Chemical Synthesis Database (ChemSynthesis) is a collection over 40,000 compounds with citations to their synthesis. Each record also includes physical properties like density, melting point, and boiling point. ChemSynthesis is searchable by chemical name, CAS registry number, molecular formula, InChiKey, smiles, and journal title. It also has structure search capability.
NOAA releases the World Ocean Database 2009. It is an update of the 2005 edition, and contains a collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. It is part of NOAA's climate services, and provides "about 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports. The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents." The news release is available here.
These are Time magazine's picks for the best new gadgets, gizmos, and breakthroughs for 2009. Check them out here. Also, be sure to take a look at the 5 worst inventions.
Springer offers free access to all journal articles and book chapters written by 2009 Nobel Prize laureates in Springer publications. This offer runs through December 31, 2009. More information along with a list publications is available here.
Finding IR, NMR, ESR, and UV spectra for common compounds is sometimes difficult. The following books may be helpful; they are indexes to journals and other books that contain spectra:
From Conservation International, Biodiversity Hotspots highlights 25 critically threatened ecosystems (hotspots) around the world. Its purpose is to focus on areas where biodiversity is at greatest risk. Information includes an overview, unique biodiversity, human impacts, conservation actions, and in depth information. There is also an outline map, a reading list, and related links.
Safari Tech Books Online releases version 6.0. This version includes enhanced usability, optimized search, user ratings and reviews, categorization, and improved readability. More information is available here. Reminder: The UAlbany collection consists of 132 Safari titles.
Don't laugh! Deep Dyve has launched a rental service for research articles in science, technology, and medicine. For as little as 99 cents, you can "rent" for 24 hours one of 30 million articles in the Deep Dyve database of thousands of journals. There's a small catch ... the article cannot be printed. Deep Dyve has other options: for $9.99 a month, you can download up to 20 articles and keep them for 7 days; these cannot be printed either. However, the premium plan, which costs $19.99 a month, allows you to print and download an unlimited number of articles. This deserves some serious consideration. A 14-day free trial is available here and more information is available here.
ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 9 hours, from 9:00 pm EDT Saturday, October 31 to 5:00 am EST Sunday, November 1.
Math Vids provides free instructional videos for students in middle school through college. The college section includes videos on calculus (I, II, III), beyond calculus, statistics, linear algebra, differential equations, and discrete mathematics.
A university consortium has been awarded $12,200,000 to create a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers, a "Facebook for scientists." The funding is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Institutions involved are the University of Florida, Cornell, Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University, the Scripps Research Institute, and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. More information is available here.
$12,200,000! We already have social network tools for scientists, and I've written about a few:
2collab
ACS Network
ACS Nanotation.
And, I am sure there are others.
Selected publications of the New York State Museum have been digitized by the New York State Library. Most of these publications are in the fields of biology, geology, and paleontology, and are freely available in PDF format here. The following publications are currently available:
Bulletin of the New York State Museum; an index is available here.
Circular – New York State Museum (nos. 14, 49, & 57); accessible here.
Education Leaflet (nos. 1 & 34); accessible here.
New York State Museum Handbook; accessible here.
New York State Museum Memoir; accessible here.
Natural History of New York; accessible here.
If you have trouble viewing any of the items, you may need to allow "pop-ups" in your browser.
Nobel chemistry laureate Linus Pauling conducted research on swine flu in 1976. Read his opinions on the vaccine and here.
Due to essential site maintenance, access to Wiley online resources may be interrupted on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:00 AM EDT. This interruption of service may last up to one hour.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is making available numerous resources on this year's Nobel Laureates in Physics. The resources include interviews, photos, and related Web links as well as free access to the laureates' articles in AIP journals. All resources are available here.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) releases the iResearch application. This application is an electronic reader that allows users to save PDF files to iPhone and iPod touch devices, and read them offline without a WiFi or cellular connection. The journals available in the iResearch application include: Applied Physics Letters, Biomicrofluidics, Chaos, Journal of Applied Physics, The Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, Low Temperature Physics, Physics of Fluids, Physics of Plasmas, and Review of Scientific Instruments. iResearch is compatible with iPhone and iPod touch devices running software version 3.0 and above. More information on iResearch is available here.
