Internet News

JSTOR making early journal content open to all

JSTOR Makes Early Journal Content Available For Free, newsbreaks (Sept 12)

"JSTOR announced it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the U.S. and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR."

More detail and link to video tutorial is at JSTOR announcement page.

The new Proquest Dialog

Dialog Delivers More Data and Features , Marydee Odala, Newsbreaks (March 14)

Proquest launched a new Dialog last August - described in this Searcher article by Amelia Kassel, ' The New Proquest and Dialog - What's Next?'

Now for the 'what's next'.

"The February 2011 release of the new platform considerably expands its capabilities. Searches can now be conducted in 69 databases, containing 200 million documents, across nine subject areas: Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Chemistry, Energy & Environment, Engineering & Technology, Food & Agriculture, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical & Biomedical, and Telecommunications & Computing. I find the subject areas reminiscent of Dialog’s OneSearch categories. Free trials of the new platform may not allow access to all 69 files, but the full list of databases is at the ProQuest Dialog site. Although ProQuest Dialog’s focus is on migrating the scientific, technical, and medical databases to the new platform before the business and social sciences, the February release includes British Education Index, ERIC, PROMT, PsycINFO, and Social SciSearch."

Database use for science research

Shifting Sands: Science Researchers on Google Scholar, Web of Science, and PubMed, with Implications for Library Collections Budgets , Christy Hightower, Christy Caldwell, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Fall 2010)

Google Scholar is very popular, but researchers feel that databases such as Web of Science are of higher quality.

"Abstract

Science researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz were surveyed about their article database use and preferences in order to inform collection budget choices. Web of Science was the single most used database, selected by 41.6%. Statistically there was no difference between PubMed (21.5%) and Google Scholar (18.7%) as the second most popular database. 83% of those surveyed had used Google Scholar and an additional 13% had not used it but would like to try it. Very few databases account for the most use, and subject-specific databases are used less than big multidisciplinary databases (PubMed is the exception). While Google Scholar is favored for its ease of use and speed, those who prefer Web of Science feel more confident about the quality of their results than do those who prefer Google Scholar. When asked to choose between paying for article database access or paying for journal subscriptions, 66% of researchers chose to keep journal subscriptions, while 34% chose to keep article databases."

ingentaconnect gets facelift

ingentaconnect Gets A New Look, EContent (Sep 9)

"Publishing Technology, a provider of software and services for the publishing industry, unveiled a facelift for ingentaconnect, its flagship collection of e-publications. The new look and field is the second phase of the platform's regeneration, with further releases to deliver additional improvements such as a new Publisher Statistics package, integration with an award winning search engine, enhanced ahead of print functionality, and additional content."

Infotrieve adds content

Infotrieve Announces Document Delivery Agreements, EContent (Sept 9)

"Infotrieve, Inc., a developer of business service solutions for information centers, entered into agreements with six leading publishers and content aggregators. According to the company, the agreements will further expand the depth of content available from Infotrieve in the global scientific, technical, and medical marketplace. "

OCLC and Gale's databases

Gale Databases Coming to WorldCat Local, Newsbreaks (Mar 22)

"OCLC (www.oclc.org) and Gale, a part of Cengage Learning (www.gale.cengage.com), have signed an agreement to index Gale's flagship full-text periodical databases in WorldCat Local to provide single-search access to users that subscribe to both services. The agreement calls for OCLC to centrally index the metadata of Gale's Academic OneFile and General OneFile databases to provide WorldCat Local users a direct link to the abstracts and articles in these popular, authoritative resources. The two databases contain some 100 million records each that connect to millions of full-text articles in both HTML and PDF from peer-reviewed journals, newspapers, and magazines, as well as thousands of podcasts and transcripts."

Magazines Galore

Magazine search engine Maggwire bridges the gap between old media and new media intelligently., The Next Web (Feb 16)

This can't be good for magazine sales, but it's great for people who like to browse magazines online. Maggwire - "a magazine search engine with over 650 popular titles so far and more being added all the time. The site is drop dead easy to use, you just browse through the magazine titles or top articles and click through." Collection includes cooking magazines among much else to inform and delight us.

