Michigan State University Application Deadline: 13 January 2025 The Department of Media and Information (MI) invites applicants for one Advanced Assistant, Associate or Full Professor to complement and expand our dynamic and interdisciplinary faculty. MI is home to a range of faculty from different disciplines and supports an array of research areas, including human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, rural computing, game studies and design, and the relationships between technology and policy, health and wellness, and society. Candidates should contribute to or expand one or more of these areas through the use of computational and/or quantitative approaches.

Rutgers University Application Deadline: 13 January 2025 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey seeks an experienced, collaborative, and innovative academic leader to serve as Dean of Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Communication and Information . Reporting to the Chancellor of Rutgers-New Brunswick, Dr. Francine Conway, the dean of the School of Communication and Information, will serve as a key member of the Chancellor’s leadership team. One of the nation's oldest and largest institutions of higher education, Rutgers is among America's highest-ranked, most diverse public research and land grant universities. The university serves more than 69,000 students from all 50 states and 130 countries and is located on three campuses– New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark–and consists of 29 schools and colleges. The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) is located on the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus. SC&I was created in 1982 with the merger of the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, the School of Communication Studies, and the Department of Urban Journalism. SC&I is committed to equipping students with the tools necessary to succeed in today’s global communication, information, and media environments. The school’s programs prepare students interested in organizational and health communication, social and new media, library and information science, and information technology for vital careers in today’s digital workplace. The dean of SC&I is chief academic and executive officer of the school and is responsible for ensuring the highest levels of academic excellence. The ideal candidate will be dedicated to building upon the excellence of the school and to promoting the significance of the fields of communication and information. The dean will build upon the strengths and opportunities within Rutgers-New Brunswick to expand research, teaching, and outreach across diverse disciplines and schools. The dean will make the most of our regional context, which includes diverse communities in New Jersey and close proximity to New York City, Philadelphia, as well as access throughout the Northeast. The new dean will possess a record of outstanding leadership, including a commitment to both undergraduate and graduate education; dedication to excellence in research, teaching, outreach, access and opportunity; and the capacity to generate public and private resources for the school. Successful candidates will demonstrate distinguished scholarly qualifications and accomplishments that warrant appointment as a tenured faculty at the rank of professor in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information.

iConference 2025 , hosted by Indiana University Bloomington (USA), will be the 20th annual iConference of the iSchools organization. The virtual academic program takes place 11-14 March 2025 and the onsite academic program takes place 18-22 March 2025. The 2025 iConference theme is “Living in an AI-gorithmic world”. All information scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to participate  in the conference. An iSchools affiliation is not required. Call for Participation With the theme "Living in an AI-gorithmic World,” iConference 2025 seeks to explore the potentially profound implications of living in a world increasingly influenced by algorithmic processes, such as generative artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language models (LLM), data analytics, and related technologies. Because so much of modern life is impacted by these technologies, we encourage everyone to take part in iConference 2025 and join scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders from across the intellectual landscape in exploring the profound implications of living in an AI-gorithmic world. Join us for presentations, workshops and panels investigating the ways in which cultural, political, organizational, economic and other social dynamics have been and are/will be altered by algorithmic processes. Meet researchers critically analyzing the economic transformations brought about by AI, LLMs machine learning, and predictive analytics. Discuss with experts the psychological and sociological dimensions of living under algorithmic influences. See how interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the gap between technology, society, and human values. Virtual Academic Program : 11 - 14 March 2025 Onsite Academic Program in Bloomington, Indiana, USA : 18 - 22 March 2025 Please register  to participate in iConference 2025. Registration is now open on the ConfTool   website, and full registration details can be found here: https://www.ischools.org/registration-and-access Early Bird Registration Deadline is 31 January 2025.  Program overview iConference tracks Virtual Physical Student Symposium ✔ (AP & EU / African sessions only) ✔ (NA session only) Doctoral Colloquium ✔ (AP & EU / African sessions only) ✔ (NA session only) Early Career Colloquium ✘ ✔ Workshops & Panels ✘ ✔ Posters ✔ ✔ Chinese Research Papers ✔ ✘ Spanish-Portuguese Research Papers ✔ ✘ Short Research Papers ✔ ✔ Full Research Papers ✔ ✔ More program details will be provided in the coming months. Additional information for travels to the onsite part of the conference in Bloomington, Indiana, USA can be found on our dedicated travel information  website.

