Entries in "Open Access" ( for this category only)

Mathematical Biology Now Covered by Biology Direct

Biology Direct considers original research articles, hypotheses, comments, discovery notes and reviews in selected subject areas, and will eventually cover the full spectrum of biology. Subject areas already launched include Genomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Immunology, and Mathematical Biology.

Andrei Yakovlev wrote an editorial that kicked off the new commitment to Mathematical Biology.

Modern mathematics offers a much richer arsenal of tools and ideas than those that are frequently employed to describe the enormous diversity of biological phenomena.

Challenge to Society Publishers

Kimberly Douglas and Dana L. Roth, both of the California Institute of Technology, put forth a challenge for society publishers to not follow in the path of the commercial publishers. In addition, they provide some background into how librarians are "ranking" quality in tough budget times.

University faculty and administrators need to engage with librarians to ensure that the best decisions are being made for the longterm.

[VIA: Chemical & Engineering News, November 20, 2006, Volume 84, Number 47, pp.82-84]

Continue reading "Challenge to Society Publishers"

Larry Page to Scientists

CNet News.com shares a image of Larry Page, co-founder of Google, speaking to the scientists at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). CNET reported that Page told the scientists to "market them (scientific studies) better and make them readily accessible to the world".

Science Commons

Science Commons, a project of the non-profit Creative Commons, is the sponsor and organizer of the Commons of Science Conference. Our goal is to promote innovation in science by lowering the legal and technical costs of the sharing and reuse of scientific work. We remove unnecessary obstacles to scientific collaboration by creating voluntary legal regimes for research and development.

The Conference is an invitation-only gathering of scientists, policy makers, and commons advocates who are actively interested in designing ways to make access to scientific data more widely available and more transparent a cross all scientific disciplines. Anyone is welcome to read the Background information, Vision Papers, or browse the list of Conference participants.

At the conclusion of the conference, audio recordings of the Conference presentations as well as presentation slides will be available on the Program page, and any recommendations arrived at during the Conference will also be posted on this site.

---

Science Commons serves the advancement of science by removing unnecessary legal and technical barriers to scientific collaboration and innovation.

Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle.

Our long term vision is to provide more than just useful contracts. We will combine our publishing, data, and licensing approaches to develop solutions for a truly integrated and streamlined research process.

Continue reading "Science Commons"

BMC - Summary of Biomedical Funding Agency Policies on Open Access

BioMed Central has compiled a summary of the open access policies of different biomedical funders, linking to official policy statements from those funders where available.

Chemistry Central Journal - New Open Access, Peer-Reviewed, Online Journal

Chemistry Central Journal (ISSN 1752-153X) is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal recently launched by Chemistry Central. Chemistry Central, developed by the same team who created BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher, is committed to ensuring peer-reviewed chemical research is immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access.

Chemistry Central Journal encompasses all aspects of research in chemistry, broken down into discipline-specific sections.

---

Chemistry Central is a new service publishing peer-reviewed open access research in chemistry from BioMed Central, the leading biomedical open access publisher. The Chemistry Central website currently features chemistry-related articles published in BioMed Central journals and independent journals utilizing BioMed Central's open access publishing services. Chemistry Central is planning to launch further chemistry-specific journals in the near future.

USPTO Bans Wikipedia

Business Week (9/4/2006 Issue 3999, p12) has reported that the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) will no longer accept Wikipedia entries as "accepted sources of information". I am wondering why the practice was allowed in the first place.

The Patent Librarian conducted his own analysis to see how much the practice was utilized.

[VIA: The Patent Librarian's Notebook, September 10, 2006]

---

The Case community can find various sources of the Business Week article from the E-Journal Portal.

OAIster - Digital Collections from Hundreds of Institutions

OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Their goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone.

As of September 2, 2006, OAIster contained 8,995,140 records from 670 institutions. Users can search these records by keyword, title, author, subject, or language, while limiting by media type. Users can also browse by institution.

More Open Access Books from Caltech

Caltech has offered more open access books since my initial post. Thanks to Dana Roth (Caltech, Chemistry Librarian) for the update.

Caltech has started a depository of open access books by Caltech authors. Subjects include chemistry, economics, geological & planetary sciences, mathematics, and mechanical engineering. The books range from 1959 to 2005.

