Open Access from BMC

Thinking of Open Access, the Penrose Library will pay for your articles when they are submitted to BioMed Central journals. We currently have a positive financial balance with them, so if you want to submit an article or two for a high impact and open access publication, this may be the place.

The Right to Research

SPARC has released an interesting new brochure...

The Right to Research

"You know first hand that students are expected to cite articles from scholarly journals when they write research papers.

You’ve probably used journal articles in your coursework. You’ve probably also encountered journal articles that you wanted to read — potentially important articles — but couldn’t get access to.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

OPEN ACCESS — the principle that research should be accessible online, for free, immediately after publication — is improving the way scholarly information is shared."

Etc., etc., etc.

Genome Island: An Experiment in Teaching Science at Second Life

I plan to go to this talk on Friday. It sounds really cool.
Genome Island was created at Second Life as a laboratory-intensive environment for teaching genetics online. Students or other visitors to the island will encounter a series of genetic objects. Most of the objects are interactive and will generate a data set according to basic principles of genetics. Genetic models on the island include Mendel’s peas, cats, rabbits, fruit flies and bacteria. One section of the site features the human genome. Data can be analyzed and used to test hypotheses suggested in the background information provided with each object. This semester one of my genetics classes helped me to test the island as a teaching environment. Come and hear about the pleasures and pitfalls of teaching science at Second Life.

Science stays in JSTOR

"We are pleased to announce that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and JSTOR reached an agreement at the end of 2007 under which Science will continue its participation in JSTOR. Science will be available with a 5-year moving wall and new participating organizations will receive Science legacy content as part of the Health & General Sciences collection. In addition, we expect to introduce more opportunities within the JSTOR site for users to link directly to Science's website from Science legacy content located in JSTOR. We are very pleased to be able to continue and extend this relationship and to assure the community that future issues of Science will be preserved in JSTOR."

IOPScience Database for Physics Research

We now have access to all 56 current and backfiled journals available from the Institute of Physics (UK). The content coverage goes back to 1874.

NIH Open Access Mandate

In case you have not heard...

The NIH policy is "an Enormous Step Forward" noted Executive Director Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

See: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news2 and
http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news3.

New Math Resources

We now have access to the SIAM Locus backfile, and the Project Euclid Prime database. We should be getting access to the complete package of the current SIAM journals pretty soon.