Entries in "Scientific Publishing & Data" ( for this category only)

Sticker Shock - Take 2

Do you know how much journals cost, especially in science and engineering?

Cornell University Library uses real world purchases to show you how much libraries invest in your education and research needs. Check out Sticker Shock 2 for more information. I am scared when they compare journals to cars and international trips.

The original Sticker Shock was completed in 2002.

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.

MathSciJournalWiki

MathSciJournalWiki is a freely-editable resource for information on scholarly journals, especially in mathematics. It aims to be a central resource for understanding the journal system, both in its academic and economic aspects.

It lists the price history and numbers of pages for many of the journals used in mathematics and physics. It also highlights various news in the math and science publishing industry.

K-Theory Editorial Board Resigns

The Not Even Blog reported that the entire editorial board of K-Theory (Springer) has resigned and in 2008 will be publishing a new journal called Journal of K-Theory (Cambridge University Press) at about half the subscription cost.

SAE Publications Board to Review Digital Rights Management Controls for Education

SAE International’s Publications Board temporarily will suspend full activation of Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls as applied on the Society’s Digital Library of technical papers for licensees at colleges, universities and other academic institutions. See full story for more information.

Update: ICIS Creates a Students Portal - Includes Chemical Prices

ICIS has fixed the format of the chemical price list that is contained within their student portal. It formally did not view correctly in the Firefox browser, but it should work for all major browsers now.

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"

ICIS Creates Student Portal

ICIS is working on a new student portal, or "knowledge zone". Right now it links to some resources available to students. In the future, they "hope it will turn into a space in which students and academics worldwide can communicate and discuss issues with each other, and showcase their best work to the wider world, not least potential employers."

Several librarians have contacted and discussed the lack of chemical prices for student projects with ICIS. In the past, I documented and shared my concerns directly with ICIS. Randy Reichardt has taken similar steps. He has personally been involved in the recent developments.

ICIS with the announcement of this new student portal has helped to fill this need for chemical prices. ICIS now provides "you with historical chemical prices. Note that these prices are a guide only, and must not be used to guide real-time business."

I understand chemical prices are hard to locate and maintain, even for a major chemical publisher, so this historical resource fills a major need for chemical engineering students.

Thank you ICIS and Randy Reichardt!

Continue reading "ICIS Creates Student Portal"

UK PubMed Central Launched

The British Library Press Release
UK PubMed Central Launched
9 January, 2007

From today scientists will be able to access a vast collection of biomedical research and to submit their own published results for inclusion in a new online resource. Based on a model currently used by the US National Institute of Health, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. See: www.ukpmc.ac.uk.

See also PubMed Central (PMC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

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".

Go-Geo

Go-Geo! is a tool designed to help you find details about geo-spatial datasets and related resources within Great Britain tertiary education and beyond.

[About Go-Geo!]

Go-Geo! is an online resource discovery tool which allows for the identification and retrieval of records describing the content, quality, condition and other characteristics of geospatial data that exist with UK tertiary education and beyond. The portal supports geospatial searching by interactive map, grid co-ordinates and place name, as well as the more traditional topic or keyword forms of searching. The portal is a key component of the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Go-Geo! has been a cooperative effort between EDINA National Data Centre, University of Edinburgh, and the UK Data Archive, University of Essex.

Topology - Entire Editorial Board Resigns

Several sources, such as the ACRLog, have announced that all the members of the editorial board of the mathematics journal Topology have resigned due to the pricing policy of its publisher Elsevier.

We have heard other reports like this over the last few years, and may see more actions like this in the future as journal prices climb quicker than the money available for their purchase.

Case has access to Topology through the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center.

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.

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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.

