The EBSCO version of the Inspec database has been enhanced with full scientific formula displays in the citation records. This new feature allows scientific formulas to appear within the title, abstract, and other fields in the results list and the full record. In addition, it is now possible to search scientific formulas using natural language. Examples of these enhancements are available here.
Developed in association with the medicals schools at Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan, and UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, Medpedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia covering up-to-date, unbiased medical and health information. The articles in Medpedia are written and edited by health experts for the general public. It can be browsed or searched.
Pubget is a search tool for the life sciences. Enter search terms and the results are the actual PDFs of the documents. Working with a library's journal subscription holdings, it's supposed provide one click to the PDF. More information about Pubget is available here. Please note that the University at Albany has not yet signed on to Pubget.
SciFinder Scholar reaction content now includes coverage of reactions from these Wiley reference works: Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis, Organic Syntheses, and Organic Reactions.
This is not entirely science, but it is certainly related and a look at things to come. Duke University Libraries offers DukeMobile 1.1, an iPhone app that provides access to its digital collections. These digital collections have been formatted for an IPhone or iTouch device. More information is available here. Be sure to watch the video.
From Mary Spiro of the Baltimore Science News Examiner: Top 20 websites every scientist (or engineer) ought to know.
Safari Tech Books Online has a new "refreshed" look. If you are not familiar with Safari, it is joint venture of O'Reilly Media and The Person Technology Group. These 2 publishers account for over half of all IT books published, including imprints from O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, New Riders, Prentice Hall, and Sams. The collection covers some of the latest technologies like Java, Web development, enterprise computing, and XML. Although the collection includes over 7,000 titles, the University at Albany community has access to about 150 books. Safari Tech Books Online may be searched or browsed, and the books are fully cataloged in the Minerva catalog. Check out the new look, and see which books are the most popular among UAlbany users.
From Tim Byrne, DOE/Office of Scientific and Technical Information:
"The Website for the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is sporting a fresh look with improved navigation pathways to our products and services. Direct links to ScienceAccelerator.gov, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org are featured, as well as a listing of DOE databases by content type. Our new features, Science Showcase and From the Director, highlight exciting ideas, science information, tools and services. Our Suggested Tags cloud provides ideas on how to tag our Website information and offers an easy path to users' favorite pages. Our interactive features can be found in the Read, Listen and Share box. While we know there will be a learning curve, we hope you find the OSTI Website more in tune with the needs of today's Web users."
Due to Website maintenance, Wiley resources will not be available on Saturday, June 13 beginning at 9 am EDT. The downtime may last up to one hour.
A backfile of Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie is available on Google Books. 1857 - 1908 is currently available. Yes, there are scholarly journals available on Google Books.
A backfile of Annalen der Physik [und Chemie] is available on Gallica. Presently, the following years are available: 1799 - 1885, 1897 - 1921, 1924 - 1930, and 1935 - 1938. Gallica is a digitized collection of resources available from Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
In 1997, JHEP was created by SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) as an open access journal, free for authors and free to readers. It was supported by grants and funding bodies. In 2002, the Institute of Physics (IoP) entered into a partnership with SISSA and took over online publication and subscription management. SISSA remained in control of peer review and submissions. IoP converted JHEP into a low-cost, subscription-based publication. In 2007, IoP added open access options. Beginning in January 2010, SISSA will transfer JHEP online publication, subscription services, and open access options to Springer.
NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) was the predecessor agency of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). NASA was established in 1958 by President Eisenhower, partially in response to the USSR's launch of the first artificial satellite. At that time, NACA had been researching flight technology for 40 years. Maintained by AERADE in the UK, the NACA report archives is available here. The archives can be browsed by year (1917 - 1958) or searched by keyword. NASA Technical Reports are available here.
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UPDATE (May 29, 2009):
I've received word that NASA Technical Reports (cited above) has more NACA reports than the AERADE NACA report site.
Direct from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS):
CAS has enriched the CAS databases with older content. (This includes SciFinder Scholar.) As part of that effort, they have added machine translated records from Chemisches Zentralblatt for the 1897-1906 time period. There are over 70,000 records from the pre-1907 era.
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and Wikipedia have collaborated to create Common Chemistry. Common Chemistry contains records for about 7,800 substances of widespread general public interest. Each record includes the CAS index name, chemical name synonyms, CAS registry number, formula, structure, and a link to Wikipedia for information about the substance. Common Chemistry can be searched by chemical name or CAS registry number.