This has little to do with science, however, since Major League Baseball's postseason begins today, I thought I would point out Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress. It is "a guide to baseball resources available on the Library's Web site and in its physical collections. The breadth and depth of materials highlighted will appeal to baseball researchers, while casual and diehard fans alike will find many digitized items documenting the history of baseball to fuel their passion for the game." If you are interested in the science of baseball, check out The Physics of Baseball by Robert Kemp Adair (Science Library / Browse Collection: QC 26 A23 1990).
Compiled by Karen Scarfone and Victoria Thompson at the Computer Security Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), System and Network Security Acronyms and Abbreviations is a listing of information technology acronyms and abbreviations. This glossary is in PDF format, and is also known as NIST Interagency Report 7581.
This video from Google explains their forthcoming collaborative tool, Google Wave, in under 8 minutes. Want to know more, check out this longer video; it's an hour and 20 minutes.
Project Euclid is an archive for independent mathematics and statistics publishers. It is jointly managed by Cornell University Libraries and Duke University Press. Project Euclid went live in August 2001, and in September 2009 it reached the significant milestone of 100,000 articles. It is important to note that 70% of its articles are available without any access restrictions.
Kaye and Laby Online contains the entire 16th edition (1995) of Kaye and Laby's Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants. It is freely available from the UK's National Physical Laboratory, and includes important physical and chemical property data. Kaye and Laby Online is searchable, or may be browsed.
Due to essential site maintenance, resources from Wiley InterScience may not be available on Monday, September 21, 2009 at 4 am EDT. This service interruption may last up to one hour.
ScienceDirect and Scopus will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 19, 2009 from 8:00 am through 9:00 pm EDT.
The New York State Library (NYSL) is a great resource, especially for items that the UAlbany Libraries do not own or provide. You should always check our holding in the Minerva catalog, before trying the New York State Library. The New York State Library is a research library located on Madison Avenue in Albany; it is in the Cultural Education Center across from the Empire State Plaza. New York residents (18-years-old and older) and State government employees may borrow materials and access online resources (journals and databases). Library users (in person and online) need a NYSL borrower's card. NY residents can apply for a borrower's card here; State employees can apply here. To see if NYSL has what you are looking for, check their catalog or their electronic resources listings.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has created a new social network called AIP UniPHY. The purpose of AIP UniPHY is to link physical scientists. Scientists can share global connections that occur through similar publications. Membership is free, but registration is required.
As announced here last month, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has registered its 50 millionth substance. It is a novel arylmethylidene heterocycle with analgesic properties (CAS Registry Number 1181081-51-5). Additional information is available here.
Chemical Abstracts (and other CAS print products) will no longer be available in print format after January 1, 2010. UAlbany canceled Chemical Abstracts (print format) in 2000 when our subscription to SciFinder Scholar was initiated. It's the end of an era. More information is available here.
Beginning today and running through October 30, 2009, the University at Albany has a trial of the Springer ebook collection. The collection contains over 30,000 ebooks, including monographs, book series, and reference works. The trial is set up to recognize the University’s IP range; no password is required. During the trial, the ebook collection is not available off campus, unless you have the University’s VPN client running.
The Springer ebook collection is available here. Or, you can access it via http://www.springerlink.com/ (click on books, book series, or reference works in the middle of the page).
The ebook collection is divided into 13 subject collections, including:
biomedical and life science
chemistry and materials science
computer science
earth and environmental science
mathematics and statistics
physics and astronomy
professional and applied computing.
The University at Albany has signed on to the SCOAP3 expression of interest. SCOAP3 is the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. The goal of SCOAP3 is to provide open access in the field of high-energy physics. For more information, please see the SCOAP3 Website.
