indexed in EBSCO and listed on EconLit creating an air of credibility. Having created the journal it now co-exists on the website with other ‘scientific’ articles mixing the two without making this evident. Sticking with the ‘real’ JKMEIT journal for the moment; the first issue of the journal in EBSCO is Volume 1 Issue 4 2011 and if you follow the menu system on the website it brings you to a listing of the issue articles. I compared both the EBSCO listing and the JKMEIT website listing and found a discrepancy. One article, the final article on the website list for Volume 1 Issue 4  is not on EBSCO.

I then found that if you click on the first sub menu of the Journal Issues button, Volume1/2011 (and not on the Issue no. list) it brings you to a single PDF of the entire journal issue. Journal Volume 1 Issue 4 is here but the extra article is not. Moving on to the last issue of the journal currently available on EBSCO, Volume II Issue 1, and crosschecking, I found that this time there were two papers (1, 2) on the website that are not available in EBSCO or from the downloadable journal PDF.

I then moved on to some of the more recent ‘real’ journal papers and there is a dizzying collapse in quality. While earlier papers made some attempt to present a volume/substance, some of the later ones are monumentally poor – I am really interested to hear what EconLit think and how they would evaluate this. The slight of hand is the way the website interleaves papers that appear in the journal with others that are just listed on the website. Everything on the website purports to be JKMEIT. Some of the ‘scientific articles’ are published on the website with a JKMEIT cover page (but with no volume number etc.) clearly to give the impression to the reader and the author that the papers are published in JKMEIT. The site doe not make this distinction clear and neither does the submission process that will accept your €125 per article. My clear advice – stay well away from this journal.

 A further scan down Jeff’s list and the very credible looking journal title of the International Journal of Business and Commerce caught my attention. The journal explains that the peer review process may take “2-3 weeks”. In a world where reviews are always measured in months and sometimes years, this is a red flag (it also plays to the need of a frustrated academic trying to publish quickly). Once the article is accepted the author just needs to pay the US$140 to have it published. All very straightforward but, unlikely to provide any real quality assurance for the academic community, let alone the casual reader. This journal has an associate editor in the US and in Europe. I contacted one of the US based Associate Editors who told me:

“As Associate Editor, my role is undefined; I think the journal is using my resume and reputation as Associate to bring in authors from the SE Asia and South Central Asian areas. Are they reputable, they were 1.5 years’ ago. Are they now?  I really haven’t been in the loop to know their current activities and they editorial directions they’ve chosen.”

I am still waiting for a response from the European Associate Editor. I went on to review some recent publications in IJBC and spotted a paper in this journal from an academic in the well known Ashridge College in the UK. Ashridge have their own very comprehensive Open Access database and so I checked to see if the article was genuine, and indeed it was available for download from the Ashridge repository. I remember my mother chastising me for pulling on the end of a piece of thread in a woolen jumper – the result of which lead to some unravelling. So, nothing learned and article in hand I gave in to the impetuous desire to pull this particular thread. I cross referenced (on Ashridges own well functioning database) the article author to see what else they had published recently and found them to be quite prolific, with 12 publications in 2012 alone. As I scanned down the list I noticed one particular journal article “(2012) Diversity management in South Africa: Inclusion, identity, intention, power and expectations. African Journal of Business Management, Vol. 6(4), pp. 1749 – 1759″. The journal title caught my interest, I had seen it mentioned recently. Could it be the one that Jeff Beal and Anne-Wil Harzing had been discussing – well, yes, and yes. I was even more surprised to see that the third author on this paper is Ashridge’s Dean and Chief Executive, the highly respected Kai Peters. I wrote to Kai sharing the information I had on the journal and his response was pretty much as I suspected. The lead author in a search for publishing outlets in a world of scarcity had found what, at the time, seemed like a sensible journal to publish in. Lesson learned.

The shifting economics of the traditional model to the Open Access model brings with it a shift in incentives. Traditional publishers have to sell their subscriptions to libraries to survive. They need credible journals that academics want to read to be able to do that. On the other hand Open Access can serve the short term need of academics under pressure and in a hurry to publish. The Open Access journal is not selling “access to read” to a customer looking for knowledge but, “access to publish” to an academic in need of a publications outlet. Where being free and easy accepting journal articles will damage the profitability of the traditional publisher, it can enhance the profitability of a predatory open access journal particularly in the short term and while the existing market pressures exist. 