Stephen Wolfram demonstrates his creation Wolfram|Alpha at Harvard University on April 28, 2009. Wolfram|Alpha is a new knowledge search engine.
Due to scheduled maintenance, Scopus will be unavailable on Saturday, May 16, 2009 for about 9.5 hours starting at 8:00 AM EDT.
From Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, Neotropical Birds provides life history information on birds from Central and South America. This new Website is freely available and is patterned after Birds of North America Online.
From EBSCO Publishing:
"Due to the recent global outbreak of Swine Influenza, EBSCO Publishing and the DynaMed Editors have made DynaMed’s information about Swine Influenza free to health care providers and institutions throughout the world. The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for health care providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flu-like illnesses during this outbreak. DynaMed Editors will continue to monitor information and update this topic as needed throughout this global crisis. DynaMed's information on Swine Flu is available here.
DynaMed is a point-of-care reference resource designed to provide clinicians with the best available evidence to support clinical decision-making. DynaMed is part of the suite of medical products owned and provided by EBSCO Publishing and is updated daily by monitoring medical literature sources."
From Babylon Ltd., Engineering Dictionaries provide definitions of engineering terms from one or more dictionaries. Enter a term and receive definitions from several dictionaries.
From Babylon Ltd., Physics Dictionaries provide definitions of physics terms from one or more dictionaries. Enter a term and receive definitions from several dictionaries.
arXiv.org is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution service for research papers covering physics and the related disciplines of mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, and quantitative biology. Theoretical physicist David Bacon recently developed an iPhone application for arXive.org called arXiview. It has several nifty features and functionalities including browsing and searching arXive.org, and reading PDFs. Screenshots and more information about arXiview are available here.
From Babylon Ltd., Mathematics & Statistics Dictionaries provide definitions of mathematical & statistical terms from one or more dictionaries. Enter a term and receive definitions from several dictionaries.
From Babylon Ltd., Computer & Internet Dictionaries provide definitions of computing and internet terms from one or more dictionaries. Enter a term and receive definitions from several dictionaries.
From Babylon Ltd., Chemistry Dictionaries provide definitions of chemistry terms from one or more dictionaries. Enter a term and receive definitions from several dictionaries.
Hosted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the E-print Network, Scientific Societies is a collection of worldwide scientific and technical associations and societies. Specialized lists of societies can be generated by checking off one or more subject discipline and one or more language. Once the list is displayed, links are provided to the societies' Websites.
The publisher Walter de Gruyter is offering a new hybrid open access model called de Gruyter Open Library. It is available for its journals and book series. Open access articles will be available in their own OA repository. Additional information is available here.
Looking for advice on finding a job? The Science Library has several books in the reference collection that may help you, including these new books:
Career Opportunities in Computers and Cyberspace by Harry Henderson. Science REF QA 76.25 H46 2004.
Great Jobs for Biology Majors by Blythe Camenson. Science REF HF 5381 C35 2004. (There is also a copy of this book in the University Library.)
Top 100 Computer and Technical Careers by Michael Farr. Science REF QA 76.25 F37 2009.
These 3 books are temporarily located behind the Science Library reference desk.
Informaworld will have scheduled downtime on:
Friday, April 10 and Saturday, April 18.
Informaworld is the online home of publications from Taylor & Francis and Routledge.
Chemistry Conferences lists future conferences for several chemistry disciplines including materials science and nanotechnology. The conferences are browsable by topic and date (via calendar). Updates are available with RSS feeds.
SHERPA RoMEO was developed by a consortium of United Kingdom research libraries. Its purpose is to provide publisher's policies on preprint and postprint archiving in repositories, which is a part of a copyright transfer agreement. SHERPA RoMEO can be searched by journal title or publisher name, and browsed by publisher name.
Beginning at 6:00 PM EDT on Saturday, April 4, 2009 and lasting about 9 hours, Scopus and ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance.
Looking for a place to publish your article? The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) now lists 4,000 journals! More information is here. More information about open access is here.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty vote unanimously to make their scholarly articles freely available to anyone on the Web. This new policy, which takes immediate effect, will use DSpace, an open-source software platform. MIT faculty will give nonexclusive permission to disseminate their articles via open access, however, faculty may opt out. More information is here.
