Monthly Archives: December 2008

Scientific Data Service from Google — No Go

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US Google to close sci­en­tific data ser­vice prior to offi­cial launch - 22 Dec 2008

Inter­net search ser­vices provider Google, US, will report­edly close its highly-anticipated sci­en­tific data ser­vice, Google Research Datasets, in Jan­u­ary with­out even offi­cially launch­ing the prod­uct. The com­pany has announced this in an e-mail to its beta testers, accord­ing to media reports.

The ser­vice was expected to offer sci­en­tists a way to store the huge amounts of data gen­er­ated in an increas­ing num­ber of fields. Nearly 30 datasets — mostly tests — had already been uploaded to the site.

Call­ing off the sci­en­tific project is seen to be another sign of ini­tial fru­gal­ity at Google. Just a few weeks ago, the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told the Wall Street Jour­nal that Google would be cut­ting back on exper­i­men­tal projects. It would, instead, focus its efforts on other activ­i­ties such as Google Scholar, its research pro­grammes and pub­lish­ing papers about research at Google.

How­ever, some sci­en­tists remain hope­ful that the ser­vice might return in bet­ter times. Google rep­re­sen­ta­tives have not responded to requests for comments.

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, Dec. 22, 2008

SPARC Digital repositories meeting summaries, Baltimore, Nov.17–18

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US Resources and pre­sen­ta­tions from recent SPARC repos­i­to­ries meet­ing now online — 23 Dec 2008

Thought lead­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers from higher edu­ca­tion and beyond called on par­tic­i­pants at the SPARC Dig­i­tal Repos­i­to­ries Meet­ing in Bal­ti­more on Novem­ber 17–18 to con­tinue their dig­i­tal repos­i­tory devel­op­ment efforts and offered strate­gies for build­ing on expe­ri­ence gained to date.

In the open­ing keynote, John Wilbanks, who heads the Sci­ence Com­mons project at Cre­ative Com­mons, pointed to the unique qual­i­ties of dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ries, and the need to high­light their poten­tial to serve the aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity. He encour­aged uni­ver­si­ties to adopt open-access poli­cies mod­eled after the one adopted by Har­vard Uni­ver­sity ear­lier this year rather than invent­ing their own.

Bob Witeck, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer and found­ing part­ner of Witeck-Combs Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc., pointed to the impor­tance of smart mar­ket­ing in get­ting dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ries off the ground and val­ued by fac­ulty. He encour­aged librar­i­ans and repos­i­tory man­agers to use plain lan­guage and vivid sto­ries to com­mu­ni­cate the impact of the open shar­ing of infor­ma­tion. By mak­ing dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ries more vis­i­ble and demon­strat­ing their value to the pub­lic, uni­ver­si­ties can win needed sup­port from tax­pay­ers and com­mu­ni­ties, said David Shu­len­burger, Vice Pres­i­dent for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs, National Asso­ci­a­tion of State Uni­ver­si­ties and Land-Grant Col­leges (NASULGC), in the clos­ing keynote of the meeting.

A sum­mary of each keynote and every panel dis­cus­sion, along with avail­able pod­casts, slides, and an invi­ta­tion to online dis­cus­sion, are now avail­able online through the SPARC web­site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08.

Click here

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter,  Dec. 23, 2008

Free service collects tables of content

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RI Newsline — Issue 24 — Decem­ber 2008

Research Infor­ma­tion [mail@europascience.com]

17 Decem­ber 2008

“A new free ser­vice makes it eas­ier to keep up-to-date with schol­arly jour­nals.tic­TOCs  — Jour­nal Tables of Con­tents Ser­vice pro­vides access to the most recent tables of con­tents of over 11,000 schol­arly jour­nals from more than 400 pub­lish­ers.  It helps schol­ars, researchers, aca­d­e­mics and any­one else keep up-to-date with what’s being pub­lished in the most recent issues of jour­nals on almost any subject. ”

This is funded and devel­oped by a coali­tion of aca­d­e­mic institutions,organizations, and publishers.

For more infor­ma­tion:  http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=418

New Portuguese scientific OA repository launched

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Portugal New Por­tuguese sci­en­tific OA repos­i­tory launched — 19 Dec 2008

Portugal’s publicly-funded Repositório Cien­tí­fico de Acesso Aberto de Por­tu­gal (RCAAP) was recently launched at the 3rd Open Access con­fer­ence that took place at Uni­ver­sity of Minho on Decem­ber 15 – 16, 2008. RCAAP gath­ers con­tent from 10 insti­tu­tional repos­i­to­ries from across the country.