ScienceDirect and Scopus will be unavailable on Saturday, August 29th due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 7.5 hours, from 2:30 PM EDT to to 10:00 PM EDT.
Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that is currently under development. Speculation in a recent Nature News article is that Google Wave may change scientific and scholarly communication. For additional information about Google Wave, see Nature news and the video on the Google Wave Website.
The UAlbany community can now access 2 new databases:
Computer Source - Providing access to nearly 300 full text academic journals, magazines, and trade publications, this resource covers computers science, programming, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, information systems, robotics, and software. An additional 150 periodicals are also indexed and abstracted.
Computers & Applied Sciences Complete - Indexes and abstracts over 1,900 academic journals and professional publications, and provides full text access to more than 830 periodicals, books, conferences, and encyclopedias. Subject coverage includes computing theory and practice; engineering and applied science; and social and business implication of technology.
Both databases are available SUNY-wide through SUNYConnect, and are accessible on the Ebsco platform.
The Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) is offering mobile access as a beta project. JACSB currently has a table of contents project and an article project. The goal of these "is to create the most useful and enjoyable mobile experience possible." More information is available here.
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is on target to register its 50 millionth substance on September 7, 2009. It seems like just yesterday that CAS registered its 40 millionth substance, but it was 9 months ago. For more information, please see news release here.
Journal articles from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) from 2004 forward are in arXiv. The articles are in either the Probability Theory or Statistics sections. Additional information is available here.
viXra.org (reverse of arXiv) is a new preprint archive alternative. It places no restrictions on the sorts of papers that can be posted, and at the same time, they are trying to determine "what kind of stuff is not managing to get into the arXiv." At the moment, viXra covers physics, mathematics, biology, and computational science. For additional information, please see physicsworld.com.
The managing editor of PLoS One, Peter Pinfield , outlines and discusses the article-level metrics being implemented by the open access publisher, PLoS (Public Library of Science. It is interesting to note that he also advocates for other publishers to open up their usage data and to use the PLoS-developed metrics.
Rejecta Mathematica is "an open access online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences." More information about this journal is available here. The first issue (volume 1, number 1, July 2009) is now available.
The oral histories in this collection are held by The Niels Bohr Library & Archives, which is a division of the American Institute of Physics. The collection includes the transcripts of the interviews as well as a few voice clips taken from the transcripts.
The Feynman Lectures are a series of 7 lectures given by physicist Richard Feynman at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were part of Cornell's Messenger Lecture Series, and were filmed by the BBC. Microsoft purchased the rights to the lectures from the BBC and has made them freely available. To view the lectures, the Silverlight plug-in is required.
The American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics have launched a new virtual journal, the Virtual Journal of Atomic Quantum Fluids. According to the news release it covers "new developments in the study of novel quantum fluids and many-body systems using ultracold atoms. These include Bose-Einstein condensates, degenerate Fermi gases, and ultracold atoms in optical lattices."
Developed by the publisher Springer, SpringerImages is a collection of over 1,600,000 scientific, technological, and medical images. The images include photos, tables and figures, charts, graphs, histograms, and illustrations. All science disciplines are covered, however, more than 61% of the images are medical or life sciences-related. Although, SpringerImages is subscription-based, over 29,000 images are freely available.
The research guides in the Science Library's "brief guide to reference resources" series have recently been updated. They are basically done, but may need tweaking here and there. They are:
Chemistry
Computer Science
Mathematics & Statistics
Physics
Nanoscience & Nanoengineering
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And one more:
Access to several journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry are (or will be) available for a limited time. The journals are:
Analytical Methods (free online access available later in 2009 until December 2010).
Energy and Environmental Science (free online access available until December 2009).
Integrative Biology (free online access available until December 2010).
Metallomics (free online access available until December 2010).
Nanoscale (free online access available later in 2009 until December 2010).
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.
