Nautilus

Steven Inchcoombe, who became Managing Director of Nature Publishing Group (NPG) last October, is interviewed in the June/July issue of Research Information. He answers questions about the main information needs of researchers, the role of peer-review, NPG's position on open access, and provides some predictions for the future.

Open access means that authors or their funders may have to pay to publish papers and I think this will make them demand a higher level of service from publishers. They will want more visibility about what is happening in the publishing process. And once papers are published, authors will want to know who has accessed them as they might want to approach them about possible collaborations. In addition, self-archiving mandates require authors to do more work. If publishers are clever they will offer authors more help to do this. Also, as more authors are not native English speakers, publishers may have to help them more in how they express themselves in their papers. There are more and more versions of content available to readers. To justify their versions, publishers must offer serious value such as in forward and backwards citation linking. Another big challenge will be bringing in rich media such as audio and video.

See the Research Information website for the full article.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 16, 2008
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The USCD-Nature Signaling Gateway would like to apply for continued funding from the US National Institutes of Health. If you are a researcher in this field, or if you are interested in this area and have been reading the articles and other content on the Gateway, please show your support by writing a letter to the team via this web form, before 30 May. Your response will help keep the content on the site freely available for all users.
The UCSD-Nature Signaling Gateway is a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute resource for anyone interested in signal transduction. The gateway represents a unique collaboration between the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Nature Publishing Group, and is designed to facilitate navigation of the complex world of research into cellular signalling. Information and data presented here are freely available to all. It is powered by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). It has won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Award for Publishing Innovation for ‘a significantly innovative approach to any aspect of publication’.
The Signaling Gateway site has three main components: a data centre (repository and toolkits); Molecule Pages (structured data on key proteins); and Signaling Update (news and comment). The Signaling Gateway is an example of a pioneering business model that allows the scientific community free access to the wealth of cell signaling information through sponsorship, described in an article by Electronic Publishing Services as ‘the door to the future’

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 07, 2008
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Juan-Carlos Lopez discusses the publication process from the authors' perspective in a couple of posts at Spoonful of Medicine, the blog of Nature Medicine. First, he shares some data to show that the Nature journals are not biased in favour of authors based in the United States. The data shown are the ratio of submitted to published papers as a function of country. Take a look.
In a subsequent post, Juan-Carlos describes a talk he gave recently in Madrid, at which he showed these data (and received some puzzling feedback), and also was asked questions about open-access publishing. He writes: "It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientific publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs -- the author-pays model, the subscription model, and everything in between ...... as there are different models, publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?"
There has been some discussion related to this topic over at Nature Network in the past week, summarized here at the blog Gobbledygook. Part of this discussion involves the latest NIH (US National Institutes of Health) policy on self-archiving of research that it has funded, requiring deposition of the author's version into the PubMedCentral database 12 months after the journal's publication date. For authors who aren't sure how this affects them when submitting to Nature journals, the new NIH policy is consistent with Nature Publishing Group's existing policy, which states: "When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 16, 2008
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In March, the British Library conducted a survey on researchers' attitudes and needs in the digital age. Of the respondents, 93 per cent stated that access to online research material should be the same as for books. Most of the 320 respondents agreed that, in the age of the Internet, anyone involved in non-commercial research should be allowed, via 'fair dealing' or exemptions, to copy parts of electronically published works, including online articles, news broadcasts, film or sound recordings. 'Fair dealing' is the ‘right' to make a copy from an in-copyright work without permission from, or remuneration to, the rights holder for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review and news reporting. For example, most individual copying by researchers at university for academic purposes is done under the fair-dealing provision in UK law. Two-thirds (68 per cent) of the survey respondents are opposed to having different fair-dealing laws for material in paper or electronic format.
Further details of the survey are available at the British Library website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 15, 2008
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Noam Y. Harel of Yale University writes in Nature's Correspondence page (Nature 452, 409; 2008):

