Monthly Archives: October 2008

NTIS — National Technical Information Services — RSS Feeds

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 The Nation’s Source for Sci­en­tific Information

“NTIS under­goes a rig­or­ous process to ensure that all the infor­ma­tion we offer is authen­tic and cred­i­ble. This integrity, along with the breadth and depth of our col­lec­tion, is why NTIS is regarded as the nation’s pre­em­i­nent source of gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion.” 

NTIS is now offer­ing RSS feeds to any of its 39 major sub­ject cat­e­gories.  One may sub­scribe to receive the lat­est titles, weekly.   For a list­ing of Scope Notes that defines the spe­cific top­i­cal con­tent for each, go to  http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/scopenotes.pdf

To sub­scribe to the Newslet­ter, write to:

 “The National Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice (NTIS), is the nation’s largest and most com­pre­hen­sive source of government-funded sci­en­tific, tech­ni­cal, engi­neer­ing and business-related information.”

 

Source: NTIS Tech­ni­cal Reports Newslet­ter, Vol. 1(4), Octo­ber 15, 2008

 

MultiSearch — new federated, deep web database for Defence

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US DTIC Online por­tal deploys Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies’ Mul­ti­Search inter­face — 23 Oct 2008

Search solu­tions provider Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies, US, has launched an updated inter­face for the Defense Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion Center’s new DTIC Online research por­tal (http://multisearch.dtic.mil). DTIC is part of the US’ Depart­ment of Defense (DOD). The inter­face, known as Mul­ti­Search, offers four defence search chan­nels from a sin­gle drop-down menu, allow­ing users to access a col­lec­tion of sci­en­tific and defence-related resources in one simul­ta­ne­ous search. The search employs the lat­est ver­sion of Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies’ Explorit Research Accel­er­a­tor, which is seen to pro­vide ‘smart’ clus­ter­ing, ency­clo­pe­dia side­bars from Wikipedia, and EurekAlert! sci­ence news.

DTIC sup­ports the DOD and its com­mu­nity by cen­tral­is­ing sci­en­tific, tech­ni­cal and related defence-information ser­vices, data­bases and sys­tems. Its new DTIC Online sig­nif­i­cantly expands the breadth of infor­ma­tion scanned and retrieved with its four search chan­nels: DOD web­sites, DTIC Pub­lic Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion, the DTIC Web­site, and Fed­eral Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion. Mul­ti­Search also includes a fed­er­ated search of other fed­er­ated search web­sites, includ­ing Scitopia.org and WorldWideScience.org — both pow­ered by the Explorit Research Accel­er­a­tor. It there­fore is pro­jected to con­sol­i­date a num­ber of advanced search engines within one search, deliv­er­ing results users might never have uncovered.

The upgraded Mul­ti­Search por­tal adds new fea­tures that seek to enrich the user expe­ri­ence and value of research. By tak­ing advan­tage of Explorit’s ‘smart clus­ter­ing,’ Mul­ti­Search pro­vides relevance-ranked clus­ters that allow users to see their results organ­ised by topic. It also retrieves and dis­plays entries from Wikipedia and EurekAlert! that com­ple­ment the search expe­ri­ence. Explorit deliv­ers not only rel­e­vant results, but path­ways and con­text to guide users to more rel­e­vant search results.

Deep Web’s fed­er­ated search tech­nol­ogy is pro­jected to enable fee-based or pro­pri­etary con­tent to be searched pub­licly on the Inter­net, with­out giv­ing it away. This con­tent is not search­able by pub­lic search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

DTIC Online was cre­ated specif­i­cally for the defence com­mu­nity. Mul­ti­Search can be accessed from the pull-down menu by select­ing ‘Fed­eral S&T’ or by going directly to (http://multisearch.dtic.mil).The search is free and much of the con­tent is avail­able at no cost. Some con­tent — like that accessed through Sci­topia — can be pur­chased on a pay-per-view basis or accessed by a subscription.

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library

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The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion on Mon­day, Octo­ber 13, 2008, has announced the for­ma­tion of a giant library to serve as a back-up for Google Books, des­ig­nated as the HathiTrust.

“The…HathiTrust, …con­sists of the mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee on Insti­tu­tional Coop­er­a­tion, a con­sor­tium of the 11 uni­ver­si­ties in the Big Ten Con­fer­ence and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, and the 10 cam­puses in the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia sys­tem. The Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia is join­ing the project, it will be announced today, and offi­cials hope to bring in other col­leges as well.”

