THREE NEWS ITEMS

 

 Emerald Makes More LIS Articles Available Through Open Access

From Resource Shelf Blog

Emerald Group Publishing Limited is delighted to announce the next batch of articles available in open access as part of its ‘special partnership’ with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The articles, available to download from www.emeraldinsight.com/tk/iflaoa2013, are published in several of Emerald’s well-respected LIS journals, including Interlending & Document Supply, Library Hi Tech News, Performance Measurement and Metrics, Library Management and Library Review.

This special partnership takes advantage of the Emerald platform to increase the discoverability of research presented at IFLA events.

Google Reader to Retire in July 2013

From Google Blog:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout.

 

Digital Public Library of America to Debut April 18-19

The long-planned Digital Public Library of America is set to make its public debut on schedule with a two-day series of events, to be held April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library. DPLA’s Concept Note states that “by adhering to the fundamental principle of free and universal access to knowledge, it will promote education in the broadest sense of the term.  That is, it will function as an online library for students of all ages, from grades K-12 to postdoctoral researchers and anyone seeking self-instruction…Despite our ambitions to include all kinds of cultural products, we are concentrating at first on the written record…but are designing the system such that we can move quickly to other types of materials… In order to lay a solid foundation for its collections to demonstrate whet the project may become …the DPLA will begin with works in the public domain…that have already been digitized.”

DPLA’s next step may hopefully be orphaned books.

 

African Journals Online

 

                AJOL www.ajol.info  proclaims itself to be the world’s largest online collection of African-authored scholarly articles drawn from 400 peer-reviewed journals published in 30 countries.   According to its mission statement: “Mainly due to difficulties accessing them, African-published research papers have been under-utilized, under-valued and under-cited in the international and African research arenas….AJOL is working to change this.”

It is another use of the internet and Open Access Journals such as the Directory of Open Access Journals www.doaj.org  and Latin America’s Scientific Electronic Library Online www.scielo.org to make non-North American /Europe research available to a worldwide audience.

            AJOL is a non-profit company based in South Africa.  It raises funds by charging for downloads for a few magazines so it’s not all Open Access.  Currently it receives 150,000 visits per month from 190 countries.   

            I did a couple of searches on my regular interests.   They used the Google system which allows for Boolean searching and setting time limits.

            The word nanotechnology got 8 pages of listings of relevant articles mostly concerning the use of nano particles to deliver medicine.

            Seven pages of relevant articles showed up for MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems)

            I decided to add the phrase cold fusion found eight pages of listings with I put in cold fusion, but none if I use the “ “mark command.

                 

JSTOR OPENS ITS SELF TO INDIVIDUALS

JSTOR is a major non-profit archive of 1,400 academic journals, some reaching back to the 1600’s. It is now offering free access to large amounts of its material.  Anyone can sign up for a JSTORE account and read up to three articles for free every two weeks.   You cannot print them however unlike paid subscribers who can look at an unlimited number of items. 

                JSTOR was one of first data archives start in 1995. It has since its founding been devoted to the helping libraries, especially research and academic libraries, deal with the constant growth of the number of academic journals in every field.   It was originally funded by the Andrew W. Mellow Foundation and subscriptions.  It is now part of ITHAKA a non-profit organization devoted “to helping the academic community take full advantage of… networking technologies. “  and collecting subscriptions from 7000 institutions in 153 countries.

 In 2011 it began carrying books.  

                When I was working as a reference librarian, I always referred students researching historical, theological, or literately subjects to JSTOR because it had material going back literally centuries.

                The advanced search on this new feature allows you to exclude material you cannot read, and exclude book reviews, which can take up an annoying amount of space in broad searches. 

OPEN ACCESS FOR MONEY

      To review the basics of the Open Access model- open access means anyone has access to the full text of a publication, journal or book, on the web, with no limitations except possibly a requirement to register. Two terms commonly used to describe open access papers are gold and green. Gold journals are intended to be open access from the start. Green open access journals means the author has posted copies of their manuscripts, published elsewhere, to open access sites on the web.

      There are government supported data bases of open access materials, but there are also for profit open access journals and some publishers have enough to organize them into databases.

      One I find interesting is Hindawi Publishing Corporation  (www.hindawi.com).  They make their money in three ways.  They charge fees of up to $1500 to authors to include their articles in one of 466 different peer review journals.  An institution, such as a university or research institute, can pay an annual subscription and submit their staff’s articles without further payment.  Finally Hindawi sells hard copies of their magazines.

       An Egyptian based corporation, Hindawi has flourished despite falling library budgets worldwide because its main source of income is author fees, usually paid from grants.

      Hindawi’s most important resource is the respect of the academic community.  Authors will only pay to be published if it improves their academic standing.

      However Hindawi faces the continuous problem of maintaining standards using volunteer reviewers, who hope being members of the editorial board will increase their standing.   Each article is reviewed by five editorial board members.  If they disagree about the article’s value or accuracy they then each read the others report and have a chance to change their mind

      The success of their system can be judged by the fact that in 2011 all the articles in 90 of Hindawi’s journals were included in PubMed Central. This open-access repository of biomedical articles is funded by the National Institute of Health.  Also all of Hindawi’s journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals and Google Scholars.

