We've all heard of the lawsuits faced by cigarette
companies in the last decade. But what we didn't know is that one company,
BAT, has had to hand over millions of internal documents for public
scrutiny. Policy papers, conference reports, medical research papers,
laundry bills, requests for special meals on airlines - its all there in
full text for the whole world to read. ACCESS spent an afternoon browsing
this amazing archive which documents the big and the small of a powerful
business enterprise. The URL is in our story here.
Web publishing tools from Cornell University
Library
Open access or no open access, there will still be a
lot of scholarly publishing on the web. That means that all over the
world, people are working on affordable web publishing tools. Cornell
University Library is no exception especially as it is home to Project
Euclid. With money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell has
developed DpubS software now ready for distribution to libraries,
university presses and independent publishers. Want it? Then read
our feature here
.
They're taking over the world
Just about everything you buy seems to be made in
China. Most of what you export is going there too. Now, in the latest
figures from ISI, soon every research paper you read will have been
written by a Chinese scientist. OK, that's an overstatement, but the
trends cannot be denied. Consider this: 10.45% of all materials science
papers indexed by ISI in recent years originated in China. More
figures here
.
Consortia, dontcha hate, er, love
'em?
If your library belongs to one, admit it, you
sometimes curse at the work it generates. Consortia might bring you
savings of scale, but they often take on a life of their own. You know the
score - offices, staff, endless meetings, accountants- Nobody seems to
think that they're going to disappear. Neither does Steve O'Connor given
the title of his article is The Future of Consortia. Read what he
has to say here.
Australian theses to be easier to locate on
the web
The Australian Digital Theses Program, ADT, has just
had a shot in the arm. A national initiative to create an online directory
of all research theses and dissertations from Australian universities is
underway. The software supplier has been named and key components
announced. More here.
Open Access divides but does it
rule?
It's the number one contentious issue in publishing
and librarianship. If you're a librarian, you can point fingers at named
enemies - those big, bad, wolfie publishers at your door barking for their
money. If you're a society publisher, you wonder how your publishing model
will survive if all government funded research results must be provided
free. If you're the people who created the Directory of Open Access
Journals, you've done many librarians and researchers a great service.
The man behind DOAJ is interviewed here.
Why so little largesse in
Asia?
Asia might have been through bad times, but its
squillionaires still have oodles of cash, shares, property and baubles
stashed away. So why is it that a Hong Kong billionaire or Singaporean
millionaire, isn't giving a million bucks to China? You might not like the
way Microsoft does business, but Bill Gates can't be faulted on his
philanthropy. A rural library service in China has just received a huge
grant from the Gates Foundation. Read more here.
Malaysia has a Medical Librarians
Group
Take a look at the Asia library associations listings
on Aardvark. Some countries - Japan, Philippines and Korea - seem to breed
associations. Whether you're a map, music, university, pharmaceutical or
extraterrestrial librarian, there'll be an association for you. The rest
of Asia is more sedate. All have one, some have two, but more than three?
No sir. Malaysian librarianship is mature enough to have a medical
librarians group in addition to the national library association.
It's under the spotlight here.
Chinese databases make their debut
at this international
conference
The most noticeable feature
of Online Information 2004 which concluded in London recently, was
its size. The space devoted to the exhibition was the smallest
in recent years. During the dot.com boom, the exhibitors overflowed
into two or more halls. But most of those upstart companies
are long forgotten leaving the familiar names of the industry to
once more dominate the floor space. The ongoing consolidation and
branding of the STM industry also contributed to the smaller
exhibition. Thomson for example had very large adjacent booths that brought together
familiar brand names: Gale, ISI, Dialog. Wolters Kluwer also had a
commanding presence.
Several
companies took advantage of visitors from all over Europe to
launch new products or announce new features to their existing
catalogue. ACCESS noticed Emerald Management
Xtra the new flagship knowledge portal from Emerald.
It expands upon the core content from over 100 select Emerald
journals found in Emerald Fulltext and Emerald Management
Reviews databases by integrating new content including
Conference Central, Research Register and more. Free trials
are offered here
.
First
time exhibitor Morgan & Claypool Publishers were
showing SYNTHESIS - The Digital Library of Engineering and Computer
Science - a novel service for students and scientists. Each
SYNTHESIS 'lecture' is typically 50-100 pages
of new content written by prominent researchers, content which
is more current than a book and more comprehensive than a
journal article. Because of their length, SYNTHESIS lectures
can be published quickly and updated frequently, a distinct
advantage in these fast moving disciplines. The lectures are
organized into series each of which is managed by an expert
editor. Linking to full text is through CrossRef and OpenURLs.
MARC records accompany each lecture, which are also COUNTER,
compliant. More information here
.
