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Newsletter
from the Physics-Astronomy Library, University of California,
Berkeley
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Fall 2004 |
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“Scientific Publications: Free for All?” |
| A long awaited report on Science, Technical, Medical (STM) publishing
appeared July 20, 2004 from the UK Parliament’s Science and
Technology Committee. The final report recommends that all publicly
funded research in the UK be made publicly available and that government
take a leading role in that mission. The report also calls for government
action to address digital preservation issues. Bundling is when
all (or most) journals by a publisher are offered to institutional
subscribers “only” as a set for annual purchase, with
high prices. The UK committee was unimpressed with bundling, stating
“only when flexible bundled deals are made available will
libraries achieve value for money on their subscriptions.”
The committee agreed that publishers contribute to the scientific
process, but also profit from it. The committee asserted that powerful
STM publishers may be using their strength during this transition
period “to make excessive profits whilst the going is good.”
The report adds that publisher costs associated with digitization
should decrease, meaning prices should as well. The report stopped
short of endorsing an immediate wholesale shift to an Open Access
model, expressing concern over the potential effect on scientific
societies as publishers. “The UK cannot act alone”,
the report notes, but it will lead by example and act as a proponent
for change. Early this summer the European Commission launched its
own study “on the economic and technical evolution of the
scientific publication markets in Europe.” In its announcement
of the study, the EU mentioned the October 2003 Berlin Declaration
which said, in part, that “[e]stablishing open access as a
worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each
and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder
of cultural heritage.”
A copy of the report can be found at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm
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| Scholarly communication is the documentation of scholarship. The
scholarly communication cycle and the price and accessibility of
science journals continue to be hot topics in conversations among
faculty (as authors, readers, and journal editors), university administrators,
librarians, and publishers. Increasingly a number of initiatives
run in parallel to the traditional journal or, at times, in place
of it: “open archives”, “open access” journals,
university e-archives, and posting articles on personal or academic
departmental Web sites.
American
Physical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), Nature Publishing
Group, and other CrossRef participating publishers announced a
new initiative this spring with Google™. In partner-ship
with Google search technologies, the publishers offer search results
at their Web sites that link to content via DOI’s (Digital
Object Identifiers) or URL’s. In addition, publishers’
full text content also shows up in results in the main Google.com
index. Launched cooperatively some years back among several science
publishers, CrossRef is a “reference-linking” service
for scholarly publishing, that facilitates reading of full-text
articles referenced in a paper across publishers. This new CrossRef
Search is free and enables scholars to perform cross-publisher,
full-text searches of the latest scholarly research. To evaluate
functionality this CrossRef-Google pilot runs through 2004. So
check it out and send feedback. IOPoffers the service at http://www.iop.org/EJ/search_crossref.
It can also be found on the Web sites of the other eight participating
publishers. CrossRef is in discussion with other search engines
about similar projects.
The open-access arXiv (Cornell University; formerly Los Alamos)
has a new screening process for its articles for first -time submitters
or for submitters in new categories. New users will need to seek
endorsement by established users. The new system will verify that
contributors belong to the scientific community and will ensure
that content is relevant to current research, all at a much lower
cost than conventional peer-reviewed journals. Also there will
be “autoendorsements” of authors based on criteria,
such as academic affiliation. http://www.arxiv.org
Changes
continue for science publishers. In the spring of 2004 Springer
Science + Business Media merged with Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Together the companies publish 1,350 journals and more than 5,000
books each year, with revenues of about 880 million euros. Re-named
“Springer”, both are currently owned by leading European
private equity houses Cinven and Candover. Springer will be the
world’s second largest academic publisher behind Elsevier
Science. In early July Springer unveiled a new “Open Choice”
program for authors in their journals. Authors may now choose
to make their articles available to readers for free on SpringerLink,
for a price of $3,000 per article. Giving its own finger-post
nod to open access, Amsterdam-based Elsevier announced in July
a new “postprint archiving” policy for its some 1,800
journals. Postprint archiving (posting an article after publication)
requires the consent of the copyright holder. Authors may post
the final version of their articles on “pre-print servers
and the authors’ personal or institutional Web sites”,
as long as it is not “a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect”.
This step by Elsevier is considered large for authors (as to facilitating
open access) but small for libraries (as to budget/price relief).
