Category Archives: Online Resources

Thomson Reuters Pulling Web of Science from Discovery Services

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Thomson ReutersEarlier this month, Thomson Reuters announced a partnership with Google to add its Web of Science content to Google Scholar.  However, we are learning that Thomson Reuters is pulling its Web of Science content from other discovery services such as Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Primo as early as the end of this year.

From a Thompson Reuters letter:

Web of Science is keeping pace with the evolution of research discovery. Increasingly, researchers of all levels are turning to the Open Web to begin their search.

That is why Thomson Reuters is collaborating with Google Scholar to make the Web of Science instantly discoverable and bring users directly to the Web of Science, where they can experience the power of citation connections.

We have always been committed to supporting researchers around the world as they find, evaluate and assign meaning to research.

Increasingly we have seen that while Discovery Services are a valuable tool for accessing full text content, they are not a replacement for the unique research discovery experience that the Web of Science offers.

As enabling research discovery based on citation connections is the primary objective of the Web of Science, and the foundation upon which our evaluation, selection and indexing process is based, we believe it is in the best interest of our customers and end users to use the Web of Science research discovery environment as the primary interface for authoritative search and evaluation of citation connected research.

For this reason we will no longer make Web of Science content available for indexing within EBSCO, Summon or Primo Central. We will, however, continue to support Web of Science Accessibility via linking and federated search capabilities in each of these discovery layers. Please direct any questions regarding configuration changes to their respective support teams.

This could foreshadow a troubling development for all discovery service vendors if others follow.

Read the partnership announcement at Against the Grain.

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Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012

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Open Access LogoOpen Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012.

We wrote last month about Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries.  The last full week of October is designated as Open Access Week, an initiative to educate about and promote open access journals.  From the  Open Access Week website:

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Some open access resources:

Some useful open access journal sites:

  • Bentham Open – Over 230 peer-reviewed open access journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences.
  • Cloud Journals – Open access e-journals in science, technology, engineering, medicine, art, humanities, and management.
  • International Scientific Publications – Five peer-reviewed open access journals in science.
  • Journal of Digital Humanities – Quarterly peer-reviewed, open access humanities journal.
  • Libertas Academica – Open access peer-reviewed medical and scientific Journals site based in New Zealand.
  • MDPI – A platform for over 70 peer-reviewed, scientific open access journals.
  • PLOS – Publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals in a variety of scientific disciplines.
  • SAGE Open – Peer-reviewed, gold open access journal.
  • Springer Open – Hundreds of peer-reviewed open access STM journals in BioMed Central and Chemistry Central.

Resources for open access repository software:

  • Digital Commons – A hosted open access digital repository service by bepress.
  • DSpace – Open source software to build open digital repositories.
  • Open Journal Systems – Locally-hosted online journal publishing software from the Public Knowledge Project with a list of journals.
  • OpenDOAR – A directory of 0ver 2,000 open access academic repositories.

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, has just published a book titled simply Open Access.  Read the book description and a preview on the MIT Press website.

Visit the Open Access Week website for more information.

Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries

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Open Access LogoAn open access (OA) paper titled Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF) was just released as the result of an international librarian roundtable hosted by the British Library and SAGE International.

Open access refers to freely-available peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.  There are two forms of open access:

  • Gold OA – The author(s) or institution(s) pays for the article to be published openly.
  • Green OA – Articles are accepted to a repository and access is paid for by the user.

The paper suggested ways that open access will affect academic libraries and change the role of the research librarian.  Open access means users may rely less on library resources and librarian mediation.  One way librarians are increasing their profile at their institution is by managing the institutional repository.  Main functions still will be information literacy and providing research advice.

Open access could affect library budgets.  If the gold OA model is more widely used, costs would shift to the departments of the publishing authors and away from libraries which typically pay subscription fees for access.

Librarians’ experience with metadata will prove important with open access.  Libraries will “compete” with better data and providing better access:

Scaled up OA also challenges the traditional role of collection development for librarians, and it raises the question of how universities can compete with each other on the basis of their libraries if the resources and tools are almost the same. One participant noted that the quality of library provision will be one of the benchmarking issues in the future, rather than the number of books or journals that a library holds.

Download and read the paper Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF).

Electronic Resources on Social Media Sites

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Social Media iconsFollow or friend your favorite electronic resource websites on three major social networking sites: Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.  The database vendors often use these outlets to give updates, offer free access trials, and announce downtime.

Facebook

Google+

Twitter

Does the Digital Public Library of America Have a Future?

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Technology Review Library GraphicSeveral companies and organizations are attempting to make all printed books available online.  From Project Gutenberg (public domain books only), to Google Book Search, the HathiTrust, and the Open Library.  Now, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is creating the Digital Pulbic Library of America (DPLA).  But with issues of copyright, does the DPLA have a future?

From Technology Review:

It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant’s book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project’s strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It’s the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia.

The DPLA still has to overcome fundamental issues of its mission, goals, and even its name and role as a library.

Read the article The Library of Utopia.

Proposed Global Library Consortium for Academic Ebooks

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In another big meeting of publishers and librarians recently took place at Harvard during which the idea of a Global Library Consortium (GLC) was presented.  Here’s how it would work according to the Publishers Weekly article:

The GLC proposal would operate on a similar basis [to SCOAP3], with libraries pooling together into a membership coalition that purchases the rights to titles offered by participating publishers. Those books would then be made available on an open access basis, perhaps with Creative Commons license terms. Libraries would place bids for each offered title into a pool, in a fashion similar to the way Groupon works; if there was sufficient interest to hit the price trigger point, the publisher would release the title into the open access pool with costs apportioned among participating institutions. Once made open access, titles would be publicly readable through a web browser interface, but downloadable PDFs or EPUBs would only be freely available to GLC members.

The GLC proposal offers a number of very significant advantages. Primarily, it would stabilize the scholarly monograph market by compensating publishers for their fixed costs in producing their first copy. It also retains a measure of competition by specifying that the more attractive book delivery formats (PDF, EPUB) are sold commercially outside of the GLC membership. It also reduces press overhead by partially releasing marketing and sales staff from the vagaries of having to sell to an unknown number of university library buyers.

But as with all propesed ebook distribution models, there are concerns by the publishers on profitability.  They must figure out how to price items across the board when popular and more obscure are offered in the same pool.  However, with tighter budgets, libraries may not want to buy in to an entire pool.  Other challenges covered in the article include technical ones including online access versus download and full-text versus metadata searching.

Read the Publishers Weekly article Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition.

YouTube for Schools: Video for the Classroom

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YouTube
YouTube just introduced a service for educators called YouTube for Schools.  This program gives free access to YouTube EDU with comments and related videos disabled making it more appropriate for the classroom.  Teachers control which videos are accessible.

YouTube for Schools gives you access to the hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube EDU. This includes short lessons from top teachers around the world, full courses from the world’s best universities, professional development from fellow educators, and inspiring videos from thought leaders.