The conclusion is straight forward. There are a growing number of journals, using a variety of mechanisms to present a credible front, willing to use dubious practices to lure Academics to pay for publication in Open Access journals that have little or know quality control and/or are open to manipulation. The issue is not the payment, somebody has to pay for the costs of publishing. The issue is the quality control in these journals and the integrity of their systems - editors with no real involvement, peer review without any real scrutiny, and unclear processes are just not good enough. If we don’t eradicate this problem the development of Open Access will undoubtedly be damaged, and a tarnished image can be difficult to shake off. I would urge major academic institutions to leverage their reputations and build their own (with independent editorial boards) Open Access journals and take the market away from less scrupulous operators. In the mean time everybody, institutions, libraries, schools/departments and academics, must work to ensure the integrity of their publication outlets. As the pressure rises on academics to move from traditional outlets to emerging Open Access, caveat emptor must be the order of the day. After all, it could happen to a Dean!

 University Rankings
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings
http://www.shanghairanking.com/

References

http://www.harzing.com/download/predatoryoa.pdf
http://scholarlyoa.com/
http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-publishers-are-corrupting-open-access-1.11385
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419779

My first foray into reference management software was with the rather enigmatic Procite (no longer supported on the latest operating systems). It had it’s quirks, but survived all the abuse I threw at it during my doctoral studies. With a little hacking I even managed to get it to link to manual scans of documents – downside, everything had to be manually keyed!

The needs it served well were three fold:

1. It provided a safe repository for all my important references.

2. It automatically created a bibliography from inserted citations (using the exciting cite while u write facility).

3. It provided an easy means of retrieval (if not saving) images of journal articles.

I probably would have stuck with Procite for much longer had it been fully supported for later versions of Windows, but beyond XP it seemed to need a never ending stream of patches and hacks to keep it alive. When it was coming to the end of its practical life I looked around to see what else was available and was quite unimpressed. There were free/cheap online tools such as Zotero which had a level of functionality, but not the stability that I wanted. These materials take a long time to build and losing them would be rather painful.  In the end I plumped for EndNote, the proprietary and expensive alternative to Procite (owned by the same people at that point).  The transition was simple, files transferred easily (links to files not so well, but they functioned to a point). EndNote maintained all of the benefits of Procite listed above and added

4. A very comprehensive citation formatting feature.

To be fair Procite had this citation editing feature, but manipulating it was clunky, unintuitive and not always successful.

So why try Mendeley. Well, one of my doctoral students seemed to be getting on well with it and we recently had a visit from colleagues (Kathrin Moeslein & Angelica Bullinger) who were hugely impressed by it, so I gave it a whirl.

To be honest I wasn’t sure what I would find so it was a poke around under the hood to see what it could do and here are my conclusions. In relation to the  existing benefits of EndNote I found:

1. Provides a safe repository. Yes, possibly better. Better simply because there is a Desktop Version of Mendeley which, when linked to the online library (you need to create a free account to see the online library), synchronises a copy of your files in the cloud (but beyond 500MB, which is easy to breach, you need a premium account).

2. Auto creates a bibliogrpahy. Yes, sort of, but see point 4 below.

3. Easy means of full text retrieval. Mendeley trumps Endnote on this front. The interface is clear and obvious. The PDF handling is excellent. As a bonus you can now

3.a. Mark up PDF’s within Mendelay and save your notes and highlights – very useful!

3.b. Add to this much easier means of saving PDF’s and importing citations. There are 8 ways to add documents. The most beautiful of which is to drag and drop the pdf file (or link if not behind a paywall) and Mendelay strips the metadata (assuming it is there – publishers please take note) and automatically creates the reference and saves the files. The one-click web importer is almost as nice and when the full functionality is eventually implemented to allow you to download PDF’s based on your institute licence, it will be a real winner.

4. Citation/reference format editor. This is probably the weakest element of Mendeley. It does have a cite while you write feature which works well, and it does have a capacity to auto generate a bibliography. The problem is that ones that I tested did not generate with the precision necessary for journal submission. The good news is they can be edited in the Citation Style Language (CSL) open standard. The bad news is that for the moment you need to be happy editing XML with a standard text editor which is not for the faint hearted and rather time consuming. The, even more, good news is there is a project now running in Columbia (with Mendelay and funded by the Sloan Foundation) to create a CSL editor for mere mortals.

Mendeley brings along two additional bonuses.

5. Sync with multiple computers. Most academics work on several machines. I work on three machines, a work desktop and a home desktop for processing power and screen size, and a laptop for portability (an an iPad for ultra portability, and an iphone for ultra-ultra portability). Mendeley seems to play nicely across them all. Importantly, although the internet interface is really useful, the desktop version will run stand-a-lone of there is no internet connection making it possible to work on those long flights.