In January
2004 the U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted a set of
recommendations for FY 2005’s federal budget. One key recommendation
would have the National Institutes of Health(NIH) put a condition
on its research grants so that articles based on NIH-funded research
would be electronically deposited in PubMed Central(PMC), the
NIH’s open-access database. The exact language of the recommendation
is not yet published, but reports indicate that any work supported
by NIH grants or contracts would be made available immediately
or within 6 months by the National Library of Medicine. It will
be the responsibility of the grantee, not the grantee’s
publisher, to deposit the text, a peer-reviewed postprint. NIH
is instructed to submit an implementation plan to the Committee
by December 1, 2004.
The
University of California became an institutional member of the
Public Library of Science in the spring. PLoS is a “non-profit
organization of scientists and physicians committed to making
the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available
public resource.” http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/
PLoS founders won one of the 14 Rave Awards from Wired magazine
in 2004.
An April 2004 Credit Suisse First Boston financial report on
the ScienceTechnologyMedical journal industry by S. Mays-Smith
et al lists “three pillars” of STM publisher profits:
copyright, peer review, and bundling. Until one or more teeter
publishers are seen as secure. But bundling is facing difficulties,
as a growing number of the well-reputed academic institutions
reject outright or successfully barter-down bundled offerings
at license renewal times. Bundling is when all (or most) journals
by a publisher are offered to institutional subscribers “only”
as a set for annual purchase, with high package prices. The same
report named three factors expected to slow the adoption of open
access/OA as opposed to toll-access journals: 1) those who benefit
financially from OA cannot easily act in unison and gain little
by acting alone; 2) most authors transfer copyright to journals;
and 3) a large number of journals still use the “Ingelfinger
rule”, the in-house rule prohibiting “prior publication”
of submitted articles.
For a compilation of copyright and open access preprint information
concerning publishers, consult the Sherpa/Romeo database hosted
by the University of Nottingham, UK. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
Open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) announced in May 2004
that Finland has made a national deal for all universities, polytechnics,
and research institutes in Finland to become BMC members. The
membership, the first national agreement of its kind for BMC,
covers the cost of publication for researchers in BMC’s
journals. The agreement was struck through the national electronic
library of Finland and will cover more than 25,000 publicly funded
researchers and teachers in the country.
Book publishing was sharply up (19% in the U.S.) in 2003, per
the R. R. Bowker Company. Bowker states that some 175,000 new
titles and editions were published last year. The increase was
largely generated by middle and small size publishers, with the
top 12 trade-houses reflecting only a 2.4% rise in number of new
titles. Still there was bad news for university presses. The Christian
Science Monitor (April 2004) counted some 95 university presses
and $444 million in sales (2002) in the U.S. Bowker reports that
in 2003 the number of books published by university presses fell
2.2%, to about 12,000.
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| Electronic
Information News |
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American Institute of Physics has a new Website design. http://www.aip.org/
Check-out their new journal service, Scitation. Scitation is the
Web home of more than 100 journals from AIP, APS, ASCE, SPIE,
and more. In an average month Scitation supports more than two
million user sessions. Scitation journal access works the same
for either personal or institutional users/subscribers. As in
the past users may continue to access any journals electronically
without passwords and to use SPIN Web to search across publications.
Physicists are encouraged to register for Scitation to receive
a login and password, which will allow them to: 1) to harness
the power of Search Scitation to quickly find full-text articles
keyed to your research interests; 2) to easily create a customized
Scitation entry page, for use of new or enhanced features, such
as MyArticles and MyPublications, components that allow you to
navigate the system based on your interests or journal preferences;
3) download properly formatted citations from Scitation and export
them into your bibliographic management software or directly into
your compuscript or manuscript (supports EndNote, BibTEX/RevTEX,
and ASCII formats); and 4) execute searches in a variety of ways,
with just one click (e.g., author search from one paper to any
other). Another feature, Scitation Alerts, is scheduled to debut
in mid-September. It will be powered by the INSPEC database under
a partnership with IEE (the Institution of Electrical Engineers,
UK) and will notify users of new subject-specific articles. For
help or questions e-mail onlinehelp@aip.org.
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This summer California Digital Library purchased the complete
INSPEC Archive of Science Abstracts back to 1898, volume 1, with
bonus coverage of science journal articles back to 1890. Plans
are to release the Archive in late fall.
