From the Article:

Early in my days as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Library, a program officer asked me for help filling out a panel of reviewers. On a short deadline, he had worked for 2 days and only found two possible reviewers. In desperation, he wondered if there was any assistance I could give. The topic was “vibrational spectroscopy.” In 2 hours, I had a list of several hundred possible reviewers, with information about each reviewer to help him choose those most appropriate. He was astounded that I could do this so quickly and easily, and I was surprised that he could not.

As a result, I developed a workshop that all new program officers at NSF would attend on how to use standard library resources to quickly and easily find and evaluate possible peer reviewers, even if the subject area is unfamiliar. These program officers come to NSF as highly sophisticated users of standard databases, having used them throughout their careers as scientists. But what they have not done is viewed these tools through this particular lens.

Web of Science and Scopus both offer a wealth of incredible features for this task. These databases are so powerful, flexible, and elegant that they have abilities you never even dreamed were available. Let me give you a quick walk through some of the special features that can make this task simple and effective for you and your patrons.

Source: Online

The most influential journals: Impact Factor and Eigenfactor

Bibliometricians have introduced various scales of ranking journals; some based on publications, some based on usage as well, including the internet, using social networking analysis. Bollen et al. (1) recently concluded that no single indicator adequately measures impact and the IF is at the periphery of 39 scales analyzed. But there is a new parameter, the Eigenfactor™, which attempts to rate the influence of journals (www.eigenfactor.org). The Eigenfactor™ ranks journals in a manner similar to that used by Google for ranking the importance of Web sites in a search.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

This week:

+ Forestry: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2004-08

+ Science in Italy, 2004-08

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Chemistry

+ Map of Science: Physics

Source: Thomson Reuters

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Oceanography

+ Civil Engineering: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2004-08

+ What’s the “Hot” Paper in Biology

See Also: Current Classic Papers

The papers drawn from Essential Science IndicatorsSM from Thomson Reuters have the greatest absolute increase in citations from January 1, 1998 - December 31, 2008, the previous bimonthly period (sixth of 2008) to January 1, 1999 - February 28, 2009, the first bimonthly period of 2009.

Source: ScienceWatch (Thomson Reuters)

From an Information World Review Post:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) will permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. Researchers can now data-mine and text-mine author manuscripts from NPG journals archived in PubMed Central and other academic repositories.

Under NPG’s terms of reuse, users may view, print, copy, download and text-mine and data-mine the content for the purposes of academic research. Re-use should only be for academic purposes, commercial reuse is not permitted. Full conditions are available on nature.com.

Source: IWR

See Also: Complete News Release (via Nature Web Site)

From a SPARC Europe Post:

New mandates requiring researchers to make their papers available in open access have been announced in Belgium, Norway, and the UK.

A trend in 2009 has been the accelerated progress in institutions, funders, and governments adopting mandates that require researchers to make copies of their papers available in open access (’green’ open access).

Source: SPARC Europe

From the OED Web Site:

In our archive section, you can now read the prefaces to the original fascicles in which the OED was issued between 1884 and 1928. This material, long unavailable, will be of great interest to scholars and dictionary enthusiasts.

Direct to Archive Section

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

Here are this week’s citation briefs from Thomson Reuters.

+ Science in France, 2004-08

+ Animal Sciences: High-Impact U.S. Institutions, 2003-07

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Medicine

Source: Thomson Reuters

From a News Release:

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is extending the reach of the “Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics” workshop by adding related materials to its popular Scholarly Communication Toolkit. The materials – including short videos, presentations templates and handouts – were developed for the half-day workshop offered at the ACRL 14th National Conference in Seattle and traveling to five locations around the country this summer. Now librarians can make use of these tools to enhance their own knowledge or adapt them to offer related workshops on their own campuses. The Scholarly Communication Toolkit is available online at http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/.

Source: ALA

From the Announcement:

The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP) today expressed its support and endorsement of a joint statement on the open access debate issued by two prestigious international organizations representing publishers and librarians. Designed to bring more light and less heat to the often contentious debate surrounding open access, the statement, entitled “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access,” was issued on May 20 by the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). They were joined in releasing the statement by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

Source: Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers, Inc.(AAP)

From the Abstract:

This paper explores dissemination, broadly considered, of an open access (OA) database as part of a librarian-faculty collaboration currently in progress. Metadata optimization for cataloging, repository submission, and search engines is examined, as are user notification methods. Libraries should consider their role in scholarly publishing, develop workflows to enable it, and extend their efforts to the web.

Direct to Full Text (13 pages; PDF)

This article was written by Philip Young. University Libraries at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

Source: OCLC Systems and Services (via E-LIS)

From the Web Site:

This site provides information for libraries, presses, and other academic units interested in launching and maintaining campus-based publishing partnerships. The resource is maintained by an editorial board representing library and university press staff actively engaged in creating and managing publishing partnerships. It reflects their practical experience and provides information on current developments, as well as guidance on best practices.

Direct to Web Site

Source: SPARC

From the About Page:

This freely accessible Web site gives research professionals working in a variety of occupations an invaluable tool to identify individuals, departments and laboratories that have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of science and technology in recent decades.

ISIHighlyCited.com reveals the face of research–the people behind the accomplishments in 21 broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences. These individuals are the most highly cited within each category for the period 1981-1999, and comprise less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers–truly an extraordinary accomplishment.

ISIHighlyCited.com will grow to include the top 250 preeminent individual researchers in each of 21 subject categories who have demonstrated great influence in their field as measured by citations to their work–the intellectual debt acknowledged by their colleagues. The information for each researcher is as follows:

Biographical information: education, faculty and professional posts, memberships and/or offices, current research interests, and personal Web sites.

Full listing of publications: journal articles, book or book chapters, conference proceedings, web sites and other Internet resources

Bibliography enhanced by links to the full bibliographic information indexed in the ISI Web of Science.

When visiting ISIHighlyCited.com, one can:

+ Search for the top researchers by name, category, country, or institutional affiliation

+ Track research trends through literature references using links to and through the Web of Science

+ Learn about or stay current on the research authorities and trends in a number of fields

+ Identify key individuals, departments and laboratories

+ Locate colleagues and experts

+ Discover new dimensions of a researcher’s work

+ Show students the development of scientific ideas

The HighlyCited.com database can be accessed here.
It was last updated on February 11, 2009.

Source: Thomson Reuters

+ Australian Universities: Most Prolific in Food Science & Nutrition, 2003-07

+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Criminology & Penology

+ What’s the Hot Paper in Physics?

Source: Thomson Reuters

Access two full-text chapters from a new book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians (in process) from Chandos. Both chapters available here were written by Heather Morrison.

+ Book Chapter: Open Access

In-depth overview of open access, covering definitions (open access publishing, open access archives, gratis and libre, open access works versus open access processes), major statements and declarations, types of open access, major initiatives, trends, advocacy and lobbying.

+ Summary and Conclusions. Final Chapter of Scholarly Communication for Librarians (15 pages; PDF)

Summary and Conclusions of Scholarly Communication for Librarians, a book designed to provide librarians at all levels with the basics of how scholarly communication works, an understanding of the academic library as an essential support for scholarly communication, the impact of the decisions librarians make, and emerging roles for libraries and librarians in scholarly communication. Includes major points from all chapters, on: scholarship, scholarly journals, the scholarly publishing industry, librarianship and scholarly communication, author’s rights, open access, the economics of scholarly communication, and emerging trends.

Source: E-LIS