 

 

 

Japanese DOAJ

The Japan Science and Technology Agency (www.jst.go.jp) is a government agency tasked with encouraging innovation in science and technology in Japan.

Recognizing the importance of access to electronic journals one of their projects is J-STAGE (www.jstage.jst.go.jp) a searchable data base of open access journals.  Its purpose is to support the computerizing of bulletins of academic societies, journals and then make Japanese science and technology information easily accessible to Japanese and non-Japanese. 

Open access refers to electronic journals, books, conference proceedings, etc. that can be accessed without any requirement beyond registering.  J-STAGE requires registration.   

 

As of December 16^th S-TAGE contained 1591 journals or 2,451,624 full text articles.  The advanced search allows one to search by keyword, article title, full text, journal or subject area.  One can select if one wants the articles in Japanese or English, conference proceedings or journals and most important select only the peer reviewed journals.  Most college assignments require peer reviewed articles.  

Earlier reviews suggest S-TAGE was mostly medical journals but I found a high percentage of electronic and materials science journals.  I ran three tests. 

Searching “brain tumor” as full text, peer reviewed journals only, I found 28 articles in three journals. 

Searching “nano-technology” got eight articles from two journals. 

Searching “rice” limited to the humanities and social sciences area got 31 articles but all in one journal.   

GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT ARE BEHIND ON ACADEMIC JOURNALS

                 Since both are trying updates it’s worth a moment to look at Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar. 

                 Microsoft Academic Search (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) is beta testing a new search page.  It makes it simple to check how many times an article has been cited, chart how co-authors have collaborated, and  find which academic institutes have produced the most cited publications. You can search for articles and books by domain, keyword, authors, journals, as well as and the conferences and organizations involved in producing them.

                Google Scholar (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/) is getting harder to find, you have to click on more and then even more to even find it.  Then Advanced Search can only be accessed if you find an unlabeled down button. Google has recently added the ability to search scholar metrics.  You can browse publications in broad categories or narrower subcategories find the most cited journals and search them by key word.

                These new features are not likely to be much use to the average student researcher just the long term professional.  Worse there is no way to limit your search for the articles that are free and available in full text.   

                Still they are free.          

News Items

The Directory of Open Access Books (www.doabooks.org/doab) was selected as the best new product of the year by the readers of the e-zine The Charleston Advisor (www.charleston.com) DOAB has reached 1255 Academic peer-reviewed books from 35 publishers.  For more info check

our November 25, 2012 entry.

The 1940 census is now available on web (http://1940census.archives.gov/)

 

SEEKING KNOWLEDGE WORLD WIDE

  

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a database of articles, 377,772 articles, from 985 journals published in 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (plus Spain and South Africa).  One can search either all the articles by word, or limit the search by nation, region, or subject.  Most of the journals are in the biological, medical and social sciences.   Its biggest limitation is that many but not the majority of  its articles are only available in Spanish and Portuguese.

The initial reason for the creation of SciELO in 1987 was the conviction that the developing world’s scientific research was not being published in the top journals.   Lists of citations, the scientific world’s equivalent of home run stats, showed only a tiny number of articles by researchers outside the U.S., Canada and Europe were being used to support research.  

In an influential article from 1995 “Lost Science in the Third World” Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, editor of a Mexican medical journal was quoted on the subject using cholera research as an example.

“Right now cases are increasing in Mexico.  Our researchers have interesting findings about some new strains.  International journals refuse our papers because they don’t consider cholera a hot topic.  But what if these strains spread across the border to Texas and California? Previous knowledge about the disease will have been lost.  Scientists searching the literature will not find the papers published in Mexican journals, because they are not indexed.”

In the same article Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, pointed out “it is vital the developing nations communicate their research to one another.  And it is hugely unethical not to have a way for [Third World] researchers to share ideas with the medical infrastructure.”

When SciELO started in 1997 with Brazilian funding it had two major goals. 

First was to find the best way to move academic journals on line in an open access format.  Simply put open access means access to the full text of a publication, on the web, with no limitations, except possibly a requirement to register.  

Its second priority was to set up a system for keeping track of the citations of the articles.

The program started with 10 journals and grew to this year’s 985.  There has also been a considerable growth in the number of citations of Latin American authors, mostly from those listed in SciELO.

In 2009 A.L Pacer in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education declared “the most critical feature of a SciELO collection is its attention to the continuing quality of the journal it indexes and publishes.  Latin American and Caribbean journals have markedly progressed in quality and professionalism. “

This year Brazil started a book portal for the purpose of publishing “national and thematic collections of academic books online with object of maximizing the visibility, accessibility, use and impact of the research results, essays and studies that are published in them."  How long it will take other members to follow remains to  be seen.

Some commentators hope the introduction of South Africa to SciELO  will be the beginning  of  African and Asian participation.