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ADS/Astrophysics Data System (NASA), the specialist database
for astronomers and astrophysicists, serves as a digital library
and an invaluable research tool. It is free to everyone through
the Web. ADS offers four sub-databases, Astronomy and Astrophysics,
Instrumentation, Physics and Geophysics, and the arXiv. It covers
all major astronomy and astrophysics journals and many minor ones.
It also indexes NASA reports, observatory reports, conferences,
newsletters, a considerable number of books, technical information,
and Ph.D. theses in astronomy/astrophysics. For physics ADS indexes
about 80% of the physics journals listed in Journal Citation Reports
(ISI; Science Citation Index). Most of the articles in the data
system are immediately available to searchers electronically,
either as scanned images (of early articles) or as links to e-journal
sites (of publishers). Many of the scanned images of journals
and observatory reports date back to the 1800’s. When an
abstract is retrieved on ADS, users have an option to translate
the abstract using Alta Vista’s Babel Fish Translation.
The Berkeley community may access ADS from the Physics-Astronomy
Library’s Article Indexes page. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PHYS/cal.html
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Three AIP journals are now accessible fulltext back to 1968,
Journal of Applied Physics,
Journal of Mathematical Physics,
and Physics
of Fluids. |
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Thompson ISI announced long-range plans to expand Web of Science
(Science Citation Index) coverage back to 1900. Currently coverage
extends back to 1945. The Century of Science initiative will add
nearly 850,000 articles from some 200 carefully selected science
journals. WoS may be accessed from the library’s Article
Indexes page.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PHYS/cal.html
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Through the vendor ProQuest you may search the Los Angeles
Times back to 1881. http://uclibs.org/PID/11379
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are also searchable
historically.
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The United Nations General Assembly declared 2005 the International
Year of Physics [World Year of Physics] on June 10, 2004, with
recognition that 2005 is the centenary of the legendary 1905 discoveries
of Albert Einstein.
For more than two years physics societies all over the world have
been engaged in marking 2005 as the year of physics and in getting
support of international organizations for its realization and
success. Led by the European Physical Society, this effort includes
APS/the American Physical Society, IOP/the Institute of Physics,
UK, the Austrian Physical Society, the Indian Physical Society,
the South African Institute of Physics and many more. http://www.wyp2005.org/internationalyear.html
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The International Astronomical Union has created a new IAU
Working Group on Communicating Astronomy with the Public. http://www.communicatingastronomy.org/
Mission statement:
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To encourage and enable a much larger fraction
of the astronomical community to take an active role in
explaining what we do (and why) to our fellow citizens. |
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To act as an international, impartial coordinating entity
that furthers the recognition of outreach and public communication
on all levels in astronomy. |
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To encourage international collaboration on outreach and
public communication |
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To endorse standards, best practices and requirements
for public communication. |
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Books may be up in numbers but readers are down, per a National
Endowment for the Arts’ Reading at Risk summer report.
Based on a sample size of more than 17,000 adults, the study
found just 46.7 percent of Americans read for pleasure in 2002,
compared with 56.9 in 1982. The steepest decline was among young
adults, 25 to 34 years old, with only 47.7% of them enjoying
non-required reading. Readers were more likely to play an active
role in their communities, with more involvement in cultural,
sports and volunteer activities than non-readers. The most important
influence on readers and non-readers is education, with 74 percent
of adults with a graduate education reported as readers. “Reading
is not a timeless, universal capability,” states Dana
Gioia, Chairman, National Endowment of the Arts, in the preface.
“Advanced literacy is a specific intellectual skill and
social habit that depends on a great many educational, cultural,
and economic factors. As more Americans lose this capability,
our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded.
These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive
society can afford to lose.” http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html
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| From the Librarian: |
| I am retiring effective
1 September 2004 after 20 years at Cal. It has been fun and anti-fun.
I was engineering reference librarian for five years before becoming
physics librarian, currently physics/astronomy librarian, in 1989.
It has been my pleasure to work with such an energetic, dedicated
group of faculty, students, and staff in both departments. |
| - Diane
Fortner |
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Copyright
© 2004 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
Document maintained on server: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
by: phys@library.berkeley.edu
Last updated
8/30/04
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