Happy Open Access Week!

This week is "Open Access Week".

About the OA movement

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.

The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Now Open Access is on a roll. Recent Funder Mandates — including that of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest research funder), which now requires that all their funded research be placed in an openly accessible database, and Harvard University — have further strengthened the prospects for Open Access to all research.

Scientific American is under new management

For now, Penrose will keep a subscription to Scientific American, even though the price went up 750% in one year (2009 to 2010). Nature Publishing Group is now the publisher, and they really jacked the price up on it. I will be watching print use of this in 2010. We do have electronic access to the magazine as well.

For more information, take a look at this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Scientific American is probably the nation's most venerable source of science news written for a general audience. The Nature group, which took over the magazine this year, proposes to charge $299 for a 2010 print subscription-up from $39.95-and as much as $1,500 for an annual license for online access-up from $1,000 - depending on how big the institution is.

Former Chancellor Dan Ritchie takes a rap...

Former DU Chancellor Dan Ritchie raps about a new blog at the DCPA. He makes "it hip and funny so the kids will like it!"



Thanks to Let's Go DU for finding this.

2009 Sparky Awards

The third annual Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. The contest is well suited for adoption as a class assignment as well as an opportunity to promote library services, including media services or the information commons, where students can edit video, browse media, work collaboratively, and learn about copyright and balancing features such as fair use. Colleges and universities across North America are hosting local versions of the Sparky Awards to get maximum benefit from the third-annual installment of the contest. Other institutions everywhere are promoting international entries through sparkyawards.org.

The organizers of the popular Sparky Awards, a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of information sharing, have announced that Pat Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media and professor at American University, and Ben Moskowitz, organizer of the Open Video Alliance and co-founder of the Berkeley Students for Free Culture chapter, will help select the winners of the 2009 international contest. These additions to the judges’ panel reflect how vital the open sharing of information is to both students and faculty, and that the Sparky Awards is a unique forum to bring together stakeholders from across campus to the discussion on access to research.

The contest is sponsored by SPARC.

Smithsonian Education Online Conference on Climate Change

The "Smithsonian Education Online Conference on Climate Change" is three-day, free, education online conference taking place September 29 through October 1, 2009.

"Climate Change" sessions will be of special interest to educators, entire classrooms of engaged students, and to the general public. Throughout the conference, participants will explore Smithsonian research and collections related to the evidence, impact, and response to climate change. Alongside Smithsonian scientists and curators, you will look at the issues surrounding climate change from the perspectives of science, history, and art.

The Internet and Civic Engagement

This is the title of a new report that just came out from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It should be noted that the report doesn't even include Twitter or comment on how social media was used at the end of the presidential campaign in October/November of 2008. Happy reading.

American Institute of Physics UniPHY

This is a literature-based professional social networking site for physical science researchers.

The site allows physicists, engineers, and other scientists to directly connect with and explore their professional contacts and to identify researchers with the expertise needed for future collaborations.

AIP UniPHY, powered by Collexis High Definition Search, enables fast, accurate and extraordinary knowledge retrieval and discovery, and empowers individuals to search for and identify documents, researchers, trends, and new discoveries more quickly, precisely –- and thoroughly –- than ever before. AIP UniPHY provides intuitive interfaces through which researchers can network and share data –- all with the goal of advancing physics research worldwide.

This press release also has more info on the product.

50 Millionth Unique Chemical Substance is indexed

Here is the new substance. It is (5Z)-5-[(5-Fluoro-2-hydroxyphenyl)methylene]-2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-4(5H)-thiazolone.

Overview of the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 Workshop

I went to the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 "Road Show" Workshop way back on August 7, 2009. It was an all day affair held on the Auraria Campus here in Denver.

Presentation materials are here. For example, they began the day with "Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics".

• Introduction: Scholarly communication system
• Economics
  
• Copyright and author rights
  
• Open access and openness as a principle
  
• New models and modes of scholarly publishing

Handouts are here, such as:

• Workshop overview & outline
  
• Ten things you should know
  
• Assessing copyright management exercise
  
• Copyright MadLibs story exercise
  
• Copyright transfer agreement comparison exercise
  
• Openness exercise
  
• Final reflection activity
  
• Workshop evaluation

Videos are here.

The organizers of the event recorded audio during the day, but it is not available yet.

An updated version of LibX is now ready

The new verison of LibX (version 1.5.8) makes Encore the default method for searching the catalog. Encore provides a new and improved interface to search the Peak Catalog with keywords.

If you don't already have LibX installed on your computer, click here to install it for Firefox or click here to install it for Internet Explorer. If you already have LibX, just update the install when Firefox or IE prompt you to do so.

This webpage provides more details about what LibX does.

SciFinder e-seminars

Want to learn more about how to use SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) Software better? Take a seminar at https://casevents.webex.com/mw0304l/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=casevents.

Penrose is now on Friendfeed

We now have a Penrose Library Friendfeed account. This way, we can keep all of our social networking feeds linked through one source, and you can leave comments. Go ahead and check it out.

Do you get PhD? Nature vs. Science

This is a good comic strip...

Need an e-book? We've got 'em by the truck load.

We provide access to hundreds of thousands of e-books. Here are some of the vendors that provide e-books. This includes a lot of stuff that you can't find in Google Books!

Focusing on science and technology

• CRC ENGnetBASE (Over 900 ebooks in engineering)
• Morgan and Claypool Synthesis (Over 100 ebooks in computer science and engineering.)
• Books24x7
• Safari Books Online (from Proquest -- This includes books from O'Reilly.)
  
• SpringerLink e-books and e-book series. Some of the series include Lecture Notes in Mathematics and the Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

General e-book collections (current)

• ebrary
• netLibrary
• National Academies Press

General e-book collections (history)

• Early English Books Online (aka EEBO)
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Evans Early American Imprints (1639-1800) - Digital Edition
• Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

Penrose in the National News

Penrose got covered in the Washington Times, and a number of other local sources, too.

Washington Times, July 8 — It’s one thing for college students to glean information online or from a textbook. It’s quite another to read or even hold actual material that played a part in history. Students at the University of Denver soon will be able to check out actual documents linked to the assassination plot against Adolf Hitler as well as papers associated with the Nuremberg trials, thanks to a just-donated trove of materials from California resident Andrea Sears-Van Nest.

Here are some other sources that cover the same topic.

Finding the history left behind in boxes (Channel 9 News)
Holocaust history revealed in family letters (The Denver Post)
Intimate Collection Given To University Of Denver (Channel 7 News)

Please don't copy that floppy

Please don't kill commerce on the Internet. Don't copy that floppy.



Thanks to the Next Web for lettimg me know about this classic video... There is a sequel coming out this summer/fall, too.

New LibX edition for Penrose

If you upgrade to the new version of Firefox 3.5, you may also need to get a new version of the LibX toolbar for Firefox as well. What the heck is LibX? Go here to find out more about this great tool. Some Recent reports show that version 3.5 is really fast, and it has HTML 5.0 support.

Here is the new edition for IE 7.0 or 8.0.

Mobile Page for Penrose

Added a link to the Penrose mobile page to the "Cool Tools" page. It is just in beta format right now, and it might not look so good on some cell phones, but it should look ok on iPhones, iPod Touches, and some blackberries. Go ahead and bookmark this on your cell phone. Once we have an official mobile page, we will create a redirect.

New TED talk from Clay Shirky

This is a great new TED talk from Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has a deep understanding of how the media is transforming, and how that is effecting the world's political structure.

The reason the Rocky Mountain News failed