New chemistry books include:

• Carl J. Ballhausen and Harry B. Gray, Molecular orbital theory: an introductory lecture note and reprint volume, 1965
• Roberts, John D. and Stewart, Ross and Caserio, Marjorie C., Organic chemistry: methane to macromolecules, 1971

Rallying Behind Open Access

Rallying Behind Open Access
Inside Higher Ed, July 28, 2006

If universities pay the salaries of researchers and provide them with labs, and the federal government provides those researchers with grants for their studies, why should those same universities feel they can't afford to have access to research findings? That's part of the argument behind a push by some in Congress to make such findings widely available at no charge.

(VIA: Case Daily, July 28, 2006)

Case Supports Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006

Case has offered their support in this letter (PDF version).

UNIVERSITY SUPPORT FOR PUBLIC ACCESS ACT EXPANDS
Library groups commend twenty-three provosts for joining recent surge of support

Washington, DC – August 3, 2006 – Just one week after more than two dozen leading universities declared their strong support for the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695), provosts from an additional 23 universities added their backing in a letter issued by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and in individual correspondence. This brings the total to at least 48 universities that have gone on record as favoring the measure.

The Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced on May 2, 2006 by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). It requires federal agencies that fund over $100 million in annual external research to make electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles that stem from their research publicly available on the Internet. The U.S. government funds an estimated 50% of university research, making this a particularly important cause for the higher education community.

The GWLA letter reads, in part: “Access to publicly funded research facilitates the open discussion needed to accelerate research, share knowledge, improve treatment of diseases, and increase human understanding. [The Public Access Act] is a crucial step in realizing this goal…”

“With the passage of this bill, researchers across the United States will have access to the results of work supported by federal government funding, which will help advance scientific understanding at a faster rate,” said David Pershing, Senior Vice-President, Academic Affairs, University of Utah. “No longer will knowledge created using public funds be limited to the wealthiest institutions and corporations. With everyone having access to up-to-date information, I am confident we will see a higher level of scientific research and innovation. This is a remarkable opportunity for educators and students across the nation.”

Signatories of the GWLA letter include provosts and vice presidents for state and non land-grant institutions, such as the University of Washington and Rice University. Their names are added to those of another twenty-five institutions, including Harvard University and Arkansas State University, who on Friday jointly issued “An Open Letter to the Higher Education Community.”

“The time is ripe for this legislation,” added Rodney Erickson, Executive Vice President and Provost of The Pennsylvania State University, who signed the Open Letter. “Many of us in the academic community believe the process of making the findings of publicly supported research more widely available will stimulate further research and education, and that is our primary mission as universities.”

“GWLA member libraries and administrators support the Public Access Act in principle and in practice,” said Adrian Alexander, Executive Director of the Greater Western Library Alliance. “The implications for research stemming from this bill are widespread, profound, and utterly positive. We are pleased to add our voices in support.”

Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition), added, “This groundswell of commitment from the provost community is a significant indication that the Federal Research Public Access Act has strong support in the higher education community in the United States.”

The GWLA letter, available online today, is at http://www.gwla.org/provostletter.html.

The Open Letter to the Higher Education Community signed by twenty-five provosts and issued on July 28, 2006 is online at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/Provosts_openletter_06-JUL.pdf.

The American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, Association of College & Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, Greater Western Library Alliance, Medical Library Association, SPARC, and The Special Libraries Association encourage taxpayers and other stakeholders in the scientific process to add their support for this important legislation. Details are online at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/.

###

Contact:
Jennifer Heffelfinger
SPARC
jennifer@arl.org
(202) 296-2296 ext.121

Open Access Books from Caltech

Caltech has started a depository of open access books by Caltech authors. Subjects include chemistry, economics, geological & planetary sciences, mathematics, and mechanical engineering. The books range from 1959 to 2005.

As of July 23, 2006, some of the books included:

Mathematics:
Abraham, Ralph and Marsden, Jerrold E. (1987) Foundations of Mechanics, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Redwood City, CA. ISBN 080530102X

Mechanical Engineering:
Brennen, Christopher Earls (2005) Fundamentals of Multiphase Flow. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 13 978-0-521-84804-6

Brennen, Christopher Earls (1995) Cavitation and Bubble Dynamics. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0195094093

Brennen, Christopher Earls (1994) Hydrodynamics of Pumps. Concepts NREC and Oxford University Press.