The Virtual Journals in Science and Technology series, co-published by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, has been around for many years. Currently, the series covers:
Applications of Superconductivity
Biological Physics Research
Nanoscale Science & Technology
Quantum Information
Ultrafast Science
The Virtual Journals are "free topical alerting services that collect and organize papers from a broad range of sources, including Science and Nature." The publishers recently announced the release of a completely redesigned Website, which now includes RSS feeds. More information about the Virtual Journals service is available here.
Please note that I am not endorsing file sharing Websites and copyright violations; I am simply reporting information that I recently came across and did not know. File sharing Websites contain more than music and movies, they contain scholarly books and journals. For more on this subject, please see this blog posting from The Ubiquitous Librarian.
Scopus and ScienceDirect will be unavailable from 6 PM EST, Saturday March 7 to 7:30 AM EDT, Sunday March 8.
UAlbany's online access to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has changed. Online access is now only available with a username and password. If you need an article, please ask a reference librarian to log you into the JAMA Website. A better alternative is to use ILLiad via the UA Delivery service. UA Delivery staff will delivery the article to you electronically.
SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) has initialed a new feature for its journals. The feature is called the "Top 20 Most Downloaded Articles." It appears on the homepage for each journal, and it lists the articles that are being read (downloaded) the most. The list is displayed in descending order, and will be updated monthly.
New content in JSTOR:
Also, JSTOR coverage for the American Journal of Mathematics is changing from a wall fixed at 1996 to a 5 year moving wall.
Funded by the Internet Society, the RFC Editor is the master repository of RFCs (requests for comments) as well as RFC metadata. Search results include the metadata, links to the RFC text itself, and links to any errata.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was established in 1945 by scientists and engineers who created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, and knew about its effects. Its purpose is to "inform the public about threats to the survival and development of humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies in the life sciences." The contents of the Bulletin (1945-1998) have been scanned by Google Book Search, and are now freely available. Members of the UAlbany community can also access 1999+ via the Minerva record for the Bulletin.
From March 2nd to March 30th, the contents all of the journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) will be available to the University at Albany community. This is in addition to the journals we subscribe to; it includes Analyst, Catalysts & Catalysed Reactions, Chemical Biology, Chemical Technology, CrystEngComm, Energy & Environmental Science, Green Chemistry, Integrative Biology, Journal of Environmental Monitoring, Lab on a Chip, Metallomics, Molecular BioSystems, Natural Product Reports, Natural Product Updates, Pesticide Outlook, Photochemical & Photobiological Science, and Soft Matter. This is for March 2009 only.
Research Blogging identifies and aggregates blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research. The posts are about real developments in science; they are not press releases or news reports. Research Blogging includes science research in biology, chemistry, computer science, geosciences, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and other subject areas. Bloggers who want their posts aggregated must register. RSS feeds are available for all topics or by individual subject.
The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is now offering RSS feeds by major subject category. By subscribing to an RSS feed from NTIS, you will receive summaries of all newly cataloged reports for the subject category. Links to additional information are also furnished. The full list of NTIS RSS subject feeds is available here, and includes feeds for atmospherics, chemistry, computers, energy, environment, materials, mathematics, medicine & biology, natural resources & earth sciences, nuclear science & technology, and physics.
Hosted by the American Mathematical Society, the aim of AMS Digital Mathematics Registry "is to provide centralized access to collections of digitized publications in the mathematical sciences" and related areas like computer science. This includes both journals and journal-like book series. The resource list can be sorted by title or source (publisher). For every title listed, there's an indication whether it is freely accessible, a subscription is needed, or it is a combination of both.
Academic Earth is an organization with the goal of giving a world-class education to everyone on Earth. To achieve this goal, Academic Earth identifies and provides access to lectures given by leading experts from the some of the top universities. Subject coverage from this growing collection includes biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics.
Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks. Open content means that these textbooks are freely available online. A textbook is defined by Wikibooks as "a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study. They are produced according to the demand of educational institutions." Wikibooks is not... Wikibooks provides access to textbooks for these science/technology subjects: biology, computer science, engineering, mathematics, natural sciences, and physics.
The University Libraries is now providing online access to the following American Statistical Association (ASA) journals:
The Optical Society of America has launched a new online-only, peer-reviewed journal: Advances in Optics and Photonics. It will contain chapter-length review articles, tutorials, peer-reviewed letters to the editor, and multimedia. Advances in Optics and Photonics is freely available in 2009.