Already HathiTrust  (a shared dig­i­tal respos­i­tory ), con­tains the full text of more than two mil­lion books scanned by Google.  How­ever, only about 16 per­cent of the books in HathiTrust—or about 327,000 volumes—are out of copy­right so that their full text can be deliv­ered to all readers.

To read the whole arti­cle: http://chronicle.com/free/2008/10/5061n.htm

 

Con­tinue read­ing →

Open Access Day, 1st International — October 14, 2008

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Open Access Day   Octo­ber 14 is Open Access Day
The first inter­na­tional Open Access Day will be held next week on Tues­day, 14 Octo­ber. Founded by SPARC, Stu­dents for FreeCul­ture, and the Pub­lic Library of Sci­ence, the aim is to broaden aware­ness and under­stand­ing of open access.

 

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Publication imbalance in Science and Medicine

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US Cur­rent pub­li­ca­tion prac­tices may dis­tort sci­ence, say researchers - 08 Oct 2008

“Open access jour­nal PLoS Med­i­cine has pub­lished a paper in its lat­est issue, accord­ing to which the cur­rent sys­tem of pub­lish­ing med­ical and sci­en­tific research pro­vides a dis­torted view of the real­ity of sci­en­tific data that are gen­er­ated in the lab­o­ra­tory and clinic. In their paper, a team of researchers — Neal Young of the National Insti­tutes of Health; John Ioan­ni­dis of Tufts Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine, USA and Uni­ver­sity of Ioan­nina School of Med­i­cine, Greece; and Omar Al-Ubaydli of George Mason Uni­ver­sity — apply prin­ci­ples from the field of eco­nom­ics to present evi­dence con­sis­tent with a distortion.

Accord­ing to these researchers, there is an extreme imbal­ance between the abun­dance of sup­ply and the increas­ingly lim­ited venues for pub­li­ca­tion. The result is that only a small pro­por­tion of all research results are even­tu­ally cho­sen for pub­li­ca­tion, and these results are unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of sci­en­tists’ repeated sam­plings of the real world. The authors argue that there is a moral imper­a­tive to recon­sider how sci­en­tific data are judged and dis­sem­i­nated. The paper is avail­able online at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201.

PLoS Med­i­cine is a peer-reviewed, inter­na­tional, open-access jour­nal pub­lished by the Pub­lic Library of Sci­ence (PLoS), a non­profit organ­i­sa­tion. The jour­nal pro­vides an open-access venue for pub­lish­ing impor­tant orig­i­nal research and analy­sis rel­e­vant to human health.”

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter

Scitation Database Implements Web 2.0 Applications

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“The Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Physics (AIP) announced the release of con­tent redesigns for six addi­tional clients on AIP’s Sci­ta­tion online pub­lish­ing plat­form. Enhance­ments include the incor­po­ra­tion of Web 2.0 fea­tures, which allow blog­gers to cap­ture a pre­for­mat­ted cita­tion that con­tains embed­ded code and plug it directly into their blog, with­out any re-keying. Users can use social book­mark­ing, which allow them to store and access book­marks from any com­puter and to use tags to orga­nize the book­marks. A Research Toolkit is avail­able where researchers can dis­cover and con­nect with online work­flow tools such as zotero and Google Note­book.”

Source:  EContentMag.com

Free Patent Databases

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In response to a ques­tion put to the Engi­neer­ing Divi­sion of the Spe­cial Libraries Asso­ci­a­tion, Mike White at Queen’s Uni­ver­sity in Ontario, writes:

“For teach­ing and research pur­poses, the pub­lic patent data­bases are excel­lent resources. The qual­ity and cur­rency of the data is as good as the com­mer­cial sites. The patent office data­bases are updated weekly and most of the inde­pen­dent data­bases (FreeP­atentsOn­line, Patent Lens, etc.) are cur­rent or no more than a week behind. My favorite is the EPO’s esp@cenet sys­tem. It’s user friendly, has tremen­dous con­tent (60 mil­lion patents from 72+ juris­dic­tions) and an excel­lent clas­si­fi­ca­tion search tool. I under­stand that they will be rolling out major enhance­ments to it some­time this fall. You might be inter­ested in a com­par­i­son of free patent data­bases I posted recently on my blog.”

PUL’s Patent Resources guide is link­able from the “Arti­cles and Data­bases” clus­ter, under “P” or “patent”.  (“Arti­cles and Data­bases”) is on the Library’s home­page.

Mike also notes that Thom­son Reuters is rumored to have a pow­er­ful new patent search­ing data­base com­ing — for pro­fes­sional patent searchers.