Housner, George W. and Hudson, Donald E. (1980) Applied Mechanics Dynamics. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

Housner, George W. and Vreeland, Thad, Jr. (1965) The Analysis of Stress and Deformation. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

Chemistry:
Goddard, William A., III (1986) Nature of the Chemical Bond. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

Langford, Cooper H. and Gray, Harry B. (1966) Ligand Substitution Processes. W. A. Benjamin, Inc., New York.

Roberts, John D. (1961) Notes on Molecular Orbital Calculations. W. A. Benjamin.

Roberts, John D. (1961) An Introduction to the Analysis of Spin-Spin Splitting in High-Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectra. W. A. Benjamin.

Roberts, John D. (1959) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance: applications to organic chemistry. McGraw-Hill Series in Advanced Chemistry. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

(VIA: Science Resources, May, 8, 2006)

Lost in a Sea of Science Data

Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 23, 2006) wrote an article called Lost in a Sea of Science Data. Carlson explores the current and future growth of scientific data, and the role librarians play in its organization, storage, and retrieval.

The Case community can access the full article from the E-Journal Portal. Several of the sources have a one month embargo before the article is available.

Japanese Science Directory

Science Links Japan is a topically arranged directory of online information resources for science and technology in Japan. Japan's scientific and technical information (STI) scattered across or isolated on the Internet have been collected and categorized under major topics. The Website aims to provide ease of access to Japan's STI for non-Japanese researchers, policy makers and many others who need Japan's STI.

Most of the contents come from information generated/compiled in the public sector, such as the government, universities, R&D institutes and STI institutes.

Science Links Japan has been compiled with a sharp focus on URL resources available in the English language. URL resources available only in the Japanese language also have been selected from the viewpoint of comprehensiveness and importance.

First Open Access Nanotechnology Journal from Major Publisher

Springer and the Nano Research Society have announced a new partnership to publish Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL), which will be the first nanotechnology journal from a major commercial publisher to publish articles with open access. The new journal provides an interdisciplinary forum for the open communication of scientific and technological advances in the creation and use of objects at the nanometer scale. The first open access articles are scheduled to appear on Springer's online platform, SpringerLink, in July 2006.

Read the full announcement for more information.

(VIA: LISNews, June 12, 2006)

MOLTABLE - Chemoinformatics Portal & its Application in Bioinformatics

When a potentially useful drug is designed or discovered, it must be delivered in a way that maximizes its ability to benefit patients.

The Moltable initiatives to discover drug candidates against CANCER, AIDS, Malaria and other potentially devastating infectious diseases through chemoinformatics research. Drug candidates in various stages of research are being analyzed to discover new and promising candidates. Dynamic QSAR initiatives through 'focused' virtual library design and the results will be made 'open access' through Moltable portal (National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India).

The portal includes links to projects, a repository for molecules, and various other resources.

Isaac Newton's "Alchemical Notebooks" Available Online

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is producing a scholarly online edition of Newton's alchemical manuscripts integrated with new research on Newton's chymistry. To date, about seven hundred pages have been transcribed and encoded in TEI/XML. Of these, roughly six hundred have been edited and are available online, including Newton's Most Complete Laboratory Notebook.

Isaac Newton, like Albert Einstein, is a quintessential symbol of the human intellect and its ability to decode the secrets of nature. Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues. We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry."

(VIA: Librarian In Black, April 14, 2006)

Biointerphases - New Open Access Journal

The Biointerphases journal, an open access journal for the biomaterials interface community, provides an interdisciplinary platform for scientific exchange among the biology, chemistry, physics, and materials sciences communities. It offers a discussion forum for rapid dissemination of scientific theories, results, and interpretations. Biointerphases serves as a global vehicle for the biomaterials interface community as well as a platform that encourages dialog between scientists and the public with respect to cogent policy issues.

[About Biointerphases]

Biointerphases is devoted to Articles of original research, Reviews, a "Myth and Reality" section addressing controversial models and experiments, Editorial Commentary/Letters to the Editor, Perspectives on Evolving Research, Reports on Interdisciplinary Research Programs and Opinionated Essays.