The new open access repos­i­tory cur­rently indexes more than 13091 doc­u­ments from 10 repos­i­to­ries. The project is funded by the Knowl­edge Soci­ety Agency (UMIC) and will be tech­ni­cally main­tained by the National Sci­en­tific Com­pu­ta­tions Foun­da­tion (FCCN).

The 10 repos­i­to­ries that are cur­rently con­tribut­ing to this main cen­tralised repos­i­tory are mainly uni­ver­sity DSpace-based repos­i­to­ries or similar.

Approx­i­mately 10% are in Eng­lish.  Top­ics appear to be mainly biomedical.

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, Dec. 19, 2008.

40 millionth chemical substance — CAS

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US CAS reg­is­ters 40 mil­lionth sub­stance - 04 Dec 2008

Chem­i­cal data­base provider Chem­i­cal Abstracts Ser­vice (CAS) has announced that CAS Reg­istry now includes 40 mil­lion organic and inor­ganic sub­stances. The CAS Reg­istry is one the most com­pre­hen­sive col­lec­tions of chem­i­cal sub­stances and the CAS Reg­istry Num­ber is the recog­nised global stan­dard for chem­i­cal sub­stance iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. More than 100 mil­lion CAS Reg­istry Num­bers have been assigned to organic and inor­ganic sub­stances and biosequences.

The 40 mil­lionth sub­stance was iden­ti­fied by CAS sci­en­tists in a jour­nal arti­cle pub­lished in Ange­wandte Chemie Inter­na­tional Edi­tion. The arti­cle describes a novel method for the syn­the­sis of poly­cyclic sub­stances with ‘a cen­tral seven-membered car­bo­cy­cle’, includ­ing the 40 mil­lionth substance.

A divi­sion of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, CAS pro­vides the world’s largest and most cur­rent col­lec­tion of chem­i­cal and related sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the author­i­ta­tive data­base of chem­i­cal sub­stances, the CAS REGISTRY. CAS com­bines these data­bases with advanced search and analy­sis tech­nolo­gies to deliver com­plete, cross-linked and effec­tive dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment for sci­en­tific research and dis­cov­ery, includ­ing such prod­ucts as SciFinder, STN, STN Express and STN AnaV­istTM, among others.

Click here

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter Dec. 4, 2008

Academia.edu — New Website for Scholarly Communication

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Dear all,

I recently fin­ished my Ph.D on the phi­los­o­phy of per­cep­tion from Oxford. With a team of peo­ple from Stan­ford and Cam­bridge, I’ve just launched a website,

 www.academia.edu, which does two things:

- It shows aca­d­e­mics around the world struc­tured in a ‘tree’ for­mat, dis­played accord­ing to their depart­men­tal and insti­tu­tional affiliations.

- It enables aca­d­e­mics to see news on the lat­est research in their area — the lat­est peo­ple, papers and talks.

We are hop­ing that Academia.edu will even­tu­ally list every aca­d­e­mic in the world — Fac­ulty Mem­bers, Post-Docs, Grad­u­ate Stu­dents, and Inde­pen­dent Researchers. Aca­d­e­mics can add their depart­ments, and them­selves, to the tree by click­ing on the boxes.

Aca­d­e­mics are join­ing the tree rapidly. More than 15,000 aca­d­e­mics have added them­selves in the last two months. Some pro­fes­sors on the site include:

 - Richard Dawkins — http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardDawkins

 - Stephen Hawk­ing — http://cambridge.academia.edu/StephenHawking

 - Paul Krug­man — http://princeton.academia.edu/PaulKrugman

 - Noam Chom­sky — http://mit.academia.edu/NoamChomsky

- Steven Pinker — http://harvard.academia.edu/StevenPinker

 We’re try­ing to spread the word about Academia.edu as much as pos­si­ble. It would be ter­rific if you could visit the site, and add your­self to your depart­ment on the tree. If your uni­ver­sity is not there, you can add it by click­ing on the arrows com­ing out of the uni­ver­sity boxes.

Inde­pen­dent researchers — if you are a researcher that is not asso­ci­ated with a uni­ver­sity, I encour­age you to add your­self to the “Inde­pen­dent Researchers”

por­tion of the tree at  http://independent.academia.edu

And do spread the word to your friends and col­leagues if you can.

Many thanks,

Richard  http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice

CAVEAT: The divulging of pass­words is OPTIONAL  &  NOT RECOMMENDED