Writing grant proposals is difficult enough; keeping track of different deadlines makes for an endless cycle of procrastination and frantic preparation. The added stack of bureaucratic forms, with arcane variations from agency to agency, can tip one over the edge as a deadline nears.
Is it almost too obvious to wish for a centralized proposal repository? Investigators could submit proposals at any time, in a common format that highlights the science rather than obliterates it with red tape. Funding agencies could search the repository for proposals matching their interests. A minimum of bureaucratic information would be required up front. Budget details could be worked out between funding agencies and investigators as necessary.
Ideally, all proposals would be publicly accessible. However, most of the scientific community has not yet accepted the inevitable dawn of truly open science. Submissions to a central repository could therefore be made accessible only to funding agencies that agree to keep proposals private (unless a submitting investigator indicates a willingness to share his or her proposal publicly).
The repository would make life easier for scientists by eliminating the hassle of searching for suitable grant mechanisms and the stress of meeting various deadlines. It would make life easier for funding agencies by expanding the pool of applications from which to choose. Of course, the best proposals could attract offers from multiple agencies. Rather than forcing investigators to choose non-overlapping sources of funding for each project, why not use the repository to mediate shared funding agreements that could benefit everyone involved? In effect, it would serve as the mediator between grant-seekers and grant-providers.
In a world where eBay, Facebook and Google powerfully demonstrate the communal nature of the Web, it is a pity that scientists and funding agencies don’t have a similarly modern forum for matching their interests and offers.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on March 26, 2008
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From Nature 451, 879 (2008):
Harvard University has adopted guidelines under which the 'final drafts' of academic papers written by researchers at its Faculty of Arts and Sciences will automatically be published on the university's website, unless the authors request a waiver. Immediate open access to papers could conflict with the copyright policies of many journals including Cell, Nature and Science.
Many institutions keep open-access repositories of papers but the decision makes Harvard the first US university to sign up to default open-access publishing for its research staff. Although the University of California has toyed with the idea for years, it has yet to agree on a policy.
Stuart Shieber, the computer scientist at Harvard who proposed the scheme, says that any request for an exemption will be granted. The university has not yet worked out how to define what constitutes a 'final' draft of a scholarly paper, nor come up with a time limit for submission.
Critics of open-access policies worry that highly selective journals with large readerships will suffer, and that non-peer-reviewed research will become more prominent.
A longer version of this article is available at Nature News.
There is also an online debate on the Harvard announcement in the Publishing in the New Millennium forum at Nature Network, with several updates and links to further information.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on February 27, 2008
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From an Editorial in today's (6 December) issue of Nature (450, 762; 2007):
Although Nature and the Nature journals are built on a business model funded by subscribers and other sources of revenue, various initiatives have been implemented to enhance the accessibility of the research papers published in these journals.
They have long been freely available to researchers in the 100 or so poorest countries through the World Health Organization's Hinari initiative and others like it. Machine access is being enhanced by the open text-mining initiative of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Preprints of original versions of papers can be deposited in arXiv and Nature Precedings without compromising their acceptability for publication. And final authors' versions of papers can be deposited in PubMed Central and other public servers from six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their work, whereas NPG retains the licence to publish it.
For many years, a more generous arrangement has been made for papers reporting full genome sequences. (The paper reporting the sequence and analysis of 12 species of Drosophila is the most recent example, see Nature 450, 203; 2007). These papers are freely accessible on NPG's website from the moment of publication. This recognizes a consistent character of 'genome' papers: they represent the completion of a key and fundamental research resource, describing and reflecting on what has been revealed but not usually providing insights into mechanism. Although some papers in other disciplines might also be characterized in this way, the fundamental character of the genome has led NPG to make a systematic exception.
In the continuing drive to make papers as accessible as possible, NPG is now introducing a 'creative commons' licence for the reuse of such genome papers. The licence allows non-commercial publishers, however they might be defined, to reuse the pdf and html versions of the paper. In particular, users are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the contribution, provided this is for non-commercial purposes, subject to the same or similar licence conditions and due attribution.
In 1996, as human genome sequencing was getting under way, leading players stated: "It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society". These principles have continued to guide the field, and NPG has consistently made genome papers freely available in keeping with them. This new licence allows us to formalize the arrangement.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 06, 2007
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Via an industry press release, I learn that a new standard for search-engine indexing has just (29 November) been launched, called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP). This standard has been devised by publishers in collaboration with search engines to "revolutionise" (the word used in the press release) the creation, dissemination and use of copyright- and licence-protected content on the internet .
According to the release, ACAP is an open, non-proprietary standard through which publishers, societies, institutions and other content providers can communicate permission for access and use to online intermediaries. ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand, hence making more content available to users through search engines. Members of ACAP can be seen here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on December 03, 2007
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Via the SciDev.Net website, I read that a new phase of the international initiative 'Online Access to Research in the Environment' (OARE) was launched on 6 November. In the first phase of the project last year, institutions from 72 countries subscribed. Now, interested institutions from another 36 developing countries will have access to an environmental and related sciences research database.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and Yale University sponsor the public-private consortium initiative. Around 350 publishing and society partners also support it, including Nature Publishing Group journals.
Primary research papers and other content in our journals are made freely available online to readers in countries that are members of HINARI, AGORA and OARE, greatly extending the reach of the papers as well as providing information in a timely fashion to people who might not otherwise be able to obtain it or obtain it promptly.
SciDev.Net is an independent online science and development network providing news, views and information about science, technology and the developing world. It is a free access website and features several articles a week from Nature, selected by the SciDev.Net editors.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 27, 2007
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From the current issue of Nature, News in Brief (Nature 450, 148; 2007).
"US investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may soon be compelled to publish only in journals that make their research papers freely available within one year of publication.
Congress is this week expected to take final votes on a bill incorporating this directive. The measure is contained in a spending bill that boosts the biomedical agency's effective budget by 3.1%, to $29.8 billion in 2008.
President George W. Bush has vowed to veto the bill, which will fund the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies, because it includes what he calls “irresponsible and excessive” levels of spending.
But congressional Democrats have attached to the measure an unrelated but politically popular bill funding the Department of Veterans Affairs. They hope that this will generate the two-thirds support needed in both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.
The open-access requirement in the bill would apply only during fiscal year 2008; it would need to be renewed in yearly spending bills in the future."