Biointerphases will include all topics relevant to the study and understanding of interfaces and confined phases in biomaterial science and biophysics, e. g. such as interface spectroscopy, in vivo mechanisms, in vitro mechanisms, interface modeling, adhesion phenomena, protein-surface interactions, cell-surface interactions, biomembranes on a chip, biosensors / biodiagnostics, bio-surface modification, the nano-bio interface, biotribology / biorheology, molecular recognition, cell patterning for function, polyelectrolyte surfaces, and ambient diagnostic methods. Biointerphases is freely available online, and will be available in an annual bound volume for a nominal fee.

Open Access in Medicine

Open Access for the Medical Librarian
Heather Morrison & Andrew Waller
Delivered at the Canadian Health Libraries Association 2006: Pearls of Wisdom, Vancouver, British Columbia.

ABSTRACT:
The most important aspects of open access for the medical librarian are presented. Reasons for open access include access to research information, access to taxpayer-funded research, facilitation of evidence-based medicine, equity of access, promotion of author control, and controlling library costs. The two primary approaches to open access, via author self-archiving and open access publishing, are presented. Key open access policy developments are highlighted. Many of the major policy initiatives of the moment are from the research funders. From the researcher funders' point of view, open access means more research impact, more real-world impact when professionals can access the literature, and value is illustrated to the taxpayer, building support for further research funding. The world's largest medical research funders, including the U.S. National Institute of Health and the Wellcome Trust, have public access policies, and many more policies are in development. For example, two weeks ago the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate. One of the essential elements of open access policy is ensuring that researchers are required, not requested, to deposit works. In Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has a policy in development called Access to Products of Research; public comments are due May 15, 2006. The dramatic growth of open access - over 2,220 journals in DOAJ, over 7.3 million items in an OAIster search - is discussed, as is the idea of new roles for librarians in an open access environment.

Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles

The article Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles (PLoS Biology, volume 4, issue 5, May 2006) described a study that looked at the number of citations of open access articles versus pay publications.

Articles published as an immediate OA article on the journal site have higher impact than self-archived or otherwise openly accessible OA articles. We found strong evidence that, even in a journal that is widely available in research libraries, OA articles are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal. OA is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings.

Promoting Copyright Management & Access

John Ober in Facilitating open access: Developing support for author control of copyright (C&RL News, April 2006, Vol. 67, No. 4) discusses the role librarians have in promoting and supporting copyright management within their organizations. He discusses educational aspects and managing institutional repositories.

Libraries should be clear and honest about the logic of our advocacy, too, which seems to be: Faculty copyright retention is a necessary precondition for developing new forms of dissemination that (possibly) allow restructuring of some of the economic patterns to be more sustainable. Or, more bluntly, copyright retention and subsequent grants of use (might) reduce/remove (some) economic barriers to acquiring content for research/teaching.

For one thing reader and author visits to IR create a point-of-use opportunity, and usually a specific need, to educate scholars about copyright management, and ensure that they do, in fact, have the right to deposit their work. And while IRs can be promoted as a way to serve the scholar and library interests mentioned above, to be used IRs have to strive for unusually good related services.

First SPARC Innovator

SPARC recognizes Herbert Van de Sompel, who is the initiator of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the open reference linking framework (OpenURL).

SPARC RECOGNIZES HERBERT VAN DE SOMPEL FOR OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
April 18, 2006

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has named Herbert Van de Sompel, who leads the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), as the first SPARC Innovator. The SPARC Innovator program is a new initiative that recognizes an individual, institution, or group that exemplifies SPARC principles by working to challenge the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators will be featured on the SPARC Web site each month. See full announcement for more information.

(Orginally seen on the Library Journal Academic Newswire, April 20, 2006)

Journal@rchive - Electronic Archive Initiative

Journal@rchive is an archive site of J-STAGE operated by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). On Journal@rchive, academic journals scanned through the Electronic Archive Initiative are released from their first issues, including those issued in the 19th century. The Initiative commenced by JST in FY2005 aiming at two goals: (1) to preserve of academic heritages of Japan, and (2) to further promote worldwide distribution of Japanese research results.

[About J-STAGE - Introduction]

In order to maintain and develop Japan's science and technology research at an international level, it is important to disseminate outstanding research and development results to the world instantaneously. To that end, it is important to computerize bulletins of academic societies and research papers that are currently appeared on paper by user organizations and release them to the appearance on the Internet.