University of California Berkeley Application Deadline: Friday, Jan 3, 2025 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time) The School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, invites applications for appointment to the faculty at the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor rank. Digital technologies have extraordinary capacity to improve the quality of human life, enrich personal and social interactions, boost economic productivity, solve large scale societal problems from mass transportation to public health, and more. Over the last decade, however, it has become clear that the human and social components of the overall systems are rate-limiting factors in those transformations. What is needed now and for the foreseeable future is attention to the security, safety, and trust dimensions that emerge when people interact with digital technologies. We seek applications from scholars who work to address this intersection directly. An ideal candidate will have some core technical foundation, but will be working with technology to address other parts of the security, safety, and trust system that depends on people and institutions as much as it does on technology. This includes areas like trusted/trustworthy algorithms and algorithmic decision making. We are looking for scholars whose work takes into account multicultural environments and issues of poverty and exclusion on a global basis and assesses trust more broadly than simply transparency or explainability. The School of Information is a graduate research and education community committed to expanding access to information and to improving its usability, reliability, and credibility while preserving security and privacy. This requires the insights of scholars from diverse fields — information and computer science, design, social sciences, management, law, and policy. The I School is home to the Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program, and partner of the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC).

Issue #93 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Retraction watch recently published a reference to a Nature  article by Diana Kwon called; ““AI-Generated Images Threaten Science — Here’s How Researchers Hope to Spot Them.”¹ The quality of AI generated images has improved over recent years.    “Already, an arms race is emerging as integrity specialists, publishers and technology companies race to develop AI tools that can assist in rapidly detecting deceptive, AI-generated elements of papers. …  Pinpointing AI-produced images poses a huge challenge: they are often almost impossible to distinguish from real ones, at least with the naked eye.” ¹ This could well mean that some papers are slipping through, but new AI-based tools may help to catch them. Some companies have already started to develop tools:  “The makers behind tools such as Imagetwin and Proofig, which use AI to detect integrity issues in scientific figures, are expanding their software to weed out images created by generative AI.” ¹  Whether these new tools are reliable is of course a serious question:    “‘I have great hopes for these tools,’ [Jana] Christopher says. But she notes that their outputs will always need to be assessed by an expert who can verify the issues they flag….These tools are ‘limited, but certainly very useful, as it means we can scale up our effort of screening submissions,’ she adds.” ¹ Publishers themselves are interested in addressing the problem, because it affects their reputations, but a serious question is how capably and how fast the publishing industry will be able address the problem. It seems unlikely that even major publishers have the in-house AI expertise to build effective detection tools, or they could have done so already.  Committees working on the problem, including “United2Act and the STM Integrity Hub”¹  The focus of both of these projects appears to be paper mills, which are definitely a concern for the scholarly community, and represent a problem that legitimate publishers have a commercial interest in addressing. Kevin Patrick says:    “Fraudsters shouldn’t sleep well at night. They could fool today’s process, but I don’t think they’ll be able to fool the process forever. ”¹     Forever may be longer than scholars want to wait. Perhaps the iSchools should set up a research group to address the problem. 1 : Kwon, Diana. “AI-Generated Images Threaten Science — Here’s How Researchers Hope to Spot Them.” Nature , November 5, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03542-8 .

University of Tennessee Knoxville Application Deadline: The position will be open until filled The Precision Health & Environment (PHE) cluster at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, seeks exceptional candidates to fill one 9-month tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level, primarily in the School of Information Sciences , starting August 1, 2025. The PHE cluster is part of the “It Takes a Volunteer” cluster hiring initiative at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. The PHE will be a cluster team of excellence in systems modeling, artificial intelligence, health informatics, health information, and communication specialists, health care, epidemiology, environmental engineering, natural language processing, and machine learning. As part of this institutional priority initiative, new hires will join a dynamic core group of scientific collaborators with complementary experience and a shared interest in building a national reputation for excellence and innovation in PHE. In addition, clusters are expected to work together to grow the University’s reputation in PHE through shared grant proposals, publications, and innovative new curricular programming.