There's a 3 minute video in the posting to show how to navigate maggwire.

DeepDyve signs on more publishers

Six Leading Publishers Join DeepDyve’s Online Rental Service for Scholarly Publications, DeepDyve (Feb 3)

Six publishers were American Institute of Physics, Association for Computing Machinery, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd, MIT Press, Radiological Society of North America, and the University of California Press.

CiteULike and DeepDyve

Search for Scholarly Journals on CiteULike with DeepDyve, Altsearchengines (Jan 14)

Researchers may find this new partnership between the scholary social bookmarking service, CiteULike, with DeepDyve Deep Web search engine.

"Through its partnership with DeepDyve, CiteULike now offers its users a simple way to rent and read the journal articles they discover for as little as $0.99. With nearly one million visitors per month, CiteULike is a rapidly growing community of like-minded people who seek out scholarly information on the Internet. With one click, users can bookmark articles of interest into their personal library and automatically save the citation details. Users can also share their library with others, as well as find out who is reading the same articles."

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS)

EBSCO Publishing Releases Its EBSCO Discovery Service , by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 11)

EBSCO has released a new discovery service product

"EDS (www.ebscohost.com/discovery) harvests metadata from both internal (library) and external (database vendors) sources and creates a preindexed service of impressive size and speed. Although the resulting collection is massive in size and scope, Sam Brooks, senior vice president of sales and marketing, says the fact that it is indexed directly on the EBSCOhost servers allows for exceptionally fast search response times and for the ability to leverage the familiar powerful features of the EBSCOhost user experience across all resources."

Exemplar for Springer Journals

Search over 1,900 journals in context with Exemplar, Altsearchengines (Dec 24)

Springer Science & Business Media and the Center for Biomedical and Health Linguistics have given us Exemplar.

"Examplar searches over 1,900 journals from Springer’s collection to find authentic examples of how a word or phrase is used in published literature. Comprehensive coverage includes both current and archival content in all major subject areas including the life sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics, computer science, business, and law, contributed by some of the world’s leading academics in these fields."

Of course, this is more useful if you had a subscription to SpringerLink.

DOAJ Reviewed

Directory of Open Access Journals - review by Peter Jacso, Gale (Dec 3)

Directory of Open Access Journals has bibliographic information on nearly 5,000 journals and holds abstracts for 331,000 articles from 1,725 journals.

While it is on the small size, the collection is broad.

"DOAJ has excellent broad subject area coverage. Journals are classified under 17 broad subject categories. This is a reasonable categorization, except perhaps to have a separate main category for Arts and Architecture (111 journals), but not a separate main category for Humanities, where Languages and Literature alone has 160 journals and History has 130."

Journal TOCS

Search engine ticTOCs is now Journal TOCs, Altsearchengines (Dec 12)

Goodbye to TicTocs for finding academic journals, and hello Journal TOCs. TicTOCS, a RSS aggregation service in the UK closed quitely. But Journal TOCS opened - and is run by the same people - Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. It has 12,750 journals from 422 publishers. Journals are organized by subects and by publishers.

From the front page: "You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 352,703 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed."

Found along the way - the JURN blog - "JURN is a search-engine indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content."

Magazines in Google Books

Discovery of the week - Google tells us what magazine titles it holds and makes magazine search easier.

http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&rview=1.

Take note of:

+ Cover view (default) or List view. Cover is pretty, but List view gives the date, a snippet, and number of pages. Unfortunately, can't then sort by date.
+ Drop down - for All magazines, Full View, Limited View and PUblic Domain - (except there are none in the public domain).
+ Advanced Search - Select magazines

We can figure out how many magazines from the 3 pages - 87 titles - it's possible to quickly browse through the choices. The collection is a mix of business / technology, travel, science (including Popular Mechanics), music, lifestyle (homes, weddings, food).

There is a search box - that even though the search buttons says "Search Books" - it will search only the magazines.