In order to support the information transmission function of user organizations, the "Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic" (J-STAGE), developed by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), set up the hardware and software necessary for electronic journal release within JST to provide services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By taking advantage of the hardware and software, the user organizations are able to computerize bulletins of academic societies and research papers currently appeared with ease and at low cost. Computerrized documents can be accessed from anywhere in the world with this system. This project also links up with the National Institute of Informatics (formerly the Ministry of Education National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS)).

Open J-Gate - Another Open Access Database

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

See About Open J-Gate for more information.

BioMed Central Journals Have RSS Feeds

BioMed Central offers RSS feeds for each of their journals.

[What is BioMed Central?]

BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. Read more here...

Indian Institute of Astrophysics Repository

Indian Institute of Astrophysics Repository is the digital repository of publications of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India, developed to capture, disseminate and preserve research publications of IIAP. You can search, browse and access full text of these publications from the repository. This Repository also hosts papers published in Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India.

[Contents of IIAP Repository]

IIAP Repository contains full text of research publications and Ph.d theses of individuals from Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. In addition, this repository also hosts papers from the journal Bulletin of the Astronomical Society India from Vol. 1, 1973. Presently journal articles, conference papers and preprints can be submitted to this repository and we invite all the researches to send the soft copy of your papers to library@iiap.res.in or chris@iiap.res.in and we will take care of uploading the papers into the repository.

Recently we have included Archival collection as another community in the repository. This Archival collection will include the various archival materials belonging to 18th,19th, & 20th century available in the Institute. These materials are in the form of hand-written manuscripts, photographs, Annual Reports and instruments and their descriptions. The full text of research publications of our directors of Madras Observatory and Kodaikanal Observatory will also be part of this archival collection.

[About Indian Institute of Astrophysics]

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics is a premier national centre devoted to research in astronomy, astrophysics and related physics. It traces its origin back to an observatory set up in 1786 at Madras which from the year 1792 began to formally function at its Nungambakkam premises as the Madras Observatory. With headquarters at Bangalore, the Institute's laboratories are currently active at Kodaikanal,Kavalur, Gauribidanur,Hanle and Hosakote.

FreeMind - Free Mind Mapping Software

SourceForge.net highlighted FreeMind as its February 2006 Project of the Month. FreeMind is mind-mapping software, or a tree editor. With it, you can create foldable trees of plain text notes, enriched with colors, icons, cloud-shapes, and other graphics. Folding and breadth-width search make it valuable as a knowledge base tool.

[About SourceForge.net]

SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site, hosting more than 100,000 projects and over 1,000,000 registered users with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code. SourceForge.net has the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet, and hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide. SourceForge.net provides a wide variety of services to projects we host, and to the Open Source community. See more here...

What Researchers Need to Know about Open Access

Peter Suber in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (Issue #94, February 2, 2006) shared his Six Things that Researchers Need to Know about Open Access.

• What OA journals exist in your field?
• OA journals are not the whole story of OA. There are also OA archives or repositories.
• OA archiving only takes a few minutes.
• Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in an OA repository.
• Journals using the Ingelfinger Rule are a shrinking minority.
• OA enlarges your audience and citation impact.

Read the full article for more details and examples.

(Originally shared on Quick Picks, March 20, 2006.)

Scientific Publishing, the Internet, & Copyright

Andrew Kantor (USA Today, 3/23/2006) highlighted the major issues facing scientific publishing and the role the Internet has played.

Lets look further at the state of scientific publishing...

First, the procedure of traditional publishing is flawed from the eyes of libraries. An author freely gives their article to a publisher, and the publishers sells it at a profit. The author's library than purchases the content that was originally available within the organization. The author may have signed over full rights of the article to the publisher, thus the library has to pay for something that should have been available internally for free.

What advantages are provided by traditional publications? Basically, you are looking at name recognition and a system of distribution. I think it is fairly obvious how the Internet is changing those systems.

Kantor looks at several changes that are developing already. For example, the open access publishing movement, as demonstrated by the Public Library of Science.

