Rowland Institute Library Blog

In the Montreal Gazette, Stevan Harnad gives a general explanation of what open access means for researchers using the literature and a call to univeristy departments to extend the proverbial “publish or perish” requirement to “provide-open-access-to-your publication” (Source: Open Access News)

An Information Today article reports that Elsevier is shutting down its online portals/communities BioMedNet and ChemWeb. Both services offered a wealth of free content, particularly the latter’s Chemistry Preprint Server, the fate of which has not yet been determined. Both were launched by independent companies and then sold to Elsevier, who gradually raised prices on some of the online articles accessible therein. On the other hand, nobody is stepping in to absorb the products; the chief of BioMedCentral is quoted saying that their service already offers a huge resource.

A good summary of developments in anti-spam legislation, the file-sharing wars, pop-up blocking, internet taxation and other issues in technology and the law can be found in this news.com.com article. (Source: Internet Legal Research Weekly)

In “the long road to longhorn.” Salon’s Scott Rosenberg details the thinking behind Microsoft’s projected new operating system, not due for a couple of years, how the “bloggers in Redmond” will provide updates, and what the prospects are for this system and “the evil empire.” (Free after you watch a commercial.)

I’d heard of this being advocated some while back, a kind of “C-SPAN for science.” (In fact, the Cable Science Network website has links to several articles about it.) It’s come back into “view”shot with an engaging commentary in Wired News. (Source: Slashdot)

Or something like that … Science’s Next Wave discusses what to do after your grant proposal has been rejected and maybe have more success the next time. (Requires subscription)

Discover lists its choice of top science news stories for 2003, including Columbia, SARS, age of the cosmos and others. A subscription is required to read the full articles. (Source: Moreover)

the International Union of Crystallography, publishers of the Acta Crystallographa Series, also offer RSS feeds for their journals, which feature title and abstract for the most recently published articles. (Source: List of Chemistry Journals and Magazines, an extensive hyperlinked list from Dr. Lonquin Hu of Rutgers. I learned about it from PSIGate.

We’re going to be seeing more and more journal content delivery via RSS. For those of us who use our newsreader to filter through all kinds of content, it’s a boon. If the full text of the journal is behind a proxy, firewall, or limited access via subscription, that complicates the picture. Just wait until BioMedCentral releases RSS feeds for its open-access journals. It will be seamless. It will be live.

Often times it seems a publisher doesn’t do much to advertise new features. I stumble upon archives or a new feature such as RSS. Was an annoucement posted to listservs or mailing lists? Am I reading the wrong stuff?

This matters. The Institute of Physics (IoP) has made RSS feeds available for its news service and several journals including Journal of Physics Condensed Matter and New Journal of Physics. The journal feeds provide listings and links for the latest papers.

Many have looked for publishers to deliver journal content via RSS and now IoP is taking a huge leap forward. Congratulations.