Australian Policy Online Blog

APO is turning 10 years old and it’s role in the policy and research landscape is as important as ever. To celebrate this with all our readers we are organising a number of competitions for conferences being held this year which will cover a rang of policy issues in locations around the country.

The next prize up for grabs is a ticket to the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare’s important annual conference Australia’s health 2012 held in Canberra on 21 June. The ticket is valued at over $450 and also includes a copy of the flagship report, Australia’s health 2012. To enter the draw email: admin@apo.org.au with ‘Health competition‘ as the subject line. Entries close: Friday 27 April.

Our most recent winner received a conference pass to the Institute of Public Administration Australia’s 2012 International Congress to be held in Melbourne in September – worth $2200!

More prizes will be offered as the year rolls on so keep a look out on the APO website!

All at APO would like to say a big thanks to all the hard working policy researchers who use our service.

We are pleased to see that the review of Extending legal deposit has been jump started again since it stalled in 2007. The Attorney-General’s department has recently released a consultation paper on the subject, focussed particularly on the National Library of Australia’s role.

Submissions are due by 14 April 2012. More information on making a submisison

This is an important issue for Australian Policy Online and our readers as we are very concerned that currently there are not adequate provisions for the collection, access and preservation of public policy related grey literature – informally published reports, working papers, discussion papers. Extending legal deposit is an important step towards enabling the NLA to take a leading role in this area and work with other organisations such as APO to collect full text copies of important documents.

The consultation paper states that:

The collection of legal deposit material forms a national record of Australia’s intellectual and creative endeavours and this discussion paper considers the potential benefits of extending the types of material collected.

Legal deposit has a long history in common law countries and has been a part of Australia’s copyright law since its colonial origins. Its genealogy may be traced back to the genesis of statutory copyright, the Statute of Anne in 1709, and even further to deposit licensing arrangements established in 1610 by the University of Oxford and the Stationer’s Company, a London-based guild of printers, booksellers and publishers.

It is generally recognised that legal deposit provides benefits to the Australian public by providing a reliable mechanism for the preservation of Australia’s documented heritage. The collection of legal deposit material forms a national record of Australia’s intellectual and creative endeavours, our cultural heritage, our history and way of life. Further public benefits are derived from deposit material, particularly as other copies cease to be commercially available over time.

The Attorney-General’s Department, working with the Office for the Arts in the Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport, is seeking comments from interested stakeholders on a proposed model to extend the legal deposit obligation in section 201 of the Copyright Act 1968 in relation to material deposited with the National Library of Australia (the National Library). Existing obligations to deposit print-based library materials under section 201 are not under consideration.

It will be interesting to watch the process and its impact and we look forward to working with the NLA in this space.

We have had a fun and very productive year in 2011 so as well as wishing all our readers a great summer holiday we would like to present a few of the highlights, achievements and acknowledgements for APO in 2011.

This year APO’s editors have monitored nearly 400 sources for research content and posted 1761 research listings, 232 commentary articles, 89 audio, 47 videos, 37 website listings and 18 topic guides. Of course we couldn’t have done this without the hard work and commitment of organisations across Australia and their dedication to open access research and better public policy.

Over 400 events, 120 jobs, 84 calls and 37 courses were advertised and we’d like to give a big thank you to all the organisations that supported APO by paying for advertising this year.

According to Google Analytics we had 792,721 visits to the site in 2011 and 475,074 unique visitors viewing 1.76 million pages.

This year we established a new partnership with the Australian National Institute for Public Policy at ANU and we are very happy to be working with this dynamic policy organisation. A big thank you to Adam Graycar, Jessie Borthwick and Mark Matthews for making the decision to support APO’s role in improving access to research on public policy issues for the whole community. We would like to wish Adam and Jessie all the best in their new roles and welcome a closer connection with the Crawford School at ANU.

A warm thanks also to the ongoing commitment and support of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, where we are based in Hawthorn, Melbourne. Particular thanks to Swinburne Institute’s Director Julian Thomas and our finance officer Grace Lee who have made sure that APO stays afloat for nearly 10 years now. We will be planning some celebrations in 2012 for the 10 year anniversary of APO.

We are very grateful for the continued support of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) and the Australian Communications and Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) which together allow us to provide specialised coverage of the Creative and Digital research sphere which now touches on almost every other policy area in some way.

We have some other interesting new content partnerships in the pipeline which you will hear more about in the new year.

