LibChemNews

Library Purchases Elsevier ScienceDirect

Syracuse University Library signed a contract to purchase Elsevier Science's e-journal database, ScienceDirect, through the NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL), a consortium of 18 major academic research libraries with the common objectives of access and cost containment, joint licensing, and possible joint deployment of electronic resources.

Elsevier Science is the largest commercial publisher of scientific research journals in the world. Buying ScienceDirect through NERL will allow the Library to gain access to the combined holdings of the member libraries rather than just those corresponding to our less-extensive print subscriptions. The Library will be adding back into its collection many titles that were formerly cancelled along with many new titles that we previously could not afford.

ScienceDirect coverage includes 1997 to date. Additionally, ScienceDirect lists journal titles for which the library has no subscription (not included in the NERL holdings). In both cases, issues with available full-text articles are identified by a green page icon while abstract-only articles are marked by a white page icon.

Access to is accomplished by clicking the "Group Wide Login" button on the ScienceDirect homepage. Individuals also have the option of creating a "Personal Login" account which allows them to create a Personal Journal List targeting specific research interests along with New Issue Alerts that e-mails table of contents of selected new issues.

Library print subscriptions will continue through the end of 2001. In order to gain further savings, the Library will begin cancelling print versions of Elsevier titles in 2002.

CrossRef Web-Based Reference-Linking Service

An article by Amy Brand, a representative of the Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), entitled "CrossRef Turns One" appeared in the May issue of D-Lib Magazine describing progress and goals of the CrossRef linking service.

CrossRef was incorporated in January of 2000 as a collaborative venture among twelve of the largest scientific and scholarly publishers, both commercial and not-for-profit, to enable cross-publisher reference linking throughout the digital journal literature. The founding members were Academic Press; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; American Institute of Physics (AIP); Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); Blackwell Science; Elsevier Science; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); Kluwer Academic Publishers; Nature; Oxford University Press; Springer-Verlag; and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

When CrossRef went live with its collaborative linking service in June 2000, it had enabled reference links in roughly 1,100 journals from a member base of 33 publishers, using a functional prototype system. The effort continues to grow 70 publishers accounting for over 3,800 journals and 3 million articles.

CrossRef functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather effects linkages through Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the participating publishers.

A researcher clicking on a link (typically a DOI in a footnoted reference in an online article) will be connected to a page on the publisher's website showing a full bibliographical citation of the article, and, in most cases, the abstract as well. The reader can then access the full text article through the appropriate mechanism; subscribers will generally go straight to the text, while others will receive information on access via subscription, document delivery, or pay-per-view.

CrossRef costs the researcher nothing; its expenses are covered by nominal charges to the publishers for depositing their metadata, annual membership fees, and fees to publishers of abstracting and indexing databases for accessing CrossRef's bank of DOIs to create links to full text articles.

Amy Brand writes in her article that "CrossRef aims to become nothing less than the complete reference-linking backbone for all scholarly literature available in electronic form. Like the centralized electronic bookseller who provides an invaluable research tool because their aggregated metadata is so comprehensive, CrossRef will be measured by the robustness of its linking coverage; the usefulness of the system is directly proportional to the volume of linkable content. By that measure, we are still in our infancy. There are thousands of electronic journals and issues still to be added to the system. And, of course, journal articles do not exclusively cite other journal articles. Our linking capabilities must be extended to e-prints, conference proceedings, reference works, etc. Hence, we are rapidly recruiting new member publishers, adding other content types to the linking process, and expanding the range and depth of the citation coverage of participating journals to include more backlist issues."

PrePRINT Network

The Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information has created the PrePRINT Network as a unified search engine for most of the scientific and technical preprint/e-print servers on the web.

Preprints are manuscripts that have not yet been published, but may have been reviewed and accepted; submitted for publication; or intended for publication and being circulated for comment. Preprints may also be referred to as "e-prints". Many e-prints are electronic versions of research papers that have been submitted for dissemination and review among peers; for publication in journals; or prior to presentation at conferences. Some preprint servers may define preprints as any electronic work circulated by the author outside of the traditional publishing environment.