Although the Advanced Search is geared to books, a couple of the search options can be used:

+ "books with title" - put in the name of the magazine
+ Publication date - use the date range to control on issue date of the magazine.

You can also use some syntax.

+ intitle:"vegetarian times" - for all issues of Vegetarian Times
+ intitle:"vegetarian times" lentils - for lentils mentioned in Vegetarian Times

For a magazine title, you can get an overview of the issues GBS has, the common terms and phrases from the articles, and places mentioned. We see quickly that Outlook is mainly about India.

But Google's magazine search is not the place to go for recent issues. Infoworld, as an example, goes from December 1978 to March 2007, and Vegetarian Times from 1980 to November 2004.

For historical view and background research this will help many keeping in mind that it is not complete.

Also see Google Books Now Offers List of Magazine Titles, ResearchBuzz (Nov 10)

Reading Maggwire

Magazine search engine Maggwire – very nice!, Altsearchengines (Nov 9)

Maggwire is very nice - it carries about 600 top magazines - browse by the category to see popular articles - read them and vote - then have Maggwire learn what you like. Can review, discuss, and share. New Yorker is here, and some items from the Atlantic Monthly, also Vanity Fair and Vegetarian Times - but no Harpers and certainly not The Walrus.

Digital Magazine Rack

Legendary Clairtone zeal takes a digital turn , Globe and Mail (Sep 28)

David Gilmour, an entrepreneur once known for Clairtone stereos in Canada, now sells digital magazines through Zinio. Started in the US, this will be coming to Canada.

"This week, Zinio and trade association Magazines Canada unveil a bilingual newsstand (magazinescanada.zinio.com), through which consumers will be able to read, retrieve, search, and save Canadian magazines in digital format.

Initially, about 100 titles have signed up for the newsstand, a mini-version of Zinio.com, which distributes 2,000 magazines and whose various offerings, Mr. Gilmour says, have a paid subscription list of five million people. "

You can view some single issues. Subscription prices look similar to print.

ticTOCS for Table of Contents

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf April issue is about ticTOCS , a current awareness service in the UK with academic bent.

Péter Jacso reviews it warmly concluding that, "In spite of some deficiencies, ticTOCs is an excellent free service and the corrections and enhancements would really justify to apply for another grant to make it even more excellent in helping users keep abreast of the current journal literature more efficiently and in making better use of the journals subscribed to by the library."

Searching Open Access Journals

Search for content of open access journals, altsearchengines (Mar 29)

Mentions search engines for finding open access journals:
+ “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org/ ) - Lund University Libraries

+ ”DOAJ English Journal Content” under http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=005943177783402775348%3A0jxffbisbzk - selection of sites not updated since 2006

+ Open J-Gate ( http://www.openj-gate.com/ ) - scientific / medical

+ JURN ( http://jurn.org ) - Arts and Humanities - Google Custom Search

XooxleAnswers - Research Resource

XooxleAnswers has an annotated directory (or link list) to free newspaper archives starting with a description of Google News Archives. This is an extensive list that covers the US, some international including Canada, college newspapers, and magazines. It received a strong recommendation from The Information Advisor's BestBizWeb's enewsletter.

XooxleAnswers (zooks-il answers) is the home website for David Sarokin, a researcher who offers for-fee services. He used to research for Google Answers, and also writes articles for eHow.com about research, computers, investing and much else.

He has created several useful guides to resources for legal and business, and links to articles he has written on a variety of topics.

For example, see David's article on Find Old Newspaper Articles and Archives Online for Free (Nov 2008)

In total, this is an excellent resource to help one go well beyond Google for specialty searches, and as a for-fee service to be helped on the really tough questions.

Magazines in Google Book Search

“Hundreds of Titles,” “Dozens of Publishers”—Magazines Going Into Google Book Search by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Dec 18)

Barbara Quint manages to get more information about the magazines being included in Google Book Search, although Google, as always, will not provide a list of titles.

"However, the articles will carry a "Magazine" tag, which users can search in the Advanced Search mode. Magazines will come into Google Book Search (http://books.google.com) from the Publisher partner side of the service rather than from Library partners, with Google offering free digitization. Some of the magazine content in Google Book Search will come from other Google interfaces (e.g., Google News Archive) and some from the main Google service (e.g., TIME magazine)."

