Papers by Alexandru Balog
In the early 1990s, public interest groups and small legal publishers attempted to push for the p... more In the early 1990s, public interest groups and small legal publishers attempted to push for the public access to federal court decisions contained in JURIS, a legal information retrieval system used for in-house searching by government employees. This early open access effort to free the law not only failed, but eventually led to the shutdown of the JURIS system. This paper presents the findings of a historical investigation into the shutdown of the JURIS system. It argues that the open access movement involves complicated social negotiations-many factors were involved in shaping access rights to primary legal information in digital format. The factors leading to the failure of the open access request included relevant government agencies' indifference about information dissemination, the involvement of commercial information providers' interests, and the ambiguity of the copyrightability of case law information. This study contributes to the broader OA/OK debates by presenting a failed case in the early stage of open access movement and by summarizing the lessons learned from this failed case.
Sensors, Feb 18, 2023
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Revista Română de Informatică și Automatică, 2018
In the present study, the motivational factors refer to all those factors that are associated wit... more In the present study, the motivational factors refer to all those factors that are associated with the researchers' motivation and which have an influence on increasing the RDI activity performance. Consequently, the context is defined by the RDI activity, by the way it is organized and by the conditions under which the activity is carried out. Two categories of motivation were analyzed: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Performance in RDI occupations refers to the performance of the research staff. The present research aimed to analyze the influence of the motivational factors on the performance of RDI research staff. The results show that motivation plays an important role in increasing performance in RDI occupations. The mean values for intrinsic motivation are higher than those obtained for extrinsic motivation (mean factor of 4.27 versus 3.81).
A large number of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) software products have been developed in ... more A large number of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) software products have been developed in academia and business. The selection of the appropriate MCDM software product to solve a given decision problem is a difficult task. Users need adequate MCDM software that meets quality standards regarding usability and functionality, utility, reliability and computer efficiency. In this paper we make a comparison of six MCDM software products regarding usability and functional suitability. Then we rank the MCDM software products included in comparison, first for criteria of usability and functionality and second only for criteria of usability. Ranking the six MCDM software products is a multi-criteria problem itself.
2016 20th International Conference on System Theory, Control and Computing (ICSTCC), 2016
The selection of the appropriate cloud services and Cloud providers (CPs) according to the cloud ... more The selection of the appropriate cloud services and Cloud providers (CPs) according to the cloud users' requirements is a complex problem, given the increased number of CPs. In the paper is proposed a new decision making framework for obtaining the criteria weights in the process of selection of a CP. The decision making framework for criteria weights is based on the hybrid DANP method - a combination of Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method and Analytical Network Process (ANP) method. We have illustrated the applicability of the decision making framework using a case study.
eLearning and Software for Education, 2019
E-learning platform quality is an important subject in the community of researchers and practitio... more E-learning platform quality is an important subject in the community of researchers and practitioners. Quality assessment approaches have different perspectives and differ in many respects, such as: objective, target groups and methods used. In recent years, the utility of advanced person-centered methods has become increasingly obvious. Person-centered approaches assume that samples come from heterogeneous populations and focus on identifying unobservable subpopulations that include individuals or similar cases. In this category are included both traditional techniques (e.g. cluster analysis) and advanced techniques (e.g. Latent Class Analysis, Latent Profile Analysis). In the present study, the e-learning platform quality is a general concept defined through three dimensions. The overall perception of students regarding the e-learning platform quality is based on the assessment of the following dimensions: e-learning system quality, information quality, and service quality. The ai...
In the last decade, the teaching and learning processes have evolved and adapted in order to take... more In the last decade, the teaching and learning processes have evolved and adapted in order to take into account the societal changes. The fast proliferation of online social networks creates new possibilities to get and share information as well as new opportunities for education. The powerful capabilities of the social media technologies make it possible to expand the context of the classroom, which is no longer the only place where teaching and learning takes place: pupils and students have access at home or anywhere to the teacher-supported courses and the support provided by their own colleagues. The social networking sites can bring something new to teaching and learning, not only in terms of transferring knowledge, but also in terms of increased motivation to learn with more familiar and attractive tools. The paradigm shift towards social learning brings in front new educational targets, such as increased engagement, personal and professional development. The aim of this resear...
eLearning and Software for Education
Social networking websites are today part of the university students' lifestyle. This situati... more Social networking websites are today part of the university students' lifestyle. This situation is challenging educators to adapt their teaching style by considering various social learning activities, such as: active participation, information and content sharing, collaboration, and debate. In order to exploit the educational potential of social media technologies is important to understand the reasons why students are using it and the relative importance of these reasons. The motives of social networking websites use have been studied from different theoretical perspectives by using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. However, there are relatively few quantitative studies that explore the reasons behind the Facebook use by university students. The Uses & Gratifications Theory (U>) explains the use of the social media technology by the fulfillment of the various needs of an active user. The aim of this research is to explore the influence of these motives on the Fac...