University of North Texas Application Deadline: The review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the search is closed. The Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas (UNT) invites applications at the rank of Associate or Full Professor with the additional responsibility as the Chair of Department of Information Science. The department chair holds a 12-month appointment. We seek candidates who are dynamic, enthusiastic, and visionary leaders with an internationally recognized research reputation in one or more core information science areas that complement existing departmental strengths in information and knowledge creation, use, communication, discovery, selection, retrieval, analysis, evaluation, and management. The candidates will be expected to foster a vibrant educational environment, promote innovative research, and enhance community engagement. The Chair is expected to collaborate with faculty, staff, and students to advance the department’s mission and vision and bring a collaborative and forward-thinking approach to interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary education. Candidates must have an earned doctorate in information science or related field. The successful candidate will have demonstrated an active research agenda, with a consistent and robust record of grant seeking and high-quality publications, as well as a strong commitment to innovative teaching. Applicants seeking appointment with tenure at the associate professor or professor rank must meet UNT’s criteria for tenure at the appropriate level.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Application Deadline: January 14, 2025 As part of our growing, strategic focus on AI along with data science, School of Information Studies (SOIS) is inviting applications for a full-time tenure track Assistant Professor position. The candidate will join us in preparing future information professionals to understand and apply AI-based technologies and techniques in various information organizations, including libraries, archives and private organizations, to add value by solving real-world problems. We seek scholars whose research, teaching, and impact in the field of AI in IST/LIS emphasize on: generative AI, natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs),deep learning or other machine learning (ML) frameworks, the interaction between human and AI, and AI in applied contexts, with specific interest in information retrieval and searching; information organization (metadata, classification, and cataloging); recommendation systems; chatbots and virtual reference services; the preservation, discovery, and accessibility of digital materials; data science (text and data mining); knowledge management and information visualization; user behavior analysis; sentiment and opinion analysis; and cybersecurity and/or anomaly detection. The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an active research agenda and contribute to the scholarship of the School and College through externally funded research, teach both face-to-face and online classes at graduate and undergraduate levels, develop courses focused on AI at graduate and undergraduate levels, mentor graduate students, contribute to service in accordance with the university policy, and participate in school, college and university activities.

Issue #92 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Retraction watch highlighted two articles from the journal Nature about related academic integrity problems. The article by Jackson Ryan about “Exposing Predatory Journals: Anonymous Sleuthing Account Goes Public” explains that his reason for the anonymous posts on X (formerly Twitter) was to avoid the problems that finally forced Jeffrey Beall to take down his blog about predatory publishing. His pseudonym is “ Publishing with Integrity ”¹   “Publishing with Integrity was initially set up to report on, and try to address, the issues posed by predatory journals and publishers. It quickly became apparent that this was the tip of a very big iceberg, and there are many other challenges that need to be addressed, including paper mills, which churn out fake papers to order; buying and selling authorships; and, in the past few years, the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, especially large language models that can generate hundreds of articles in a matter of minutes.”¹ The second article by Richard Van Noorden had the title “Journals with High Rates of Suspicious Papers Flagged by Science-Integrity Start-Up.” It discusses a website called “ Argos ” that    “... gives papers a risk score on the basis of their authors’ publication records, and on whether the paper heavily cites already-retracted research. A paper categorized as ‘high risk’ might have multiple authors whose other studies have been retracted for reasons related to misconduct, for example. Having a high score doesn’t prove that a paper is low quality, but suggests that it is worth investigating.” ²   The article mentioned two other websites that “... look for red flags in papers.” ²  Argos offers a table of “[t]he publishers with the greatest number — and proportion — of 'high-risk' articles in their portfolio from 2014 to 2024…” ² It is perhaps unsurprising that Hindawi, which is now closed, has by far the highest negative score. Publishers take the ratings seriously:    “... Chris Graf, head of research integrity at Springer Nature, says that the journal investigates every issue raised with it. He adds that the proportion of its content that has been highlighted is comparatively low given its size.”²   The problem is not that the publishers are indifferent, but that they simply do not have the capacity to deal with the scale of potential integrity violations. Universities can help only if they ease the pressure on early career academics to publish beyond their capacity. They should have the freedom to think. 1 : Ryan, Jackson. “Exposing Predatory Journals: Anonymous Sleuthing Account Goes Public.” Nature , October 22, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03321-5   .   2 : Van Noorden, Richard. “Journals with High Rates of Suspicious Papers Flagged by Science-Integrity Start-Up.” Nature , October 22, 2024.   https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03427-w .

