Personal PDF file storage on CiteULike - Do you keep copies of the PDFs of some of your articles on your hard drive? Can you never find the right one when you want to? Or, do you keep these files on a machine at work and sometimes want access to them at home? Now you can keep a personal copy of the PDF on the CiteULike server. When you’re logged in, just navigate down to any article with your web browser and you’ll get the option to upload the PDF from your hard drive. After that, you’ll have access to the content wherever you can log in to CiteULike. [via CiteULike weblog]
check out WikiPulse: “In the last 59 minutes there have been 54 new articles, 199 new pages, 2799 new edits. On the English Wikipedia there are currently 588477 total articles, 624 featured articles, and 1738262 total pages, with 16813116 total edits and 9.67 average edits per page. There are 291812 registered users and 484, or 0.17% are administrators. 180 people are currently chatting in #Wikipedia, and over the last 286 days there have been 7331 nicks.” [via Weblogg-ed]
The World, a long-planned project of Stephen Glover’s to launch a new very upmarket newspaper, has lost its managing director Vicky Unwin. She left her (unpaid) post with The World after two years to become chief executive of arts publisher Third Millennium Information. Stephen Glover, a freelance writer and one of the founders of The Independent, remains optimistic: “It’s not the end of The World“. He assures that the long-awaited serious celebrity-free tabloid will be launched. All that’s missing is the money, apparently to the tune of £20m.
Botany - National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) has created a wonderful portal of botanical information with copious links to a wide variety of sources. Covers most apsects of botany. The rest of the NBII site includes resources on current biological issues, geographic perspectives, and resources for kids and teachers.
Eclipse Resources - Searching for a specific lunar or solar eclipse? Want to see maps of recent and upcoming eclipses? Check out these two sites USNO Eclipse Portal and Eclipses of the Sun and Moon. The USNO Eclipse Portal allows you to enter in a year, choose the eclipse of interest, and see a diagram and map of that eclipse. Eclipses of the Sun and Moon has links to recent and upcoming pdf maps of solar and lunar eclipses [via Georgia State University Library weblog]
The JISC’s Scholarly Communications Group study on author self-archiving behaviour final report Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open access self-archiving: an author study is now available. This important and long-awaited JISC Report, destined to be very influential, is also available at http://cogprints.org/4385/ and at http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/ 2005_Open_Access_Report.pdf.
Excerpts of a summary by Professor Stevan Harnad, Southampton University, a long-time advocate of Open Access to publicly funded scholarly research:
“Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories […] There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access.
“Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and […] another worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided […] The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate.”
The JISC site includes a useful Questions and Answers on Open Access.
PubMed Central hits UK - 08 Jun 2005: Six biomedical research funding bodies and charities, headed by the Wellcome Trust, have formed an alliance to create the UK’s own version of the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) PubMed Central, a repository of openly available peer-reviewed scientific research. [via Open Access News weblog]
The University of Connecticut Libraries site has a useful collection of links to Open Access web sites.
This is from six months ago, but it is still available: Publish Or Be Damned, a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast on Tuesday 21 December 2004. An excellent introduction to the issues surrounding Open Access -
“Scientific publishing is undergoing a revolution. Scientists and policy makers, fed up with valuable research being locked away in expensive subscription only journals, are mounting a challenge to the publishers. They are launching their own competing journals and giving away the results for free. But not everyone is happy.”