Finally thanks should go to the hard working and enthusiastic APO team who put together an abundance of policy research and information every week – Penelope Aitken, Editor, Meghan Cummins, Deputy Editor, and Andrew Zammit, Deputy editor.  Meghan, an Industry Based Learning student from Swinburne University, will leave us in the new year for study in the UK. She has been dedicated, professional and quick to learn the ropes of online content production (and keep us up to date with the latest Twitter innovations). We are sorry to see her go and wish her all the best for her travels.

We are looking forward to making big improvements to the site next year when we move to Drupal 7 but we will try to keep all the things that our readers love about APO. We are also excited about getting a chance to do some research of our own as we embark on an ARC Linkage project looking at the current state of grey literature, policy innovation and access to knowledge and seeing if we can find ways to improve them.

Thanks to the organisations and departments who provide our content and to all the readers who use it to further their policy work and make Australia and the world, a better place. Have a wonderful summer break and see you in 2012.

Amanda Lawrence, Managing editor

The Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society recently published a white paper exploring how citizens use the internet to access information about key political issues. The report Political Issue Analysis System: Policy deliberation in the age of information abundance includes case studies of a number of online resources including OpenAustralia, Getup, National Forum, WeGov, Below the line and our very own Australian Policy Online.
Thanks to Craig Bellamy and the team at IBES for including APO in their research. We are certainly interested in solving some of the issues that were raised in the report, particularly that of access to current policy positions by major parties and this report is great encouragement to pursue this idea further.

The key recommendation of the report is:

One of the key themes that emerged from the workshops is that citizens find it difficult to locate quality policy information online. It also shows that there have been few attempts to aggregate the different policies of Australian political parties so that voters can compare and deliberate upon them. This appears to be a key barrier to the Internet being used effectively by Australian citizens to engage with formal democratic structures. Some of the key recommendations of this study include:

Enhanced policy documents:

Polices published by political parties should be made available in such a way that they can be aggregated into other systems so that citizens may compare policy positions (eg in machine readable formats, preferably using a neutral schema).

Pressure should be placed on the political parties to produce clear, concise, and understandable policy information for the public.

Structured meta-data standards and frameworks

• Metadata publishing standards and frameworks should be utilised by political parties when publishing documents so that the information aggregated is of a high-standard allowing it be utilised effectively.

Enhanced engagement through centralised policy aggregation:

• A central site needs to be developed where the key policies of the parties can be aggregated. This would allow the policies to be structured, browsed, and compared in innovative ways such as through visual or other means.
• The most likely developer of such a service should be a non-partisan group within the Federal public service (such as the AEC), a University, civil society group or, less ideally, a media outlet. This could build on previous projects, such as Australian Policy Online, OpenAustralia, however, it is important that such a project is open, non-commercial and both credible and trustworthy.

The emphasis is ours. Australian Policy Online would be very happy to work with anyone interested in looking at how to achieve these recommendations and get something off the ground in 2012.

Please email Amanda Lawrence alawrence@swin.edu.au if you’d like to discuss further.

Jodie van de Wetering at ABC Southern Queensland picked up on our recent listing of the best research reports for 2011 and interviewed Amanda Lawrence about APO for their radio and online news service. The story is below or read it at the ABC site

From youth detention to seniors’ sex lives, via Indigenous affairs and carbon pricing: Australian Policy Online counts down their most-viewed documents of 2011.

Reviews, reports, surveys, research: how does the average Aussie paddle through the ocean of documents being released by our country’s researchers and policy makers?

Australian Policy Online can help. A team of data-hounds based at Melbourne’s Swinburne University, the APO team sifts the tide of newly released information and catalogues the most relevant in its searchable online database.

As the year draws to a close, they’ve just released a list of the most clicked-upon documents on their site.

The list runs the length and breadth of the human condition, from juvenile detention to seniors’ sex lives, via asylum seekers, Indigenous affairs, the internet and the environment.

APO is the brainchild of the Australian National Institute for Public Policy and the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.

Managing editor Amanda Lawrence explains they’re not a research outfit or lobby group, more like a hand-curated digital library.

“Say the Productivity Commission publishes a report on its website, and the government produces a review on its website, and an academic centre produces a report and it goes up on their website.

“You could search for that information and it would come up eventually, but you’d have to know that it existed and you’d have to sift through all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t relevant.

“Even when you know what it’s called it can be quite hard to find these things. I don’t know if you’ve ever wandered around a government website trying to find a document that you know exists, but even when you know it’s there it can be quite difficult to find it.

“There is a lot of content out there. We subscribe to every newsletter under the sun, RSS feeds, Twitter, we monitor the media, and we bring all that information together and catalogue it.