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in a Nature or other NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit their version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to their funding body's archive, for public release six months after publication. Nature journals are hence already more than fulfiling the conditions in the proposed bill. In addition, we encourage authors to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution's repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication. Authors should cite the publication reference and DOI number on any deposited version, and provide a link from it to the URL of the published article on the journal's website. See here for details of our licence policies.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 13, 2007
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Via Seven Stones blog:
Molecular Systems Biology (published by a partnership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and Nature Publishing Group) has changed its publishing licence for all articles accepted after 1 October 2007 (see updated instruction to authors). The new procedure allows the journal's authors to choose between two Creative Commons licences: one that allows the work to be adapted by users ("attribution-noncommerical-share": by-nc-sa), the other that does not allow the work to be modified ("attribution-noncommercial-no derivative": by-nc-nd). The first articles to be published under the new licence are appearing online at the beginning of this month. The journal's content is therefore not only freely available to all, but also authors can decide to make their research fully open for reuse and adaptation.

Thomas Lemberger, EMBO editor of Molecular Systems Biology, who runs the Seven Stones blog, notes that he initially wanted to make this announcement only after the first paper published under the new licence (accepted after 1 October) had appeared online, but in light of a recent Editorial in PLoS Biology (“When Is Open Access Not Open Access?”), reviewing in detail the subtleties of publishing licenses and the concept of “open access”, he bought forward the announcement of Molecular Systems Biology's new policy. "Unfortunately, this Editorial, at the time of its publication (16 October), included erroneous information on Molecular Systems Biology, given that we had updated our policy on 1 October.", Thomas writes. "In any case, it is somewhat ironic that MacCallum chose to stigmatize Molecular Systems Biology as an example of a journal that “promulgates” confusion about open access. As it turns out, Molecular Systems Biology is dedicated to the concept of making research freely available and to engage authors themselves in decisions that would achieve this goal with their own research. It is in this spirit of openness and respect for authors that we have recently adapted our license to publish."

