Scitopia now offers an advanced alerts service

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Louise Deis

"Scitopia.org, designed for direct access to the best in science and technology research, provides a one-stop search interface to more than three and a half million peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings, fifty million patents, and full-text documents from government websites. Founded in 2007, scitopia.org spans 350 years of data, federating the scholarly content from twenty-one societies, and six government information sources. Each search is run against all or selected digital collections. Results are then aggregated, de-duplicated and ranked for maximum search efficiency." ( First mentioned in this blog, Oct. 23, 2008, as part of DTIC’s MultiSearch.)

Update: New alerting service

"Deep Web Technologies launches advanced alerts service in Scitopia.org – 06 Mar 2009

Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has launched their advanced alerts service in Scitopia.org, the free, federated search portal powered by Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit Research Accelerator. Scitopia.org Alerts delivers science and engineering content of interest to users through email and RSS feeds automatically, rather than forcing users to come to scitopia.org to perform searches themselves. The service makes it easy for users to stay current on research from the deep web libraries of major science and engineering societies, such as IEEE, Institute of Physics, American Physical Society as well as patent databases and government sources."

"Scitopia.org Alerts service automatically runs searches requested by users on the terms and those societies they choose to include in their search. The technology “remembers” which search results have already been delivered to the user and sends only new results, making it a powerful tool for researchers to identify new publications and articles in their areas of interest. Alerts can be created for any term or field, including author, abstracts, and affiliations. The technology also recognizes institutional subscriptions to society content and automatically authenticates those users, allowing them to click through to the full text from the Alert. Others can purchase full text on a pay-per-view basis."

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter 3/6/09

AuthorMapper.com — free online analytical tool — Springer

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Louise Deis

Springer launches free analytical online tool, AuthorMapper.com – 04 Feb 2009

STM publisher Springer Science+Business Media, Germany, has launched AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research.

The portal currently searches over three million journal articles to deliver a variety of useful information. The current searchable content is from all Springer journals. Metadata from other STM publishers will be included in the near future. The tool can provide a variety of analyses, such as keyword tag clouds and "Top 5" bar charts for various important metrics, and includes an interactive world map of the results.

AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search function also allows complex queries using keyword, discipline, institution, journal and author. The results can identify new and historic scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics, allowing for identification of trends in the literature, discovery of wider scientific relationships, and locating other experts in a field of study.

The trend timeline graph, for instance, allows authors to see whether their area of expertise is growing or has already peaked. Users that are only interested in open access content can restrict their searches accordingly, and all search results provide link-outs to content on SpringerLink. For graduates, post-docs and emerging researchers, AuthorMapper.com shows which institutions are the most prolific in specific research areas and allows for their comparison.

AuthorMapper.com’s can even be useful for members of the general public seeking to identify experts, for example, medical specialists, working close to where they are located.

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter (2/4/09)

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

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Louise Deis

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.

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Dec. 23, 2008

Academia.edu — New Website for Scholarly Communication

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Louise Deis

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

Royal Society Podcasts

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Louise Deis

The Royal Society: Podcasts [iTunes]

http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=7476

"The Royal Society, based in the United Kingdom, is not only 350 years old, but is also not about the royal family. Rather, The Royal Society is all about science–influencing science policy and debating scientific issues, with other scientists and the public. Their website is loaded with resources, such as their "News" section which has articles on science, education, industry and the environment culled from the major daily newspapers. Click on the "Library and Archives" section to be catapulted into a virtual room of resources such as the "Science Policy Collection", "Digital Journal Archive", "Biographical Information on Fellows", and "Picture Library". The Library events podcasts are easy-to-listen-to and wide-ranging, though many are about the history of science, and include video and audio podcasts. Podcasts about scientific failure, apothecaries, and the taming of electricity are just some of the titles available from the past two years of library events. Visitors shouldn’t miss using the unique search feature called "Select an Audience" at the bottom of any page of the site that allows them to choose what information is viewed based on who they are, i.e. teacher, student, policymaker, researcher, media, scientist, or fellow. Such a feature really helps to make a large website, such as this, much more accessible and easy to navigate. [KMG] "

From the Scout Report, University of Wisconsin, Nov. 14, 2008

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Louise Deis

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 →

Publication imbalance in Science and Medicine

Posted on October 8, 2008 by Louise Deis


	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

Free Patent Databases

Posted on October 3, 2008 by Louise Deis

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.

UK PubMed Central catching up with US version

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Louise Deis

"Research institutions to further develop the UK PubMed Central website – 18 Sep 2008

Eight leading biomedical research funding organisations, including Government bodies, Research Councils and Charities, have approved funding to further develop the UK PubMed Central website (www.ukpmc.ac.uk) over the next three years. The development will be carried out by the British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in close consultation with the UK’s biomedical and health researchers.

Since being launched in January 2007, the UKPubMed Central has expanded to offer 1.3 million full-text, peer-reviewed research papers through its online digital archive. The new and improved features will include direct links to the 18 million records currently available on the US version of PubMed as part of the European Bioinformatics Institute’s CiteXplore bibliographic tool; new ways to extract biological information from research papers using text analysis and data-mining tools; an easy-to-use, intuitive interface; and access to content not included in traditional journal literature – clinical guidelines, technical reports and conference proceedings. These developments are projected to significantly enhance UK PubMed Central’s accessibility and make it a valuable first point of call for the UK’s life sciences researchers.

UK PubMed Central is part of a network of PubMed Central (PMC) International repositories. Based on PMC, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, UK PubMed Central provides a stable, permanent, and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications.

From Knowledgespeak Newsletter

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