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ICSTI: news items

  • To: epc@iucr.org
  • Subject: ICSTI: news items
  • From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
  • Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 11:41:27 +0000
  • Organization: IUCr
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Wellcome Trust introduces new proposals for grantees, and liaises 
with NLM
Date: Thursday 04 November 2004 5:31 pm
From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE>
To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL

Research publishing and Open access Latest developments from the Wellcome 
Trust: November 2004

The Trust is now working in partnership with the National Library of Medicine 
(NLM) to establish a European site for PubMed Central (the free to access, 
digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, wholly 
funded by the National Institutes of Health in the United States). In the 
future, we are proposing that Wellcome Trust grantees will be required to 
deposit an electronic version of their peer reviewed research articles in 
PubMed Central (or the European PMC, once established) no later than six 
months after the date of publication.

In addition, the Trust will provide grantees with additional funding to cover 
the costs of page processing charges levied by open access publishers, such 
as Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. There will also be 
additional funding to cover the cost of converting files into the metadata 
schema required for deposition in PubMed Central. These initiatives were set 
out in a letter to all UK university vice-chancellors [see 
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx022820.pdf] on 1 November 2004 and a 
question and answer sheet provides more information on them [see 
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtx022821.pdf.]

Bye, Barry


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----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: NFAIS Annual Conference

For your information, and action if you intend to go, see

http://www.nfais.org/press/2005_ANCO_theme_announce.htm

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----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Information on EU project in STI
Date: Thursday 18 November 2004 6:13 pm
From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE>
To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL

Dear All,

I made contact with the team undertaking the project launched by the EU in May 
2004 on the future developments of STI in the EU and elsewhere. You may 
recall that ICSTI made a proposal to undertake the work which was 
unsuccesful. The project budget is around 250,000 Euro. I have just received 
the following information from them:

The results of the EU study are expected for the summer 2005.

The EU study is performed jointly by the University of Toulouse 1 and the 
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The team brings together economics 
researchers from ULB ECARES (European Centre for Advanced Research in 
Economics and Statistics) and from Toulouse IDEI (Institut d'Economie 
Industrielle) as well as specialists in information sciences from the 
libraries of both universities.

The study will provide a detailed overview of the behaviour of the market and 
its actors, addressing the issues at stake, such as economic models, 
technologies, open access resources, legal environment, data archiving, etc. 
The researchers will also undertake an economic analysis of this behaviour in 
terms of competition policy and knowledge-diffusion concerns, and a pilot 
study on the specific economic modelling of the behaviour of market 
participants.

A preliminary set of recommendations will be discussed and validated with a 
representative sample of stakeholders and actors on the market. This workshop 
has not been scheduled yet but I will keep you informed of further 
developments.

We are of course interested in the activities of ICSTI and would be grateful 
if you could provide us with information about your organisation, its role 
and activities.

Best regards,
Françoise Vandooren
Libraries Head Office
Université Libre de Bruxelles

If any of you have more information on the project or those undertaking it or 
have been approached by the team it might be interesting to share it, if you 
can.

Bye, Barry


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----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: scholar.google.com Google's search engine for Science
Date: Thursday 18 November 2004 6:13 pm
From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE>
To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL

With thanks to Jill O'Neill of NFAIS for this and apologies to those of you 
who have already been alerted.

Bye, Barry

> From today's New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that
it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic
researchers.

Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at
scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a
number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first
stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed
papers, books, abstracts and technical reports.

Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and
books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While
the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are
indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public.

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had
received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical
publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online
Computer Library Center.

For the rest of the article, click through at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html


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----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Fwd: Google's Scholarly Search Service does not sidestep the need for  
Open Access Institutional Archiving
Date: Friday 19 November 2004 7:41 am
From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon@IOL.IE>
To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL

A commentary on the new Google service (and Hilda Ceredeira of ICTP reminds me 
that www.scirus.com does the same thing) and the OA movement.

Bye, Barry

Subject: Google's Scholarly Search Service does not sidestep the need for Open 
Access Institutional Archiving
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 08:55:08 +0000

Google's new scholarly search service (scholar.google.com) may deliver
to the scientific and scholarly worlds some of the facilities that the
OA community have been labouring over - most specifically a search
service which is limited to scholarly and scientific resources but
which unites material from all web sites within that domain across the
complete spectrum of scholarly enquiry. It also provides a basic (but
highly welcome) level of citation analysis so that individual papers
are listed with an entry which indicates how many citations they have
received. As far as gross coverage goes, a search for the definite
article indicates that 315 million articles (or at least, citable
scholarly artefacts) have been indexed - a figure that appears to
correspond to 13 years of the world's scientific and scholarly
peer-reviewed research journal output. (Doubtless further analyses will
soon show a more accurate interpretation of this figure and the
relative coverage of each discipline.)

It may be tempting to suggest that in the face of such an overwhelming
resource, there is little point in putting continued effort into
Institutional Archiving, with its administrative overheads and
individual metadata entry requirements for each paper. After all, with
Google on the job, all we apparently need to do is to encourage
individual researchers to leave a copy of their papers on the web! This
is, after all, in line with Harnad's original "Subversive Proposal"
 from ten years ago.

However, we need to bear in mind some crucial factors
(a) Google is indexing data from commercial publishers as well as the
open web - and so it may still be impossible for any individual to read
the vast majority of articles that are returned as the result of a
query (again, more thorough analysis will give a better indication).
(b) Most researchers aren't even putting their articles on the web let
alone in a managed institutional repository (and for the same reasons -
they don't see the need, they are worried about copyright etc etc).

So Google is not offering increased Open Access, just improved resource
discovery of current ad-hoc OA. To advance we still need to offer
carrot and stick, policies and mandates, and that is one of the places
where a managed Institutional Archive comes into its own. An
institutional archive offers many advantages to the institution in
terms of research management, reporting, statistics gathering,
publicity and research assessment. These institutional benefits mean
that the institutional support, policies and mandates are more likely
to be forthcoming, which in turn WILL DIRECTLY increase the amount of
open access material available.  (Of course it's not all stick! The
carrot comes in the form of improved impace, automatically generated
CVs, up-to-date bibliographies on personal web pages and the enormous
relief of automatic data collection for institutional bean-counters -
an enter-once system which caters for the many uses to which
researchers need to apply their output.)

Google, of course, indexes entries in Institutional Archives! Whether
EPrints or DSpace, these OA repositories are providing grist to
Google's mill. So the Google scholarly search engine is a welcome
addition to the arsenal of services that researchers use to mine the
literature - but it is still OA Institutional Repositories that provide
the best chance of getting readable copies of those papers into Google!
---
Les Carr
EPrints Development Manager & University of Southampton Institutional
Repository Manager


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-- 

Best wishes

Peter Strickland
Managing Editor
IUCr Journals

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