From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:34:21 +0400

Hi All

Sandy, when I refer to the IT Staff, I'm talking about the
institution's IT Staff - in other words, the university or college's
IT support staff who may have an impact on all servers that fall under
the university IP address.  But, whoever it is, there must be
_someone_ who is dedicated to the setting up, maintenance and support
of the publisher's servers (even if out-sourced) -  or are you saying
that that type of work is taken on in an ad hoc fashion by regular
publishing staff?

Regards

Ken

------

On 17 February 2014 04:36, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:53:42 -0600
>
> IT staff? When you're talking about university presses, as Joe was, I
> daresay with few exceptions only the larger presses have anyone on
> their staff dedicated to IT issues.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
> At 8:48 PM +0100 2/13/14, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>>
>> From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 07:50:51 +0100
>>
>> Hi All
>>
>> I think Joe is correct.  And I think part of the reason is that, in
>> huge organisations, so much responsibility has been handed over to IT
>> staff, that very little of what they do is known to senior management
>> (apart from the IT staff who serve in senior management, of course).
>>
>> This is a very real problem, because senior management tends to
>> classify everything to do with computers as "IT stuff," and fails to
>> see that what their IT staff does reflects directly on the
>> institution, especially when institutional ethics are involved.   In
>> this case, the IT staff will know that they are collecting data, but
>> it is likely that the senior management don't know about it.  (For
>> example, how many librarians on this list have ever asked their IT
>> staff about what information they are gathering on their users, how,
>> where and for how long the data are stored, and discussed the ethics
>> of that?).
>>
>> To answer your question regarding instances of tracking by
>> organisations: I don't know of any, but the study of such tracking by
>> medical organisations that I mentioned in my previous mail can be
>> found at http://ispub.com/IJMI/6/2/14386
>>
>> I attempted to follow up on that study by surveying the medical
>> organisations, trying to get their opinion on how much they knew about
>> the data gathering, and how this fitted in with medical ethics (given
>> that there was almost no informed consent on the data gathering).  I
>> received a 1% responses rate, so, obviously, could not publish
>> anything.  Apart from normal low response rates to surveys, I would
>> think that the non-response rate probably had to do with
>> organisations' closing ranks, or, because it would have been seen as
>> "IT stuff," would have been forwarded to the IT dept, and they
>> certainly would not have responded.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Ken
>>
>> ------
>>
>> Dr. Ken Masters
>> Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
>> Medical Education Unit
>> College of Medicine & Health Sciences
>> Sultan Qaboos University
>> Sultanate of Oman
>> E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education