BMC Geriatrics
Background Quality of life (QOL) is a complex concept known for being influenced by socio-demogra... more Background Quality of life (QOL) is a complex concept known for being influenced by socio-demographic characteristics, individual needs, perceptions and expectations. The study investigates influences of such heterogeneous variables and aims to identify and describe subgroups of older patients who share similar response patterns for the four domains (physical health, psychological health, social relationships and environment) of World Health Organization Quality of Life instrument, Short Form (WHOQOL-BREF). Methods The sample used included older Romanian patients (N = 60; equal numbers of men and women; mean age was 71.95, SD = 5.98). Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted to explore quality of life profiles with the four WHOQOL-BREF domains as input variables. Differences between profiles were analysed by MANOVA and ANOVAs as a follow-up. Results The LPA results showed that the three-profile model was the most suitable and supported the existence of three distinct QOL profiles...
Revista Română de Informatică și Automatică, 2018
Among the professional factors that influence performance in the research-development-innovation ... more Among the professional factors that influence performance in the research-development-innovation (RDI) activities are: quality of occupation, organization and management in RDI activity, professional development and organization resources. This article analyzes the influence of job quality in increasing the performance in RDI activities. The analysis was structured on three categories of factors that depend on the quality of employment, the quality of work and the professional development. The professional factors that have a great influence on performance (the average above 3.50) and that are linked to the quality of work are: salary level, flexibility of work schedule, work autonomy, job stability, individual work development program, and specialization stages.
One major area of library and information science research is the evaluation of digital library. ... more One major area of library and information science research is the evaluation of digital library. The term "digital library" (DL) covers different applications and has been used interchangeably for digitized collections, e-journal platforms, network databases, library websites. As Chowdhury (2010) pointed out, "a modern digital library is a space-a centre of intellectual activities-with content, available in different forms and formats in a distributed network environment , as well as tools and facilities for user-centric access, use, interactions, collaborations and sharing". In line with the growing number of operational DLs, there is also growing interest among researchers to investigate the quality of DLs (Agosti, Ferro, Fox, goncalves, 2007; gonçalves, Moreira, Fox, 2007; Kyrillidou, giersch, 2005; Xie, Joo, 2010; Zhang, 2010). The overall quality of DLs is insufficiently studied and reported (Zhang, 2010), and DL quality and evaluation is a very underreprese...
The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students is raising several research quest... more The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students is raising several research questions regarding the characteristics of use. In the context of modern school, the academic use and the usage related to the university context are of special interest. This paper aims at analyzing the motives for the use of Facebook and the characteristics of Facebook use by students from a Romanian university. The results show that the motives of using Facebook are mainly related to communicating with friends, to find out what happens in their university and to keep in touch with former high school colleagues. The results revealed significant differences between male and female students in terms of motives of using, network size, frequency and duration of use. Female students have more Facebook friends and spend more time on Facebook than male students. Moreover, significant differences exist between undergraduate and master students.
Revista Română de Informatică și Automatică, 2021
Revista Română de Informatică și Automatică, 2021
The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students stimulates the study of social ne... more The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students stimulates the study of social networking websites and associated social phenomena. As social networking websites are able to provide valuable resources for students there is an increasing interest in measuring the social capital that is formed and developed in university contexts. This paper presents an empirical validation of a multidimensional model for the bridging social capital that has been conceptualized as a global factor with three dimensions: outward looking, broader group, and meeting new people. The model has been tested and crossvalidated using two samples collected from two Romanian universities. The results show that the multidimensional model is a better conceptualization having a higher explanatory power than the unidimensional model. An analysis of invariance shows that the proposed scale is equivalent across university profiles thus enabling group comparisons.
The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students stimulates the study of social ne... more The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students stimulates the study of social networking websites and associated social phenomena. As social networking websites are able to provide valuable resources for students there is an increasing interest in measuring the social capital that is formed and developed in university contexts. This paper presents an empirical validation of a multidimensional model for the bridging social capital that has been conceptualized as a global factor with three dimensions: outward looking, broader group, and meeting new people. The model has been tested and crossvalidated using two samples collected from two Romanian universities. The results show that the multidimensional model is a better conceptualization having a higher explanatory power than the unidimensional model. An analysis of invariance shows that the proposed scale is equivalent across university profiles thus enabling group comparisons.
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Papers by Alexandru Balog