CALL FOR PAPERS - Advanced Mining & Use of Life Science Information

CALL FOR PAPERS - Advanced mining and use of life science information, ACS Chicago, March 2007

You are invited to submit abstracts for a session entitled "Advanced mining and use of life science information" in the division of Chemical Information (CINF), co-sponsored with the CSA Trust, at the 233rd American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago, March 25-29, 2007

We are particularly interested in papers that address the mining of large volumes and diverse sources of chemical and life science information to aid in decision making in the drug discovery process. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Development or application of data mining techniques
• Knowledge discovery on large chemical databases such as PubChem
• Integrating textual and structural information
• Design of interfaces and interaction tools for complex, diverse kinds of information
• Database querying tools and interfaces

The presentation should last about 30 minutes, including time for questions. To submit an abstract, go to http://oasys.acs.org/acs/233nm/cinf/papers/index.cgi and select the "Advanced mining and use of life science information" session. Abstracts should be submitted no later than November 17th, 2006.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact David Wild at djwild @ indiana.edu. You can find out more information about the CSA Trust at http://www.csa-trust.org/.

David Wild
Session organizer

___________________________________________

Dr. David J. Wild, djwild @ indiana.edu
Assistant Professor

Indiana University School of Informatics

ph (812) 856-1848 - fax (812) 856-1995

1900 E. 10th St. Rm. 1128, Bloomington, IN 47406

web http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/djwild

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.

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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.

ICIS Chemical Business Americas - Update

I am glad to see Randy Reichardt at the University of Alberta got a little further with a response towards why the publication (Chemical Market Reporter) was drastically changed with no feedback or warning to academia. I only received a standard response from several people at ICIS that basically already told me the obvious - "we are only covering about 100 prices and focusing more on news". I made it clear to ICIS that the strength, and what made them unique to academic libraries, was that they covered such a large amount of chemical prices. The current price coverage was much weaker than they were promoting and probably of minimal value for engineering students. Chemical industry news had many publications and organizations that focused in this realm and they were leaving a niche market (chemical prices) that academia relied heavily on CMR for.

Randy Reichardt received another response from Penny Wilson, ICIS Global Editorial Director, that reaffirmed a commitment to students. I hope this statement is not just an attempt to keep current subscribers. Their past efforts have not shown that students were considered much in their decisions, or they did not truely understand their subscibers or future subscriber needs. I am hoping it is the later, and they just did not understand how much academia needed chemical prices before they dropped the prices from the print CMR, rigged together a clunky online access with no IP recognition, and finally slashed hundreds of prices from their inventory.

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]

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

Connecticut Legislators Are Fighting Back Against Textbook Publishers

This comes at no shock to anyone that has ever bought a textbook:

Government analysts say the price of textbooks has risen at twice the annual inflation rate since 1986.

Boston.com News has reported that Connecticut legislators are trying to fight back against textbook prices.

Legislators are considering legislation that will require publishers to inform professors of all books available on a particular subject, how long they will remain on the market and the wholesale price they charge to bookstores. It would also allow Connecticut students to purchase their books the first week, even if financial aid has not been finalized.

ICIS Chemical Business Americas - More News

Seems like ICIS Chemical Business Americas (Chemical Market Reporter) may be writing its own ending in academic libraries. Randy Reichardt has discovered that up to 75-80% of the prices that were historically tracked have been removed from the online price index.

I looked today (September 12, 2006) at the price index. Only 86 prices were listed for 51 unique compounds. Last year when we spent the EXTRA money over 500 entries were included. In addition, many of the items that are included rarely come up in a chemical engineering design project at my institution. For example, I have never helped a student look up the following items nor did I need them a couple of years ago when I worked on my own chemical engineering design projects: coconut oil (2 entries), clover leaf oil, cotton oil (2 entries), canola meal, fish oil (4 entries), etc.

I will be updating my chemical engineering research guide to include other alternative resources and tricks for students to find chemical prices, as the value of this resource may no longer be a luxury academic libraries can afford.

Timeline of events:

• Chemical prices are removed from print edition
  
• Case spends the money to add online prices with an initial price of $415 for over 500 chemicals
  
• Announced name change
  
• Entry about poorly timed updated
  
• Today less than 100 entries exist

Chemical Market Reporter Publisher Again Shows No Respect for Academia

As you may recall previously, I worked with the publisher of Chemical Market Reporter to establish electronic access for the Case community. This came after many librarians expressed great concern to the publisher for not considering the needs of their users.

