Hybrid open access refers to articles freely accessible via the Internet but which originate from an academic journal that provides most of its content via subscription. The effect of hybrid open access on citation counts and author behavior in the field of chemistry is something that has not been widely studied. We compared 814 open access articles and 27,621 subscription access articles published from 2006 through 2011 in American Chemical Society journals. As expected, the 2 comparison groups are not equal in all respects. Cumulative citation data were analyzed from years 2–5 following an article's publication date. A citation advantage for open access articles was correlated with the journal impact factor (IF) in low and medium IF journals, but not in high IF journals. Open access articles have a 24% higher mean citation rate than their subscription counterparts in low IF journals (confidence limits 8–42%, p = .0022) and similarly, a 26% higher mean citation rate in medium IF journals (confidence limits 14–40%, p < .001). Open access articles in high IF journals had no significant difference compared to subscription access articles (13% lower mean citation rate, confidence limits −27–3%, p = .10). These results are correlative, not causative, and may not be completely due to an open access effect. Authors of the open access articles were also surveyed to determine why they chose a hybrid open access option, paid the required article processing charge, and whether they believed it was money well spent. Authors primarily chose open access because of funding mandates; however, most considered the money well spent because open access increases information access to the scientific community and the general public, and potentially increases citations to their scholarship.

Context.Several empirical studies have explored the benefits of software design patterns, but their collective results are highly inconsistent. Resolving the inconsistencies requires investigating moderators—i.e., variables that cause an effect to differ across contexts.Objectives.Replicate a design patterns experiment at multiple sites and identify sufficient moderators to generalize the results across prior studies.Methods.We perform a close replication of an experiment investigating the impact (in terms of time and quality) of design patterns (Decorator and Abstract Factory) on software maintenance. The experiment was replicated once previously, with divergent results. We execute our replication at four universities—spanning two continents and three countries—using a new method for performing distributed replications based on closely coordinated, small-scale instances (“joint replication”). We perform two analyses: 1) apost-hocanalysis of moderators, based on frequentist and Bayesian statistics; 2) ana priorianalysis of the original hypotheses, based on frequentist statistics.Results.The main effect differs across the previous instances of the experiment and across the sites in our distributed replication. Our analysis of moderators (including developer experience and pattern knowledge) resolves the differences sufficiently to allow for cross-context (and cross-study) conclusions. The final conclusions represent 126 participants from five universities and 12 software companies, spanning two continents and at least four countries.Conclusions.The Decorator pattern is found to be preferable to a simpler solution during maintenance, as long as the developer has at least some prior knowledge of the pattern. For Abstract Factory, the simpler solution is found to be mostly equivalent to the pattern solution. Abstract Factory is shown to require a higher level of knowledge and/or experience than Decorator for the pattern to be beneficial.

Mini unmanned aerial vehicles (mUAVs) have the potential to assist wilderness search and rescue groups by providing a bird's eye view of the search area. This paper proposes a method for augmenting visible-spectrum searching with infrared sensing in order to make use of thermal search clues. It details a method for combining the color and heat information from these two modalities into a single fused display to reduce needed screen space for remote field use. To align the video frames for fusion, a method for simultaneously pre-calibrating the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the cameras and their mount using a single multi-spectral calibration rig is also presented. A user study conducted to validate the proposed image fusion methods showed no reduction in performance when detecting various objects of interest in this single-screen fused display compared to side-by-side viewing. Most significantly, the users' increased performance on a simultaneous auditory task showed that their cognitive load was reduced when using the fused display.

Camera-equipped mini-UAVs are popular for many applications, including search and surveillance, but video from them is commonly plagued with distracting jittery motions and disorienting rotations that make it difficult for human viewers to detect objects of interest and infer spatial relationships. For time-critical search situations there are also inherent tradeoffs between detection and search speed. These problems make the use of dynamic mosaics to expand the spatiotemporal properties of the video appealing. However, for many applications it may not be necessary to maintain full mosaics of all of the video but to mosaic and retain only a number of recent (temporally local) frames, still providing a larger field of view and effectively longer temporal view as well as natural stabilization and consistent orientation. This paper presents and evaluates a real-time system for displaying live video to human observers in search situations by using temporally local mosaics while avoiding masking effects from dropped or noisy frames. Its primary contribution is an empirical study of the effectiveness of using such methods for enhancing human detection of objects of interest, which shows that temporally local mosaics increase task performance and are easier for humans to use than non-mosaiced methods, including stabilized video.