Preprints in the areas of physics, materials, chemistry, mathematics, biology, environmental sciences and other areas related to DOE's research interests are accessible through the Network. The PrePRINT Network offers the user several access mechanisms. Users may browse or search one specific preprint site, a selected set of site, or all of the listed sites. The Browse option allows users to view an alphabetical listing of all of the preprint sites included in the system and to visit any of the individual sites listed. Lists of the available preprint servers are also organized by subject, including lists for Biology and Medicine and Chemistry.

The PrePRINT Alerts feature allows users to create personal profiles which will then notify the user as new information is added.

Public Library of Science

The following is an extract from the April 2001 issue of Current Cites, a monthly current awareness newsletter that monitors and annotates information technology literature in both print and digital forms.

This topic isn't new, but when Science, Nature, and Scientific American all weigh in on the same topic, you get the sense that something big is afoot. And there is. A number of scientists and researchers are as mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. What are they not going to take? It's probably best to go to the Public Library of Science site and find out for yourself. But in a nutshell, they no longer want to give away their intellectual content to publishers and have publishers lock it up for perpetuity except for those who pay to access it. They're calling for their published work to be freely available six months after publication. Read on to find out more.

Butler, Declan, editor. "Future E-Access to the Primary Literature" Nature (April 27, 2001)

This Nature "web debate" and the recent attention of Science and Scientific American on this same topic, means that major scientific publications are waking up to the fact that there is a revolution in their midst. Faculty and researchers are no longer complacent with what one researcher has termed the "Faustian bargain" of giving up copyright in an effort to obtain tenure. Neither are they complacent about the amount of money libraries are being charged to buy back their intellectual effort. I have no idea where the chips may fall, but fall they must, and discussions such as these can only serve to shed light on the possibilities for change and the positions of the antagonists. Be forewarned, this debate has many contributions, from many different perspectives. You could easily spend a day or more reading, sifting, and thinking about what the future may hold for scholarly communication.

Karow, Julia. "Publish Free or Perish" Scientific American (April 23, 2001)

Karow pens a readable and interesting overview of the controversy surrounding the Public Library of Science open letter calling for publishers to make scientific journal articles freely available six months after publication. Read this before diving into the debates in Science and Nature on this issue, and you'll have a good introduction to the players and the issue.

Richard J. Roberts, et. al. "Information Access : Building A 'GenBank' of the Published Literature" Science 291(5512): 2318-2319 (Mar 2001)

The Editors [Science]. "Science's Response : Is a Government Archive the Best Option?" Science 291(5512): 2318-2319 (Mar 2001)

The first piece is a group of scientists calling for free and open access to scientific literature six months after publication, and for the centralization of this material in a common repository. This is not just a small group of scientists calling for this, but as of this writing over 15,000. The "movement" to free the scientific literature is called the Public Library of Science. To enforce their call for change, they suggest a boycott of journals that do not comply. The boycott, scheduled to begin September 2001, would not just include article contributions, but also editing or reviewing for such a publication as well as personal subscriptions. In the second cited piece, the editors of Science suggest a somewhat different strategy to achieve some of the same ends. Rather than having all scientific publishers submit their content to a central repository, the Science editors favor a distributed model, where publishers retain their content but it can be searched at a central location. The editors also predictably raise economic questions and other concerns. Meanwhile, they plan on making the research reports and articles of Science freely available after a year (not the six months advocated by Roberts and his colleagues), on their own web site, not in a central repository. It will be interesting to see what happens come September, but this is a war of unknown duration and it has only just begun.

SciFinder Scholar Coverage Increased

SciFinder Scholar now provides access to literature and patents from 1947 to the present. On April 22, 2001, bibliographic information and abstracts were added for over 2.2 million references published in Chemical Abstracts from 1947 to 1966.

This information may be searched by:

• Research Topic
• Author
• Document Identifier
• Company Name/Organization