Talking in the Library

Open Access Week 2009: Open Access Journals

Unlike journals published by a commercial publisher, open access journals are freely available online to the public. There are no charges or subscription fees to readers or their institutions. And, most open access journals are peer reviewed or undergo editorial quality control. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) currently lists over 4300 open access journals in 17 major disciplines around the world. This sounds like a good thing, right? So why aren’t all journals open access?

The prevailing business model has been commercial or society publishers accepting articles from researchers or scholars, putting the articles through a peer-review and editing process and then bundling articles in a journal issue – sometimes at great subscription cost to libraries and other consumers. The situation is improving, though; several business models are evolving that favor open access. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central (BMC) are two large open access publishers. One PLoS journal, PLoS Biology, has achieved a high impact factor and ranking in a very short time. The BMC journal Genome Biology is a top journal in its field. Both these publishers operate with membership fees paid by libraries, and fees paid by authors to publish in their journals.

The majority of open access journals, though, do not charge article fees or memberships to authors and libraries. Editors are finding that they reduce costs by doing away with print editions and increase the visibility and impact of their journals by making them freely available online. They rely on business models such as advertising, sponsorships, or society dues. For example, many academic libraries now sponsor publishing services hosting online journals edited by their faculties. K-State Libraries launched New Prairie Press just last year and is now publishing two journals – both open access - with two additional journals in the works.  If you are involved with editing or publishing a journal at K-State and want to know more about moving your content to an open access platform like New Prairie Press, contact Dale Askey (daskey@k-state.edu).

Wondering what this is all about?  Check out our earlier post explaining Open Access Week, and watch for more posts this week, and even more information on our Twitter feed.

Coming July 6, Get It recommends...

I don't know about you, but I really like the way Amazon.com produces recommendations when I look at a book (or some music or shoes or a phone or...). It's pretty neat to see what people buy in addition to the item I'm looking at, even if I don't want to buy that item. All kinds of Web services offer recommendations. Netflix even held a contest for people to improve the company's movie recommendations. With all these automated suggestions floating around, have you ever wished that there could be some for your research?

Wish granted.

After you get back from your July 4th holiday weekend, the Get It menu will look just a little different. Oh, it will still take you from citation to full text, catalog search, or interlibrary loan in just a few clicks. But it will also make recommendations. Based on the article you're trying to get, Get It can suggest more articles on that same topic. It will give you a full citation and the Get It button. Like the look of one of those articles? Click the Get It button to - well - get it. You'll also be able to export those suggested article citations to RefWorks or Zotero.

How does Get It know what to recommend? The software is based on research done at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Basically, the researchers were trying to turn some of libraries' ordinary usage data into value-added services. The recommender service gathers up data from many libraries to inform its recommendations. Suppose you're researching food safety and find three or four articles really relevant to your specific topic. You might recommend those articles to a friend who's researching the same thing. Now spread that out over hundreds or thousands of food safety researchers, all of whom found the same three or ten or twenty articles clustering around that topic. In the same way that Amazon.com turns data about customer purchases into recommendations, Get It's service will turn all that food safety research into suggestions for you.

Or, if you like neat and tidy summaries, you can think of it this way:
Usage creates relationships; relationships create recommendations.

The ABC's of Summer in Hale Library

There are a lot of changes going on this summer - here's a quick A-Z rundown of things you need to know.

A is for alphabetical
All our journals and magazines are now in alphabetical order on 1st floor.  No more trying to remember call numbers - just find your journal by title. 

B is for basement
The only area in Hale Library not affected by summer projects is the basement.

C is for carpet
Carpet is being installed this week and into next on 2nd floor and in a few of the meeting rooms.  This may create a little more noise than you're used to; 1st floor should stay fairly calm if you need a quiet spot.

D is for diamond
You might need to take a new route to get to familiar places - just follow the color-coded diamond-shaped wayfinder signs.

E is for elevator
Don't forget to use the elevator to exit the building from 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors - the stairs won't do you any good right now.

F is for familiar
Our media collection - video tapes, CDs, and DVDs - is now located on 3rd floor, in the familiar big white cabinets you remember from 2nd floor.

G is for Great Room
The Great Room is closed until June 10th, so we can continue the mural restoration project that started last summer. 

H is for Help Desk
Our temporary Help Desk on 1st floor can give you a hand with checking out and returning materials, reference questions, getting around the building, using equipment - whatever you need!

OK, that was actually an A-H rundown, but you get the idea. As always, if you have any questions about the projects, give us a shout via your favorite communication channel on the Ask A Librarian page.

NIH Policy Mandates Open Access for Published Works

K-State researchers receiving grant funds from The National Institutes of Health must now comply with legislation requiring them to deposit their published work in  PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles. NIH recently published guidelines and an extensive FAQ explaining the new policy and how to comply. 

Starting April 7, 2008 researchers who receive NIH funding must submit their final peer-reviewed, revised manuscripts to PMC upon acceptance for publication.  The manuscript must be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.  Some journals automatically submit articles to PMC and no further action is required by the author.

In addition, beginning May 25, 2008 all researchers submitting applications, proposals, or progress reports to NIH must include a PubMed Central reference number when citing articles that they have authored or co-authored with support from NIH funds.