Posted by Maxine Clarke on November 02, 2007
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Portico and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) have signed an agreement to preserve Nature and all the other NPG journals and online databases across the life, physical and applied sciences and clinical medicine, to ensure that these publications are preserved and available for future readers.
Portico began as the Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched by JSTOR in 2002 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to extend the foundation's E-journal archiving programme. The goal was to build a sustainable electronic archiving model: for more than two years, project staff developed technology and discussed approaches with publishers and libraries. In 2004, the Electronic-Archiving Initiative became a part of Ithaka Harbors, Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education around the world. The electronic archiving service, known as Portico, was then developed and launched in 2005, with support from JSTOR, Ithaka, the Library of Congress and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. The service aims to be a permanent electronic archive of scholarly journals. With the addition of the NPG titles, there are more than 6,200 publications in the archive.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 02, 2007
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From Nature 449, 13 (2007):
The Association of American Publishers* is taking part in an initiative to protest against what it calls government interference in the scholarly communication process.
Some groups and legislators are pushing for all publicly financed research to be made freely available to the public. Many traditional publishers object, and some have used aggressive tactics to fight the movement (see Nature 445, 347; 2007).
The initiative — called the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine — says that it wants to provide the public with more information about scholarly publishing. One of its principles is that "society is best served by sustainable business models and reasonable copyright protections". News of the group's formation did not go down well in the blogosphere, where a number of critics attacked it for implying that open-access publication harms peer review. (*Nature's US division, Nature America, is a member of the Association of American Publishers.)

Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing Group's web publishing director, writes on Nascent blog: "Although Nature America is a member of the AAP, we are not involved in PRISM and we have not been consulted about it. NPG has supported self-archiving in various ways (from submitting manuscripts to PubMed Central on behalf of our authors to establishing Nature Precedings), and our policies are already compliant with the proposed NIH mandate." The Nature journals' policies on archiving and preprint servers can be found at our author and reviewers' website.
Timo's further thoughts and opinions about PRISM, "open-access" publishing and the manners of some individuals involved, are provided in his excellent Nascent post, which I recommend you read if you have any interest in this topic. There is a comment thread at the Nascent posting, to which you are welcome to add, or you may comment here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on September 11, 2007
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The Nature journals this month (August) feature several editorials on the publishing process. A short round up (with links) follows:

Nature Genetics (39, 931; 2007), in 'Compete, collaborate, compel', calls for procedures for microattribution to be established by journals and databases so that data producers have an overwhelming incentive to deposit their results in public databases and thereby to receive quantitative credit for the use of every published data accession.

In 'Got data?', Nature Neuroscience (10, 931; 2007 ) points out that data sharing is not only good citizenship for researchers, but is also required by funding agencies and many journals. The scientific community needs to develop better incentives to encourage compliance and reward those who share.

And in 'Name that gene!', Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (14, 681; 2007) warns that scientists coin new terms, or neologisms, at a tremendous pace, but name choice can have unforeseen results.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on August 09, 2007
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The July issue of Molecular Systems Biology, NPG's open access journal published in partnership with EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation), is live. This month's featured article is Systematic evaluation of objective functions for predicting intracellular fluxes in Escherichia coli, by Robert Schuetz, Lars Kuepfer & Uwe Sauer (Molecular Systems Biology 3, 119; 2007), with an accompanying News and Views article by Jens Nielsen (Molecular Systems Biology 3, 126; 2007). See the journal's home page for more research papers, News and Views, Perspectives and Editorials, as well as links to systems biology papers published in the Nature journals.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 25, 2007
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Open Access as a model for the future? So writes Evelyn Harvey in a news report at Nature Network. Is open access publishing an unstoppable force? Does it face immovable objects in the shape of publication costs, quality control and copyright? These were questions addressed by the third Lonon open research conference last month.
The successes of open access were highlighted by some speakers: it makes research available without access barriers or subscription costs. BioMedCentral and others believe they have shown that it can be a strong publishing business model. There were also various demonstrations of personalised readership profiles that can be created using metrics such as number of times a paper is downloaded.
The problems include the removal of the main source of income for scientific societies, and a possible compromise in quality via self-publication and inadequate review.
Evelyn writes that most delegates agreed that open access is here to stay, but that big challenges lay ahead. As one researcher said when confronted with the copyright risks: “My problem isn’t plagiarism, it’s obscurity!”.
Nature's two extensive debates on access to the literature, including commissioned articles from a range of perspectives, can be read here (free access!).

