AuthorMapper.com — free online analytical tool — Springer

German Springer launches free analytical online tool, AuthorMapper.com04 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.

Click here

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter (2/4/09)

Open Access proposal at Harvard

From The Chronical of Higher Education via Patty Gaspari-Bridges, Head of the Science Libraries, Princeton University: 

February 12, 2008

 

"Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement

Harvard University’s faculty this evening adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.  Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications.  Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard, who proposed the policy to the faculty, said after the vote in a news release that the decision ‘should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.’  The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of the article to the provost’s office, which will place it in an online repository.  The policy will allow Harvard authors to publish in any journal that permits posting online after publication. According to Mr.Suber, about two-thirds of pay-access journals allow such posting in online repositories. –Lila Guterman ‘

 copyright 2008 CHE (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Cal (Berkeley) to pay for authors to publish in Open Access journals

"enews feature: Berkeley steps forward with bold initiative to pay authors’ open-access charges 

 

It’s one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It’s another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it. That’s what’s happening at the University of California Berkeley. In January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for open-access journals… "

 

From SPARC enews, May, 2008

 

To read more, or subscribe to the SPARC  (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) newsletter: http://www.arl.org/sparc/index.shtml