CMR was one of the few resources available for students to establish chemical prices for their many projects. The publisher switched to online-only without asking academic users what they needed the most. They tried to make things better by offering an online subscription, but many libraries were still left in the dark as they required a single password login and wanted more money. This publisher forgot that the future purchasers of CMR would be the very students they were ignoring now.

ICIS has again decided to ignore academic subscribers. They are changing CMR to another publication, but shut down operations right when many academic librarians were directing students to this resource. A "coming soon" message does not help students complete their assignments.

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/.

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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.

FREE ONLINE - Building a National Science Digital Library

UPDATE: If you did not participate in the live presentation, the PowerPoint and related materials are available.

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EDUCAUSE Live! May 8, 2006 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT); runs one hour

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Dean Krafft, and the topic will be "Building a National Science Digital Library."

Since 2000, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team has been creating the infrastructure for a digital library of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources. That library now contains more than a million resources from approximately 100 collections. In this talk, Dean Krafft will give a short historical overview of the NSDL and describe the current NSDL community and participants. He will then review the technical underpinnings of NSDL 1.0, a library built on metadata harvesting, and describe some of the challenges encountered. For the past year, the project has been working on NSDL 2.0, a new version of the library built on the Fedora repository architecture. For the last part of the talk, Krafft will describe this new library architecture and explain how it supports creating context for science resources, how it enhances the selection and use of library materials, and what these capabilities mean for the users of the NSDL.

Dean Krafft is currently a senior research associate in computer science at Cornell University, serving primarily as a researcher but also as an IT administrator. On the research side, he is the principal investigator for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Project (http://nsdl.org/) at Cornell. Krafft leads the effort to develop key components of the Core Integration Technology for the library and manages the team that maintains the production library services. He works with the other institutions involved in the Core Integration effort to specify, develop, and provide new digital library technologies to the more than a hundred NSF-funded projects involved in the NSDL program.

As an administrator, he serves as director of information technology for computing and information science. He helps provide oversight for the Computer Facilities Support group, represents CIS to the campus-wide IT Managers Council, and focuses on a number of issues including IT policy, software acquisition, and computer security. He received his PhD in computer science from Cornell in 1981.

ChemDB at University of California, Irvine

ChemDB is a public database of small molecules available on the Web. ChemDB is built using the digital catalogs of over a hundred vendors and other public sources and is annotated with information derived from these sources as well as from computational methods, such as predicted solubility and three-dimensional structure. It supports multiple molecular formats and is periodically updated, automatically whenever possible. The current version of the database contains approximately 4.1 million commercially available compounds and 8.2 million counting isomers. The database includes a user-friendly graphical interface, chemical reactions capabilities, as well as unique search capabilities.

Additional information:
ChemDB: a public database of small molecules and related chemoinformatics resources
Jonathan Chen, S. Joshua Swamidass, Yimeng Dou, Jocelyne Bruand, and Pierre Baldi
Bioinformatics 2005 21(22):4133-4139

(Thank you to Gary Wiggins on the Chemical Information Sources Discussion List - CHMINF-L for pointing out this resource.)

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.

Fragile Digital Data

According to a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (June 7, 2006), humanity in the next 3 years will produce more data than in did in the past 1,000 years. Concerns of future data format and degradation are of great concern to many institutions, such as the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Archives, IBM, and the Library of Congress. See full article for further discussion.

(Full Article VIA: George Mason University's History News Network)

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)

International Conference on Chemoinformatics - August 2006

National Chemical Laboratory Pune, India is planning a two-day International Conference on Chemoinformatics during 7-8 August 2006 which would be participated by eminent scientist and professors in this specialized area from both academia and industries.

Several distinguished scientists from Germany, UK, USA etc. along with Indian scientists are participating in this important meeting. The conference will bring together more than 100 participants for this scholarly event focusing on the futuristic application of cheminformatics in medicinal chemistry, material science, structure elucidation and structure activity/property/toxicity relationship studies, high performance computing, chemical data mining etc., Other participants would present oral and poster presentations of their work.

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