+ will see articles in full colour
+ can browse through an issue
+ limit to a specific magazine by using the ISSN
+ GBS also has journals from its digitization of library bound periodicals. These are treated as Google Scholar items. They will not be marked as magazines.

This is quite the endeavour that will have some effect on Google.com as well. There is more to come. Read the article to get all the details.

Table of Contents Service for Scholarly Materials

Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy by Roddy MacLeod, ticTOCs (Dec 11)

Roddy MacLeod runs a blog to report on the ticTOCs project in the UK - "The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personisable web based environment."

This project has just released a new table of contents service for journals.

"It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject."

More details are given in New improved ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service now available

ticTOCs is impressive. Search by word in title, subject or publisher, find journal titles and select, view the current issue, and add this is a favourite journal (requires registration). You can export the table-of-contents page as a feed to Google Reader or iGoogle home page. This is terrific.

CSA Illustrata's deep indexing

CSA Illustrata Adds Deep Indexing From Springer Journals Newsbreaks (May 1)

"ProQuest (www.proquest.com) and Springer Science + Business Media are collaborating on a project to enhance CSA Illustrata with deep indexing from Springer’s journals. Researchers, librarians, and reviewers will soon be able to use indexing tables, figures, and other illustrations from Springer journals to select relevant research and links to articles in CSA Illustrata library’s electronic subscriptions. This is especially critical for biology and environmental sciences that use images on a frequent basis."

Highwire Press H2O

HighWire’s New H2O Platform Updates Epublishing for Publisher Partners by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Mar 31)

How Web 2.0 concepts are now changing publishing --

"HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu), a division of the Stanford University Libraries, has provided online technology and services to scholarly publishers since 1995. It now offers access to 1,126 peer-reviewed sci-tech journals including some 4,724,288 full-text articles from more than 140 publishers. Some 1,870,883 of those articles are available free. The new HighWire 2.0 (H2O) electronic publishing platform is built on an array of publishing standards, including XML, Atom, MarkLogic Server, etc. It was designed to provide publishers with flexibility in features and functionality to suit any and all formats and output devices. HighWire will phase in its publishers individually. "

Not to get too technical but ...

"The new architecture provides publishers with tools for innovating services, expanded branding, monetization, etc., and end users with the possibility of features such as social networking, forums, RSS, etc. In addition to a fully XML-based environment for handling input and output, H2O is built on a wide range of standards: XSLT version 2, XQuery 1.0, XPath version 2, Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), Atom Syndication Format (ASF), XHTML, CSS2, Unicode, etc., ASF and RSS, RESTful architecture, Web Services, WebDAV, Microformats, NVDL, Schematron + SVRL, and RELAX NG. The infrastructure is flexible and modular, designed to interact with other systems, and extensible to new web services and technology."

Ingenta's pub2web

Ingenta Annouces pub2web; Updates IngentaConnect eContent (Nov 30)

"Ingenta,the technology provider that connects the publishing and information industries, announced the launch of its publications platform, >pub2web.This publishing system assembles best-of-breed components into a scalable, extensible platform, building on the technical architecture of Ingenta Connect while offering customization optionsto its clients."

FindArticles passes to CNet

LookSmart Sells FindArticles to CNET Networks for $20.5 Million in Cash ResourceShelf (Nov 9)

This is the sound of the penny dropping. Looksmart sold Grub and Wisenut and closed its search site. Now, FindArticles.com is being picked up by CNET. Furl will be next. I'm surprised it didn't go to HighBeam but ...

Subscription Agents

Swets Continues to Redefine Role With Acquisition of ScholarlyStats by Jill E. Grogg, Newbreaks (Oct 15)

Update on subscription agents in libraries:

"Subscription agents and intermediaries continue to expand their service and product offerings in an effort to move beyond their conventional roles. Over the past 5 years, companies such as Swets, EBSCO Information Services, and others have broadened their scope to include A–Z listing services, link resolvers, and federated search products. They also continue to provide their own searchable, end-user content gateways that either cover journals hosted by the agent or links to full-text titles. All these new services and products co-exist with more traditional offerings that continue to facilitate the purchase and delivery of subscription-based content."