Wise
old SAGE has new databases
New from SAGE
and CSA are four full text databases in the SAGE
Full-Text Collections: Management and Organization
Studies, Materials Science, Nursing & Health Sciences, and
Urban Studies & Planning. These peer reviewed databases
offer more than 220 journals, and over 80,000 articles, book
reviews and editorials with original graphics and tables.
Included is access to the latest issues and backfiles
extending 36 years. SAGE Journals Online can be found here
.
INSPEC
announced the availability of its archive for
1891-1968. The entire collection of Science Abstracts
contains 873,700 records, original tables and diagrams, all
fully searchable. IEE has also chosen AIP's Scitation to
replace IOJ to host the IEE Digital Library. In addition to
tables of contents and abstracts users also get sophisticated
searching and browsing, personalization tools and extensive
citation links to publishers and databases. Launch date is
February 2005. More here
.
IEEE also has
plans to digitise its collections. Proceedings of the
IEEE will be digitised back to its first issue in 1913.
Currently, articles from 1988 are available through
Xplore. By 1Q 2005, that will be pushed back to 1963
with content from 1913 to 1962 following at a later date. The
Proceedings can be found here
.
Business
information is always a crowd puller but one product, the
Islamic Finance Information Service (IFIS)
caught our eye. Touted as the 'first professional strength'
information service designed to meet the requirements of
Sharia compliant industries, IFIS offers news from primary
sources, details on deals and transactions, and user oriented
features such as an events calendar and company tab. In
addition, IFIS has an Islamic bond league table and Sharia
rulings. ISI Emerging Markets is the publisher. Here has more . The
same publisher also announced that its flagship
Emerging Market Information
Service now covers Australia. Company and industry
information is sourced from over 160 publications
A new equity
ownership product was launched by Bureau van Dijk.
INVIEW (Investments in Equities Worldwide)
presents a global analysis of equity-holding investment funds
and the quoted companies in which they invest. Here
has more.
If you're
interested in the ethical rating of companies, ECIS from
Ethical Consumer Information Systems Limited is for you. It
rates 10,000 companies and products by indexing publicly
available data produced by NGOs like Oxfam and Greenpeace. The
database has 50,000 abstracts critical of the activities of
individually named companies. ACCESS searched the
database and found many references to Asian companies and
foreign conglomerates doing business in the region. Fully
referenced reports on companies are supported with an 'ethical
score'. Find out more here
.
The iGroup
(Asia Pacific) was promoting several Chinese databases.
Zhong guo ben cao quan shu
is the complete collection of traditional texts of Chinese
Materia Medica: The Encyclopedia of Chinese Herb and Chinese
Medicine. The text, in Chinese, includes herbal, zoological
and mineral knowledge of Chinese remedies and related
historical literature written by scholars from the earliest
times to the present. The complete database is the equivalent
of 410 volumes or 250 million words on 240,000 pages.
If you want a
collection of Chinese books, look no further than the
Superstar Digital Library
. A
subscription will buy you 220,000 rebooks published in the
People's Republic. If you're wanting Chinese murder mysteries
or romance on the Yangtze, you're out of luck because this
database of social science, philosophy, geography. medicine,
engineering and books of many more topics, is destined for
university and special libraries.
Lighter reading
as well as the serious stuff, is found in the
GoldenNews Digital Newspaper Library, a
searchable database of all the significant local language
newspapers published in China. That means six million stories
and 5.6 billion characters occupying 80 gigabytes. Details of
all these databases are on the Taiwan Online Plus
website
.
If you're a fan
of the HighWire Press, you'll be pleased to
know that its free journal archive has passed the 3/4 million
mark. Bets are on that 1 million will be reached in 2005.
Nicholas R. Cozarelli, Editor in Chief of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, reminded us that "All PNAS papers dating
back to 1990 are free at HighWire Press after 6 months."
Additional content beginning with volume 1 in 1915 will soon
be freely available and all content is immediately available
to more than 140 developing countries. Visit here
.
Yesterday once
more. Australian literature is valued and significant but not
well known and often out of print. Classic Australian
Works is using online technology to make available
once again, classic out of print literature most of it still
in copyright. Twenty five books selected by AustLit have been
digitised and can be bought here
.
While the Online Information
exhibition was the smallest for years, one country was
noticeable by its presence. Indian companies had at least
seven booths. So should we prepare for an avalanche of Indian
databases or ejournal collections? Not yet. All these
companies were competitors, offering essential back room
services for publishers. Outsourcing has always been a feature
of Online Information so it was good to see Indian companies
prospering by offering high quality, competitively priced,
essential services to electronic publishers.
Wise
old SAGE has new databases