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 24, 2007
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More than 100 STM publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, and three UN organizations (WHO, FAO and UNEP) have announced the extension of programmes that provide free, or almost free, access to online peer-reviewed journals to several developing nations that lack access to information and training. Microsoft has also announced its support of technical assistance to enhance access to online research for scientists, policymakers, and librarians in these countries.
The three sister programmes – HINARI (research on health), AGORA (research on agriculture) and OARE (research in the environment) - provide online research access to more than one hundred of the world’s poorest countries. All three programmes have official commitment from their partners until 2015, marking the target for reaching the Millennium Development Goals.
In a World Health Organisation (WHO) survey conducted in 2000, researchers and academics in developing countries ranked access to subscription based journals as one of their most pressing problems. In countries with per capita income of less than $1000 per annum, 56 per cent of academic institutions surveyed had no current subscriptions to international journals. These three programmes aim to solve this problem and make research as easily accessible in countries such as Sierra Leone as it is in the United States.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 12, 2007
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In this post on Nascent, NPG's web publishing and science blog, Timo Hannay provides a draft of his recent article in STM news : Nascent: Foo and beyond. The whole section is worth reading (and there is a good graphic of the opportunities provided by the "scientific web"), but here is an excerpt:

"The idea that everyone can now do their own publishing, making publishers superfluous, is misguided. But publishers do need to adapt. Online communities don't just happen, they require initiators, motivators, organisers, moderators, summarisers and guides. They also need trust systems based on user identification and reputation. In many ways, these, too, are traditional publishing roles, but they require new skills. Writers and editors now need to double as moderators and hosts. Publishers need to become adept at mitigating gaming and spamming of their systems, and at monetizing web traffic rather than selling subscriptions. On top of that, they need to become better at cooperating — with each other and with other organisations outside the industry. This particularly applies to online interoperability (even horror of horrors, with competitors), which is a positive-sum game that can benefit all participants. CrossRef has blazed a trail in this area, and we should build in its success.
Above all, publishers need to be leading the online charge, not following the scientists we serve. We are the information dissemination experts, so if we aren't pushing the boundaries and testing what's possible in this new world then we're not merely missing out, we're also not doing our jobs. Cynics will point out that most apparent 'opportunities' are a long way from turning a profit, and many probably never will. They're right. Do any of the STM projects I've mentioned above make a lot of money? No. But are they representative of the future of scientific communication, and do they provide a platform on which to build information businesses of the future? You'd better believe it."

In a similar vein, Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript blog wrote about Nature Publishing Group's "game plan" as he calls it, regarding science publishing and web "2.0" (the social, interactive web). The post arose from Alex's attendance at Nature Network Boston's pub night. This post, and the lively set of comments accompanying it, range over the the topic of the value of publishing in a journal, "open access" publication, and whether the unit of publication will become the paper itself rather than the journal in which it is published.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 02, 2007
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In which I contemplate the unsung scientific record - Mind the Gap - Jennifer Rohn's blog on Nature Network

There is a very chatty conversaton happening at the above post on MInd the Gap, Jennifer Rohn's Nature Network blog. Jennifer's post is about the plea In Nature by Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts to scientists to save their notebooks and correspondence and donate them to historians.

Jennifer writes: "Of course I agree that such materials should be preserved, which is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away the two boxes of gently moulding lab notebooks, spanning thirteen years of research, stashed up in the loft. I’m sure these are not the papers that Brenner and Roberts had in mind, though – they want to preserve the detritus of the Watsons and Cricks of this world, not of ordinary research folk like me.
But then I got to wondering. Why not? My lab notebooks might make pretty compelling reading to some future historian starved for scraps of how 99.9% of (non-celebrity) researchers spent their days and nights in the lab. Why not document the parade of meaningless or ambiguous data that make up most researchers’ records? The ‘non-Eureka moments’, if you will? "

Join in the conversation here or at the Mind the Gap post's comments section, which has taken some fascinating tracks along avenues of clear communication and the virtue of electronic notebooks as well as the importance of a good cup of coffee.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 25, 2007
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Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee Unplugged: Semantic Web better than APIs for data access

Via Berlind's Testbed blog, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world-wide web, received the 2007 lifetime achievement award of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange in Boston on 5 June. After the reception to honour his achievement, "Sir Tim" (as David Berlind calls him) answered questions about the semantic web, data access and standards. The session is captured on video at the link above.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 08, 2007
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Publisher Digitisation Service
The British Library has just launched its Publisher Digitisation Service (see link above), which, it says, is the first fully integrated journals digitization service on the market. One of the greatest challenges for a publisher undertaking a digitization of its archives is finding content -- one publisher had to locate 75% of the content for its programme from third parties. The British Library has an unrivalled collection of serial content and is aiming to save publishers time and money in locating material and providing it in online, searchable format. At the webpage linked to above are more details of the service, and a link to a downloadable PDF of the white paper 'Journal backfiles in scientific publishing.'
All the Nature journals have searchable online archives back to issue 1 available via each journal's website, except for the oldest, Nature. Nature's online, searchable archive currently extends back to 1950 but will be complete to issue 1 (4 November 1869) by the end of this year. In the meantime, the first issue of the journal is available online at the "about the journal" page of the Nature website.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on June 08, 2007
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In its June Editorial, which is freely available, Nature Chemical Biology (3, 297;2007) reports on new online features to enhance interdisciplinary communication and to increase the accessibility of chemical information for readers.

