Sir, Brighton’s new Professor of Media Studies says students cannot identify “serious, refereed work” (“White bread for young minds”, Jan 14). This is a problem with which the scholarly publishing community has been grappling since the explosion of “user-generated” content.

Key organisations within the industry are now exploring the feasibility of a “kitemark” that would identify as scholarly the materials provided by research sites. Such a mark would combine human readability, in order that it be recognisable to users, with machine readability, so that search engines could filter content based on its scholarly value. Imagine a “search only for authoritative content” option in the main index of Google or Yahoo!.

A metadata-rich kitemark would enable students simply and efficiently to distinguish serious, refereed work from less reliable sources.

Let us hope we can make it a reality before Professor Brabazon undermines decades of progress by training students to see only printed texts as authoritative.

Charlie Rapple

Oxford

Sir, I think it is quite wrong and rather myopic of Professor Brabazon to ban her students from using Wikipedia or Google in their first year.

It is academia’s own fault that students have not got the interpretive skills necessary to assess the credibility of information that they find on the internet; its own fault not to teach these skills, but also its own fault not to publish in accessible places.

So often do users find a promising abstract of an academic work, only to find that they are asked to pay to read it, even though the research that it describes has been funded by public support. These papers are out of reach of most users of the internet. There is no reason for this other than tradition, as the cost of publishing electronic journals is not high.

Of course, there are many free-to-view electronic journals,

but with lower academic status. In fact, the status of an academic journal is quite like the ranking given to a website by Google: it depends upon how often papers from that journal are quoted in other papers.

Google takes the students to the most popular website. Improve access to serious academic works and you will improve their popularity.

Richard Gregson

Nottingham

Sir, Magnus Linklater is quite right to redress the balance in favour of Wikipedia as a useful tool (“Reference books? Give me good old Wikipedia any day”, Jan 16), though even Wikipedia itself gives warning of its weaknesses for academic research.

Unfortunately, too many people think ten seconds on Google will provide the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Duncan Grey

Great Shelford, Cambs

Sir, I have learnt ten times as much about the poet John Clare from the internet than a trip to even my biggest local library could have provided. From the many Googled pages on his works I have been able to select facts and ideas about the poet, just as I would have done with a library book or hefty encyclopedia in front of me, but without the travel, the reserving, the carrying about or the cost.

Allan Friswell

Cowling, N Yorks

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