6. Collaborate. This I think is the real jewel in the Mendeley crown. While EndNote web takes a shot at collaboration, Mendeley hits a bulls-eye. Share a library with colleagues or your doctoral students, pass notes, messages, and keep each other paper libraries up to date. I haven’t had time to fully test this yet, but this looks like a game changer.

There are other additional benefits such as the paper search features, the ability to join groups, create an online profile and many others. This is after all the first real attempt at a Web 2.0 reference management software suite. This has the sense of a community that is trying to build a useful tool set with some core principles that ensure you can free your data when you want to. It is good to see this is still alive several years after the business funding arrived.

So am I going to switch over. Yes, and no!

Yes I am going to use it for its reference management and collaboration features. The growing ease with which it will managed saving articles seems a real winner. However, it is certainly not ready to replace Endnote as a citation tool when writing articles, unless you want to manually edit the bibliography (I’d rather leave academia!). So for the moment I will export from Mendeley and import into trusted old Endnote for writing. It is an extra step, but quick and easy. Roll on the CSL editing interface so we can complete the revolution.

Follow Robert on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/robertgalavan

Apple last paid a dividend back in 1995 and a change to a 17 year old policy is bound to get a lot of attention. It is certainly a significant move but, I don’t believe it is actually of much strategic importance. At the same time Apple announced that they would be engaging in a multi-annual share buy back programme. This too is significant but, not necessarily strategic. So how can a major share buy back and a dividend policy of the scale ($45 Billion) announced by Apple not have strategic implications?

Let’s look at some of the numbers. The dividend announced is $2.65 quarterly ($10.60 annualised) per share. With Apple stock hitting the €600 mark that represents a dividend yield of 1.76%. At over 930 million outstanding shares that adds up to an annual $10 Billion dividend payment making it one of the largest absolute dividend payouts on the US stockmarket.

The share buy back scheme is committed collecting $10 Billion over the next three years. There is not enough detail provided to work out the exact number here, but in the conference call Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, mentioned an expected $4 Billion cash draw in the first 12 months which is the net impact of share buy back and the cash cost of dividend payments to net settle stock options being vested. Interestingly, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cooke, has waived his right to dividend payments on his unvested stock options. As you would expect it is difficult enough to unpick these numbers, but given that the first year cash draw is estimated to be $4 Billion ($12 Billion if it remained stable over the three years) and the estimates are for a total $45 Billion cash draw, which leaves $15 Billion after dividends, we can presume that some of the $3 Billion buffer is for expected stock price rises.

So overall Apple will be down by $45 Billion dollars in cash over the next three years, right! Well sort of. Relatively this is correct, but in absolute terms that doesn’t explain the whole story. In the past year Apple generated $41 Billion in free cash and if it continues at that rate it will actually swell its bank balance $27 Billion dollars in the coming year even after the share buy back and dividend payments. To thread water and maintain its cash balance it needs to keep generating free cash at the rate it did in mid 2010. All this is of course assuming there are no monster acquisitions.

So if, as it seems likely, Apple will have north of $100 Billion cash this time next year, what could they buy. Well Google might be a little out of their reach for an outright purchase with a market capitalisation of $210 Billion, but Philips or Sony could be a snip at $20 Billion a piece!

So what does all this mean for Apple’s strategy. In short, very little. The decision to pay such huge dividends is a function of a company that can grow revenues with excellent margins that translate rapidly into cash. This is a company that grows organically and while it needs cash for that growth and some flexibility to make acquisitions it has more than enough cash to cope.

The bigger Apple question is what does the pipeline look like. From Tim Cooke you get the standard answer – trust me it’s great. It is however pretty clear that the iPad and iPhone markets are moving (slowly) towards commoditisation. Unit prices are not growing and over the next 24 months Apple will be forced to bring out infill products to cover the range as they already have with the iPod in the form of Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch. This helps maintain revenue but hurts margin –  and  Apple’s share price demands margin. For the moment we will have to wait and see what emerges. Maintaining significant growth from the current baseline needs something like a new $1 Billion business every week! That will mean they need to own and probably create some new market spaces. Will it be new markets, new products, new sectors, new services, or integrated offerings. Yes. It will take all of the above to feed the Apple monster. This is going to be fun to watch.

Follow @robertgalavan

by Robert Galavan, PhD

Professor of Strategic Management at the National University of Ireland Maynooth

This post was originally published here http://facultyblog.nuimbusiness.ie/2012/03/23/what-does-the-apple-dividend-say-about-its-strategy