NRC-CISTI Adds PPV

NRC-CISTI Introduces Pay Per Article Service, EContent (Aug 7)

"A new Pay Per Article service offered by NRC-CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, allows any researcher to search a database of more than 11 million articles and pay by credit card to view and print those selected without requiring registration."

Laundry List of Where to Find Answers

New Developments in Web Searching "If Google is the only search tool you use, you may be missing out" by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp Digital (June 2007)

It's a habit of writers now to put Google in the title to attract your attention. This article mainly features resources that deal with mainly with factual information. or with access to journals. Wikipedia (which needs no introduction), Britannica Online, Answers.com, Highbeam (if Highbeam is listed where is Access My Library - which is free to use), RefDesk.

Also thrown in are DialogWeb and Lexis Nexis, both of which require registration and fees. These are tools for professional searchers to find articles and reports. Lexis Nexis is the friendlier of the two and offers ALaCarte for small businesses.

Or, in a completely different category, you could use Yahoo Answers or other answer centre where members ask and answer (except I wouldn't for anything other than a laundry question.)

AccessMyLibrary in Canada

AccessMyLibrary www.accessmylibrary.com is another research resource from Thomson Gale. This gives free and fairly smooth access to articles in premium databases through the local library.

I had first thought that this applied only to libraries in the United States. A Thomson Gale representative has given me the good news that Canadians can also gain access.

AccessMyLibrary currently has 4,159 journals and over 28 million articles. A counter on the first page gives the latest tally.

Navigation is by Publication or Subject. There is also a grouping of Encyclopedias. My guess is that subject will be used the most. My route was through Hobbies to Home and Garden to see the publications available. Toronto Life was on that list. Next, select a publication and browse the titles of the articles. Note also the dates which can vary in currency with some up to the current month and others lagging.

Keyword search skips over the navigation and directly lists the articles. I suspect that the search is on the title and description and possibly author. Search seems to look for ALL the words. Keep the queries simple with 2 or 3 words.

Once you find what you want to read, you'll see some instructions.

How to access the full article: Free access to all articles is available courtesy of your local library. To access the full article click the "See the full article" button below. You will need your US library barcode or password.

1. Proceed anyway to click on See The Full Article.
2. Enter your postal code.
3. Select your library. I selected one of the branches of the Toronto Public Library.
4. Enter your Library ID or barcode.
5. If you don't have a library card, you might still be able to register and read it for free, or pay a small fee.

AccessMyLibrary also offers a link to more content from your library - depending, I presume, on their licenses with Thomson Gale. Toronto Public Library carries many of the databases and supports a federated search.

Thomson Gale explains that libraries that are using its Remote Patron Authentication System to give patrons access to premium information services will be accessible through AccessMyLibrary.

All in all, it is wonderful to have such an easy access to the databases and seems simpler than the one used at the library site. One quibble, it would be nice if AccessMyLibrary could recognize me so that it's not necessary to retrace the library selection and authentication steps with every visit.

Finding Full-text from Journals

Reference from Coast to Coast: Stalking and Finding the Full-Text Article By Margi Heinen and Jan Bissett, LLRX.com (Apr 24, 2007)

Has some points on how to find full-text online - "There are useful internet sites, both subscription or via library web pages, as well as print publications to help you determine if a journal is available full text online. Two of the familiar print directories, Information Today's Fulltext Sources Online and Books & Periodicals ONLINE also offer subscription based electronic access to their directory entries of periodicals, newspapers, newswires, newsletters, and transcripts available full-text online from data aggregators."