“Often it’ll be our record of a document that comes up through an online search before you find the actual document on page four of the search results.”

APO doesn’t take in every thesis and research paper published, but chooses those that have something relevant to add to Australian policy. Ms Lawrence uses the example of solar power to explain:

“We’d look at research on how homes will have to change the way they use energy, consumer behavioural change, industry change. It’s not just about what government needs to do, but what society as a whole needs to do.

“It’s not going to be content like ‘what kind of heat on a solar panel generates enough electricity to light a light bulb?’ It’s not the detailed technical or theoretical content.

“Our reason for being is to bring content about policy issues to the fore, and make it accessible.”

The ten most-viewed documents on the APO site for 2011 are:

10: Life inside Ashley Youth Detention Centre

This publication is the first of a series of books by the inmates of Tasmania’s Ashley Youth Detention Centre, and talks about their lives on the inside and their hopes for the future.

9: The impact of social media use on children, adolescents and families

Young people’s use of social media, from websites to mobile phone apps and online gaming, has grown massively in the last few years. This report looks at how families can encourage healthy use of social media and be on the lookout for problems like cyberbullying, sexting and exposure to inappropriate content.

8: Australian Social Trends June 2011

Australian Social Trends reports are published quarterly by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, drawing on a wide variety of data sources. The reports cover many aspects of Australian life, from health, education, employment and econommics to culture, leisure and religion.

7: Bullying in an Aboriginal context

The “Solid Kids Solid Schools” project is the first study specifically investigating Indigenous bullying. The three year study has involved more than 260 Indigenous children and young adults, Elders, teachers and education officers in Western Australia.

6: The benefits of social networking services

Much of the research and publicity surrounding social networking looks at the potential pitfalls and dangers, but this report argues that there are plenty of benefits of social networking, from education to politics and health.

5: Clean Energy Bill 2011: Exposure draft

The Clean Energy Bill 2011 outlines the carbon price mechanism, and accompanying legislation in the same package deals with regulating, administering and future design of carbon pricing in Australia.

4: Asylum seekers and refugees: what are the facts?

This background note presents simple information on asylum issues, to combat some common misconceptions surrounding asylum seekers and refugees.

3: Australian Social Trends, March 2011

2: Safe sex after 50 and mature women’s beliefs of sexual health

Research has found that women over 50 are uncomfortable talking to their doctors about the risk of sexually transmitted disease, and may not be willing to talk to their partners about using a condom for fear of rejection or conflict.

1: Closing the Gap – Prime Minister’s report 2011

This is the third annual report on the Federal Government’s Closing The Gap initiative. The program aims to bring factors like education, employment, life expectancy and infant mortality in the Indigenous community into line with the wider Australian population.

Thanks to Jodie  and the ABC for supporting the work of Australian Policy Online and for making me sound like I speak in sentences.

Read the article on ABC Southern Queensland

We’ve just published our annual APO Top Ten list of most viewed research reports and articles for the year on APO. But this is just based on the pageview statistics provided by Google Analytics and we all know the statistics don’t always tell the full story.

We’d like to know what research reports YOU thought were the best in 2011 in terms of impact, quality and significance. Judge it as you see fit and don’t worry if its just in your area of expertise or practice. If you thought a report was a stand out let us know.

Leave a comment here and if you can let us know the title of the report and why you think it was the best.

Or if you prefer email admin@apo.org.au, leave a comment on the Top Ten 2011 page, use the Twitter hashtag #APOBest2011 or leave a comment on our Facebook page.  We will endeavour to compile an APO Readers’ Best of 2011.

Australian Policy Online is planning a major upgrade of the site in 2012 and to do this we need to know more about our readers – how and why you use the site and what else we could be doing to help you do your work better.

We are looking for volunteers who would be prepared to participate in
*Contextual interviews (sitting around your desk at your workplace)
*Interviews by phone

Interviews would take around one hour and a gift voucher of $50 would be provided as a token of our appreciation in giving your time.

Questions would be about how you use the internet in general and what kinds of resources and sites you use for your work. We will then discuss APO in particular and consider the sorts of features and content that could be provided in the future that would help you do your work.

We would like to get a representative sample from all the major sectors that use APO – education, government, government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, media, libraries, practitioners and corporations.

If you can spare an hour of your time to discuss you policy and research needs we will use this information to build you an even better policy and research information service.

To volunteer email admin@apo.org.au with the subject Volunteer interview.
Please let us know where you work and the address in the email.

We will be in touch if we need to interview you. This may take some time as interviews will be conducted over the next 6 months.