Most published chemical content is traditionally contained in the schemes, figures and tables of scientific papers. Authors also use abbreviations, acronyms or numbering schemes to identify specific molecules. Though these shorthand notations simplify the presentation of chemical information, they tend to make chemical papers less accessible to the general reader. This is a concern for chemical biology articles, which are intended to attract an interdisciplinary audience. Moreover, since the advent of the Internet, the way by which scientists acquire scientific information has changed. Though some scientists continue to read journal articles in print, most turn to the online HTML and PDF versions of published manuscripts. This expanded use of electronic resources offers an excellent opportunity to make chemical information more accessible and user-friendly to readers of scientific papers.

The Editorial provides details of the resources now available to authors and readers, and asks for your evaluation of what has been done so far, and your 'wish list' for new chemical or biological functionality that will foster communication and collaboration between researchers at the interface of chemistry and biology.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 30, 2007
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Microsoft's scholarly search engine, Live Search Academic, has been available in a beta (trial) version for more than a year. Launched 18 months after Google Scholar, it has a lot of catching up to do in order to make researchers aware of it and want to use it in preference to other search services. To this end, it has expanded the range of articles in its index from computing and physics only, to all disciplines. When it launched in 2006, it contained around 7 million articles; now it contains about 40 million.
Unlike Google Scholar, Live Search Academic content is not scraped remotely from the web, but uses feeds from CrossRef, HighWire, JSTOR, PubMed and others, making it part of the network of connected scholarly information. By so doing, it hopes to have better relevancy in search query returns, because the engine is indexing a regularly updated feed, is flexible and able to adapt immediately to new citation links and taxonomies. Microsoft is also aware that, as the amount of web content grows ever larger, there is a danger that services like Google Scholar will get bogged down with the sheer quantity of information that needs to be signposted. Google Scholar brings academic researchers more results, but Microsoft´s hope is that Live Search Academic results will be more relevant to users.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 25, 2007
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The HINARI Access to Research Initiative of the World Health Organisation has announced the registration of the 2,500th institution to access free or low-cost online medical journals and databases. These publicly funded and non-profit institutions include universities, medical schools, hospitals and research institutes drawn from 109 developing countries. Through HINARI, they are able to access 3,750 journals online from 100 different publishers covering medicine, nursing and related health and social sciences -- including Nature, the Nature journals and all journals published by Nature Publishing Group.
HINARI facilitates teaching, research and the delivery of health care in the developing world while helping researchers in these countries to get their work published and made available to a wider international audience. Access is free for institutions in countries with a GNP of less than $1000 per year while there is a small charge for countries with a GNP of $1000-$3000. The income generated is used for local training initiatives.
Launched in January 2002, HINARI Access to Research Initiative is managed by the World Health Organisation in partnership with The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical publishers, 100 publishers and Yale University Library. The HINARI website is the main port of call for thousands of librarians, scientists, students, medics and healthcare researchers in the world's poorest countries. They benefit from free access to the leading international biomedical peer-reviewed journals and other information resources.
There are similar initatives for agricultural research (AGORA); and climate and environmental research (OARE). Nature and all Nature Publishing Group journals are included in these programmes.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 25, 2007
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The Geological Society of London, one of the world's oldest national scientific and professional societies for earth scientists, is opening up its archive of published material free to anyone for four weeks from 17 May to 18 June.
The Lyell Collection represents the digitized content of the society's extensive range of publications, covering journal and book articles from the mid 1800s to the present. The Lyell Collection was created to mark the Geological Society of London's 200th anniversary, and is one of the largest integrated collections of online earth science literature.
Although a subscription will be required for full access from June 18, many aspects of the service will remain entirely free for public use. This includes a sophisticated search functionality, access to summaries and abstracts and e-mail alerts about new content as it is added.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on May 21, 2007
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