Journals from PhysMath Central

BioMed Central to Provide PhysMath Platform, Newsbreaks (Apr 16)

"BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com), a publisher of open access, peer-reviewed journals, announced the first three journals to be launched by PhysMath Central: PMC Physics A, PMC Physics B, and PMC Physics C. PhysMath Central (www.physmathcentral.com) is BioMed Central’s open access publishing platform for the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science. "

Open Access Research

Open access: Reshaping rules of research by Michael Geist, Toronto Star (Feb 26)

Expect to see more open access journals with content from publicly funded research - but not necessarily in Canada.

"Last month, five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy to require that all government-funded research be made available to the public shortly after publication."

The Directory of Open Access Journals, a Swedish project, lists more than 2,500 open access journals worldwide and over 127,000 articles. Many agencies are making funding conditional on self-archiving the research in a freely available repository. Three are agencies are the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, and the Australian Research Council.

However, in Canada -- "With the notable exceptions of the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the International Development Research Agency, which last year introduced proposals to require open access for their funded research, Canada's major funding agencies have been slow to move on the issue."

IngentaConnect new interface

Ingenta Releases New Subscription Management Service

"Ingenta (http://www.ingenta.com) has revealed details of a new subscription management service for IngentaConnect. A new Web interface—which makes use of technologies such as Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript Pages and Faces—will provide IngentaConnect’s publisher, librarian, and agent partners with improved administration capabilities."

Ingenta Connect

Ingenta Signs Publishers to IngentaConnect Platform Econtent (Jun 9)

"Ingenta, a provider that connects the publishing and information industries, has announced the latest 13 publishers to add their journals to the IngentaConnect platform, which provides subscription and pay-per-view access to nearly 10,000 scholarly ejournals."

Finding Academic Articles

Finding Articles Online by Mary Ellen Bates, Tip of the Month (Jan 2006) - List of resources on the web that can be useful for research in the academic, scholarly and sci-tech areas. Includes Google Scholar, Scirus, PubMed, CiteSeer, OAIster.

Highbeam Research Adds Enticements

HighBeam(TM) Research Expands Premium Content, Makes 1.5 Million Articles Free; New Sources Include Knight Ridder, Oxford University Press' Pocket Dictionary & Thesaurus and The Washington Post , Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 30)

Highbeam is making a pitch to get new users by offering 1.5 million full-text articles from 200 sources for free, registration not required. BusinessWire, Financial Management, Science News, USA Today are among the sources. As well, the Reference section will have The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English and The Oxford Pocket Thesaurus of Current English as well as the current Columbia Encyclopedia.

Those who are paid members will have access to more content from Knight Ridder, Oxford University Press and The Washington Post.

Infotrieve's ArticleFinder

Find-for-Free Policy Returns for Infotrieve’s ArticleFinder by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 16)

"Now it’s 2006 and ArticleFinder is again open to all Web users at no cost, offering more than 26 million citations and 8.5 million abstracts from more than 54,000 journals. Infotrieve promises full document delivery for almost all content, but the “fetch” function is definitely not free."

Infotrieve's Article Finder

Infotrieve® Converts ArticleFinder® STM Search Engine to Free Access Model , Press Release (Jan 5) - people looking for journal articles will be able to search Infotrieve's ArticleFinder for free again. ArticleFinder is an "online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with more than 26 million citations and eight million abstracts from over 54,000 journals".

This is a clear response to the Google Scholar challenge.

"ArticleFinder is similar to GoogleScholar® in that STM content from MEDLINE/PubMed and publishers can be searched in multiple ways from one online location. However, ArticleFinder differs from GoogleScholar in many ways, including: the total number of copyrighted articles that can be retrieved; the ability to add articles to a single shopping cart and continue searching; fulfillment from a single document delivery provider; and the absence of advertising on results pages."

Informed Librarian

Informed Librarian Online Launches ILOSearch EContent (Aug 5)

"The Informed Librarian Online has announced the launch of ILOSearch, a new database index of articles from library periodicals designed to help library professionals keep up with their professional reading. The index now contains 36,600+ documents dating back to January 2003, from over 300 different library journals, newsletters, magazines and Web zines. The indexing is current through the last day of the previous month. Searches can be limited to an individual title, a particular subject collection of journals, or a date range."

