LibChemNews

SciFinder Scholar 2000

A new 2000 version of SciFinder Scholar is now available for download through the Library databases page.

SciFinder Scholar 2000 is a client program that searches a suite of chemical information databases using internet protocols. It must be downloaded and installed on a desktop machine and use of the program is restricted to the syr.edu and esf.edu domains. A users manual in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, available from the database page, describes in detail how to use this product.

New in SciFinder Scholar 2000:

• The ability to scan journals by table of contents;
• Searches can be conducted in both Chemical Abstracts and MEDLINE databases;
• Many bibliographic citations now display a list of journal article references with hyperlinks to their corresponding references in CA or MEDLINE; and
• Answer sets can be refined by exploring by company name.

See the SciFinder Scholar web page for a more in-depth overview of new features.

BioOne

BioOne is a collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe and the private sector to bring an aggregation of the full-texts of important bioscience research journal titles that, because they are published by small societies and non-commercial publishers, had until now been available only in printed form. BioOne provides integrated access to this collection of journals focused on the biological, ecological and environmental sciences.

Syracuse University has committed itself to supporting society publications that have been threatened over the years by large commercial publishers. Library acquisitions budgets have not kept pace with the escalating costs of scholarly journals nor with the proliferation of new publications. Often the smaller society presses have been cancelled to support more expensive commercially published titles.

The Association of Research Library's SPARC project is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market by partnering with publishers of top-quality, low-cost research.

BioOne is one of SPARC's most ambitious projects and provides a unique opportunity for libraries to enhance their support of research directly and at a lower cost. The initial offering of BioOne's 33 titles supports fifteen journals that either Syracuse University or SUNY/ESF currently purchases, reinstates twelve titles that these libraries cancelled in the past, and provides access to six new titles.

BioOne will eventually include many more journal titles (they anticipate over 200 in the next two years) as more publishers come on board. The web site allows users to browse journals issue by issue, to search the entire archive by subject, and to receive email alerts about new issues in the BioOne collection.

See "A Question of Access: SPARC, BioOne and Society-driven Electronic Publishing" (PDF File) by Richard K. Johnson, SPARC Enterprise Director, for a longer description of the SPARC partnership in BioOne.

Wiley E-Journals

The Library just signed a deal for Wiley Interscience's collection of over 350 journals. The site organizes titles into alphabetical lists and by subjects. You can perform subject searches across the whole Wiley site or with subject subsets. Users additionally have the option to create personal accounts to bookmark journals or "hot articles" for future reference. You can also save search queries against your profile.

This is an important collection for the Syracuse University Library and reinstates many biology and chemistry titles that the Library was forced to cancel in the 80s and 90s. Most of the titles provide access to an archive dating back to 1998 or before. The Library will continue to carry all the print editions of currently subscribed titles throughout 2001 while we evaluate the Wiley e-journal service.

Not all of these titles have been cataloged in SUMMIT at this point. However, the Wiley package is listed on the the Science and Technology Library web page of subscription packages.