According to the policy, researchers are responsible for ensuring that publishing or copyright agreements on submitted articles comply with the NIH policy.

Excellent resources are now available to university administrators and staff involved in funded research, campus compliance officers, and NIH investigators to assist them with compliance concerns. Librarians at K-State Libraries suggest the following:

Institutional Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy: Ensuring Deposit Rights, a webcast sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC).    This event is scheduled Friday, March 7 from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. and can be viewed in Hale Library, Room 114.  Presenters include:
Kevin L. Smith, JD, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University
Jim Siedow, Vice Provost for Research, Duke University
Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This webcast will be archived and made available for later viewing at http://nih-webcast.easyurl.net .

Complying with the NIH Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations and Options, a SPARC/Science Commons/ARL joint white paper by Michael W. Carroll, Feb. 2008. This white paper discusses compliance options for grantees and principal investigators especially with regards to copyright-related obligations. Michael Carroll is a Professor at the Villanova University School of Law and serves on the Board of Directors of Creative Commons.  His research and teaching interests are in the areas of intellectual property law and cyberlaw.

The NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities, a web-based guide developed by the Association of Research Libraries.  It includes a policy overview and sections on institutional responses, retaining rights, how to deposit and resources. 

K-State faculty with questions on the NIH policies or procedures can contact Marty Courtois, Repository Services, courtois@ksu.edu

Current Contents~your own personal research assistant

Wouldn't it be glamorous to have a personal assistant? Someone who will send out birthday cards and flowers to your loved ones so you don't have to. Someone who will pick out your clothes and make sure they are wrinkle free when you want to wear them. Someone who will go through all the newly published research in your research area and email you the citations weekly.

I can't help you with the first two, but I can help you with the last. K-State Libraries has a subscription to Current Contents on Demand (not to be confused with Current Contents Connect, a different service), which covers Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences, Chemical & Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences. All you do is fill out a form telling us what your research interests are and in a week or two you will begin getting emails with new material being published in your area.

This service is free and is available to K-State faculty, staff, students, and researchers. Give it a try, if you don' t like what you see you can delete the emails or close cancel your Current Contents profile. No problem. Think of it, your own personal research assistant. How cool is that?

Well, nevermind

10:15am:
As I wrote the message below, Get It decided to start working. Who says technology doesn't have a sense of humor? It seems to be working now. Sorry for any inconvenience you experienced this morning.

10:00am:
Get It is bringing you a heck of a Valentine.
Seems it had some trouble during its early-morning backup and just didn't feel like getting up for school today. You're not able to access the E-Journals list, Citation Linker, or Get It menu right now, even though you can still see the Get It button.

Rest assured that we're working to roll Get It out of bed and bring it back to you as quickly as we can. Unfortunately Get It doesn't like coffee, so this may take a while. We'll keep you updated.

Get It: Your relationship counselor

Have you ever had difficulty tracking down a friend who moved away, changed their name, married, or divorced? If so, you know what it's like to look for a journal that's in a journal relationship. Didn't know journals could have relationships? Surprise!

Do journal relationships really affect you? Yes! Imagine you are looking for the journal Brain Research. You want to browse through old and new issues. You don't know, though, that Brain Research has spawned at least four different new titles, effectively quintupling the material you'll want to browse through. How would you know? You need a journal relationship counselor. You need Get It.

CiNii Free

SFX now has more than 2000 active portfolios to free full-text content from CiNii. So what is this CiNii?

According to the site's "About" section, "CiNii (Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator) is a database service that enables searching of information on academic papers published in academic society journals or university research bulletins, or included in the National Diet Library's Japanese Periodicals Index Database."

Much of the free content dates back to the 1950s. The articles originate from Japanese academic journals, societies, and university research bulletins. They cover a wide variety of intellectual content, including Agriculture, Medicine, Economics and Engineering.

To see the items available from CiNii, choose the Locate tab in the E-Journals list. Leaving all other fields blank, pull down the "Vendor" menu and choose "CiNii". Click GO and browse the service's list of titles.

Science to return to JSTOR

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the journal Science will be returning to JSTOR.  This summer, Science decided to withdraw from JSTOR, meaning no articles published after 2002 would be stored and available through JSTOR and future subscribers to JSTOR would have no access to the Science articles.

While the details of the deal have not been released, this news should mean that many smaller institutions that could not afford an institutional subscription to Science's archives, but could swing a subscription to JSTOR, will once again have access this valuable resource.

Learn more about JSTOR.

ScienceDirect

K-State Libraries has expanded your access to ScienceDirect! You can now view full text from 2002 forward for 335 leading journals in scientific, medical and technical subjects. The Get It service will take you to ScienceDirect journals in the course of your research, especially if you are starting at a scientifically-oriented resource such as Web of Science.

You can take advantage of some of ScienceDirect's cool features by registering for a personal account. You don't need to do this to access full text. It's convenient, however, if you'd like to:

• Receive alerts via email or RSS feed about topics that interest you
• Save and re-use searches
• Mark and watch favorite journals
• Personalize your ScienceDirect interface

Contact your subject librarian if you have questions about these features. Not sure who your subject librarian is? Check here.