Wayne State University Application Deadline: open until filled The School of Information Sciences (SIS) at Wayne State University invites applications for one open rank tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor level.  The position is open to applicants from various fields including information science, information management, data science and library science.  We seek candidates whose work advances scholarly agendas in their given fields, complements our faculty’s strengths, who delivers excellent instruction for students, and who have a record of achievement that will continue to Wayne States’s community engagement mission. Reporting to the Associate Dean of the School of Information Sciences (SIS), serving as an advisor to SIS students, and providing service to SIS, the Assistant/Associate/Full Professor will perform research and teach in one or more of the following areas: Information management and ethics, data analytics, cybersecurity, web development, and database management, plus teach one of the SIS core courses. Candidates are expected to contribute to the growing and dynamic online teaching environment.

National Taiwan University Application Deadline: 10 January 2025 The Department of Library and Information Science at the National Taiwan University is seeking to employ two full-time faculty members. Candidates should have a Doctoral degree in library and information science, information management, information and communication, educational technology or related fields. Those who can teach required courses in LIS in Mandarin Chinese and English are preferred. The Appointment begins on August 1, 2025 or February 1, 2026. Official ranks will be appointed according to working experience and qualifications.

Issue #91 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Loren Frank wrote an article for The Transmitter  on 8 October 2024 entitled “The S-index Challenge: Develop a metric to quantify data-sharing success”.¹ The context is the neuroscience community, but the issues are far broader. He cites several reasons for the importance of data sharing: “ Sharing the data generated by experiments is critical for reproducibility, and it enables reuse of data that may have taken years to collect. Sharing the code used to transform data into scientific results is also critical, both to boost reproducibility and to reduce the amount of time trainees spend developing these tools. ”¹ The US National Institutes of Health are sponsoring a challenge to devise “... the best idea on how to quantify sharing.”¹ The incentive is a million dollar prize for the person with the best idea. Frank warns that the challenge is not easy:    “ The index would ideally consider not only how many datasets or software repositories a group shares, but how useful they are to the community. At the same time, … Major hurdles still remain—most notably, limited funding to support data-sharing tools and limited technical expertise to adopt them. ”¹    The requirement to share the code may discourage corporate researchers, partly because of the complexity of the task: “ … writing code designed to derive a result and writing code that is useful to others can be very different things, and much of the code written in a laboratory is incomprehensible to anyone other than the author (and sometimes even to them.) ”¹ Anyone who has done significant coding in a corporate shared-code environment knows how true this problem is, even for people who are trying to write easily maintained code. Another feature is the requirement to enable tracking:   “... the S-index will need to offer a way to track when datasets or code are used by others, as well as how often that use turns into one or more publications. ” ¹ Tracking matters in order to enable following up on errors in both the data and the code, both of which affect reuse.  If someone wins the prize, there is good reason to think that other fields could benefit from the standard, assuming they have the resources and the will to do so. 1 : Frank, Loren. “The S-Index Challenge: Develop a Metric to Quantify Data-Sharing Success.” The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives, October 8, 2024.   https://www.thetransmitter.org/open-neuroscience-and-data-sharing/the-s-index-challenge-develop-a-metric-to-quantify-data-sharing-success/ .