NOTE: Most contextual interviews will be done in Melbourne however we will also do some interviews interstate when the opportunity arises so do let us know if you would be willing to do a workplace interview even if you aren’t in Melbourne.

We are very pleased to announce that Swinburne Institute for Social Research has been successful in the latest round of Linkage projects and has been awarded funding for a three year project called “Grey literature, policy innovation and access to knowledge: realising the value of informal publishing”*.

This research project is very much grounded in and inspired by the work we have been doing at Australian Policy Online and the changing nature of informal online publishing particularly for research and policy material. The chief investigators are Professor Julian Thomas, Director of Swinburne Institute and Professor John Houghton, Professorial Fellow at Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES), both of whom have a strong interest and track record in policy development and open access publishing. Swinburne Institute is of course home to Australian Policy Online, the largest collection of policy grey literature in Australia.

The project has a terrific group of partner organisations who will be fundamental to its progress and success: the National Library of Australia, National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA), the Eidos Institute and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). We are very grateful for their support of this project and looking forward to working closely with them. We also look forward to working with you, our readers and publishers, on this exciting project as it is very much about your work.

We will post some background information about the research to be covered here shortly and keep you updated via this blog. Other forms of communication will be set up in due course.

If you’d like to know more details or discuss the project please contact Amanda Lawrence, APO Managing Editor alawrence@swin.edu.au

*We will work on a snappier title asap

At APO we are excited to see that in the latest changes to Excellence in Research Australia (ERA)* policy reports are eligible for inclusion under the ‘other’ category of ‘Original creative works’

The 2012 Submission guidelines state that:

For disciplines in which non-traditional research output types may be submitted, additional output types may now be submitted under the category of Original Creative Works, provided they meet the relevant eligibility criteria, including meeting the definition of research. Such works may include scholarly editions, scholarly translations and public policy reports.

This will have implications for university repository collection policies which often do not include reports and working papers produced by academics at their institutions.  It will also hopefully mean a major improvement in ongoing accessibility to these documents.

We will be talking to ERA experts about what these changes might mean for our work, for APO member organisations, and for the way informal research publications (grey literature) that we collect and disseminate will be managed.

*The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative assesses research quality within Australia’s higher education institutions using a combination of indicators and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally-recognised experts. More information about ERA is available here: http://www.arc.gov.au/era/

I think APO is a really outstanding resource. It is comprehensive, dynamic and full of rich content. In an information-saturated world, I still look forward to my APO newsletter every week. APO reader survey 2011

Between 5 May and 16 June 2011 APO’s editors surveyed our readers for feedback about the Australian Policy Online website and the associated email newsletter: APO Weekly Briefing.

The aim of the survey was to gain a clearer understanding of APO readers’ current and future requirements of the service.  Questions assessed:

General feedback

APO’s readership

• Location of readers
• Occupations of readers

Service delivery and site functionality

• Frequency of use
• Ease of use
• Activities undertaken and content accessed
• Reasons for reading

How and why APO content is used

• What is APO useful for?
• Specific ways APO is useful for readers

Future content options

Future functionality requirements

• APO options
• Reader suggestions

Environment and competition

• What do APO readers also read, watch, access, consume

Conclusion and recommendations

A total of 754 people took part in the survey. During the survey period APO sent the Weekly Briefing email newsletter to an average of 16,800 people each week.

Overall opinion of APO

This question received 388 responses almost all of which were overwhelmingly positive.

“APO is often the first place I go to get an overview on a policy issue because it has up-to-date information from a broad range of (usually reputable) sources. I also appreciate getting the weekly newsletter which lets me know what’s happening in the policy world.”

“I have subscribed for many years and whenever I change jobs ensure that I hook back up as in any job it is important to have a broad understanding of what is going on and APO offers that in a convenient way for me. I am a member of other policy sites but have a very strong preference to this one and have referred many people to it. Keep up the great work with the excellent site.”

“Living in a remote area, APO provides a comprehensive overview of what is happening in the wider world. Absolutely essential if you do not want to develop a myopic view of the place and context you live in.”

“I think it is one of the most useful websites I have ever used, and I am a bit of an ‘APO dealer’… I make everyone I work with or have worked with over the years subscribe. Well done to all involved.”

“When I see the APO Briefing in my inbox I get really excited!”

“Unmissable. The only must-read policy site in Australia and one of the best in the (English-speaking) world.” David Owen, Policy Officer, Advocacy Tasmania Inc.

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Read the rest of the results in the PDF Summary available here

Full results will be published shortly.  Just a bit more formatting to go!

Please let us know what you think and any ideas for next steps.