Coming across this article was perfect timing. Kenneth Crews, Director of the Copyright Management Center just spoke at the Kelvin Smith Library on Tuesday, April 4th. He expressed how copyright laws are driven by international pressures, money, and many other factors. He pushed hard for authors to manage their copyright rights in order to meet the needs of their organizations and themselves well into the future. It is the one time, during author to publisher negotiations, that publishers can be convinced to change their ways.

(Originally shared on Open Access News, March 23, 2006)

Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction

On March 24, 2006, it was shared on the CHMINF-L listserv that Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction (Dedicated to the International Union of Crystallography on the occasion of the commemoration meeting in Munich, July 1962, by P. P. Ewald, editor, and numerous crystallographers) was digitzed and freely available for use.

arXiv.org e-Print Archive

Hosted by Cornell University, arXiv.org is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. As of February 27, 2006, it contained over 350,000 e-prints. The major subject categories are broken down into more specific subjects that allow the user to find papers of relevance to their research. Abstracts can be viewed in html and the full papers are available in PDF. RSS feeds are available for individual archives and categories.

Petroleum Journals Online

Petroleum Journals Online (PJO) publishes the first fully refereed, open access, e-journals of petroleum engineering. The publications cover the following main areas of petroleum engineering namely: petrophysics, production geology, drilling, production, reservoir engineering, and petroleum management and economics.

(Originally reported in the Internet Resources Newsletter - Issue 103, October 2005, by Roddy MacLeod)

PLoS (Public Library of Science)

I have highlighted a couple of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) open access titles in the past (PLoS Genetics and PLoS Computational Biology). Read the testimony of a CASE student that has been using the PLOS resources.

Electronic Literature Organization

Electronic Literature Organization was established to facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media. It has been collecting related news articles since July of 2000.

[About the ELO]

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another.

(Highlighted by the The Internet Scout Report, January 6, 2006, Volume 12, Number 1)

Trends from the Entertainment Industry -Translate to Libraries?

Aaron Shaffer brought my attention to a very interesting article, called The Long Tail (Wired Magazine, Issue 12.10, October 2004). Most of us believe that the entertainment industry is driven only by the hits, probably due to all the award shows, rankings, etc. The "long tail" is all of the other albums, songs, movies, and books that account for a super large volume of sales if provided to the public. Examples like Amazon, Rhapsody, NetFlix, and eBay show that people are interested in and will buy the non-#1 materials if the resources are available to see reviews, get recommendations, and have easy access.

I think this article has long reaching consequences on libraries. First, what role does copyright have in the development of future library resources and services? I believe the intentions of copyright, that "Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8), is very important. As copyright protection limits are continually increased in length, are will still protecting "progress" or just monetary interests? Someone would argue that economic numbers demonstrate progress, but are we using this measure at the death of future educational, cultural, and scientific discoveries? Just look at the article I shared on the KSL Reference Weblog for an example.

It appears that the "long tail" examples also counteracts the statements by book and journal publishers that open access materials would mean death to their sales. The article showed that increased access, free or very cheap, only boosted sales drastically. As people gained access, they always wanted more and more.

I think in libraries we are seeing a similar fate with Google and other Internet resources. While people are going to Google first for their questions, it results in only more questions and curiosity. The type of questions I see in the library are becoming more complicated in nature and more inquisitive on the user's part.

I think the academic libraries in Ohio have been very lucky with OhioLINK. It has allowed individual libraries more freedom (i.e. money) to maybe focus on what could be considered items that fall into the "long tail." In addition to consortia, libraries need to find the other processes that allow users access to everything and anything. It appears CASE is headed in the right direction with the increasing amount of electronic resources and collections, such as Digital Case.

Digitization of AMNH's Scientific Publications

The American Museum of Natural History Library announced the digitization of the museum's roster of scientific publications. They are freely available and searchable through a DSpace platform.

So far the following publications are available:

• American Museum Novitates
• Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History
• Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History
• Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History

(Courtesy of the Rowland Institute Library Blog and the American Scientist Open Access Forum)

Wikibooks Offers Free E-Textbooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project, set up on July 10, 2003. Volunteers have written over 12,000 book modules in a multitude of books.

Wikibooks's goal is to create a free instructional resource—indeed, the largest instructional resource in history, both in terms of breadth and depth, to become a reliable resource. It's an ambitious goal which will probably take many years to achieve.