CISTI has OpenURL

CISTI announces new OpenURL link EContent (June 10)

"The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information has announced a new OpenURL link with TDNet, a supplier of electronic resource management solutions. This link is designed to allow access to CISTI's Document Delivery service for TDNet users. Outbound and OpenURL links to CISTI can now be activated from most online information services, link resolvers and library systems."

For further information see CISTI press release -- CISTI announces new OpenURL link with TDNet

OA for Scholarly Information

Open Access or Differential Pricing for Journals: The Road Best Traveled? -- by David Stern, Online (Mar/Apr 2005) -- Finds serious problems with the concept of Open Access publishing model for journals.

" Open access journals do not provide a significant solution to current scholarly information distribution concerns. While OA publication may seem like a great idea at first, there are reasons why OA for journal articles is not the right approach to distributing scholarly information."

Find Articles

Web Search Gets Specific: LookSmart Re-designs FindArticles.com -- "
FindArticles Proves the Easiest Way to Search for Pinpointed Content; A Top Destination for Free Articles on the Web" Business Wire (Mar 21) [CBS Marketwatch - registration]

Looksmart has redesigned FindArticles.com . It claims 5.5 million articles from 1,000 publications some dating back to 1984. Not all are free. From scanning the listings I get the impression that about 30 to 40% of the titles are premium priced. Among the for-fee sources are HighBeam, KeepMedia, Goliath (Thomson/Gale).

+ Find magazines by topic
+ Find magazines by name
+ Featured magazines and articles by topic
+ Topical categories: Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business & Finance, Computers & Technology, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, News & Society, Reference & Education, and Sports.
+ Search free or all articles.
+ Advanced search: search in title or body or both; select specific publications; specify date range for published date; and sort results by relevance, date, length, or name of publication.
+ Option for Furl members to save a copy of the article.

All in all, a much improved service.

ISI and HighWire

ISI Web of Knowledge Expands to Include HighWire Free Archive in EContent (Mar 18)

"ISI Web of Knowledge is an integrated, research environment that delivers a combination of content, tools, and technology, allowing researchers and information professionals to access, analyze, and manage information. Once all links are in place, users will be able to link directly from any content area within ISI Web of Knowledge to the full text of more than 800,000 HighWire Press articles."

Rocketinfo adds journals

Rocketinfo Now Accesses Premium Periodical Content Business Wire (Mar 3)

"Rocketinfo Inc. (RKTI), the real-time business news search engine and infomediary, has signed an agreement with Thomson Gale to provide Rocketinfo's customers with access to over 1,000 full-text periodicals, journals, and magazines licensed by Thomson Gale."

Open Access

Two articles from Information Today journals on Open Access:

Open Access or Differential Pricing for Journals: The Road Best Traveled? by David Stern, Online (March 2005) -- Doesn't think that Open Access for journals is a good thing.

" I believe that the adoption of the OA model for journals will create serious instabilities within the existing scholarly publication industry. OA, as a business model, is neither necessary nor desirable."

Open Access: The Battle for Universal, Free Knowledge by Carol Ebbinghouse, Searcher (March) It's a battleground of self-archiving authors, publishers, consortia, search engines, database vendors. Where will it lead?

" In truth, the players (authors, publishers, databases aggregators, open access archives, libraries, academic institutions, the Internet Archive, researchers, end users, etc.) have much more in common than many may think. To avoid blood on the walls from the war-games analogies that I have drawn, new alliances, partnerships, collaborations, and joint research and development projects should be explored. "

Ingenta Premium

Ingenta Upgrades Flagship Web Service EContent (Jan 21) - Premium services for libraries -- "IngentaConnect Premium combines elements of Ingenta services, such as email alerting and custom-built library gateways, with new features including one-click subscription activation management, searching by subscribed content only, customized library branding and advanced statistics."

Public Library of Science Adds Journals

PLoS Announces New Community OA Journals Weekly News Digest - Newsbreaks (Jan 10) " The Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org) announced plans for its next suite of open access journals—PLoS Community Journals. The three new journals (PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens) are modeled after successful discipline-based journals published by scientific societies."

SwetsWise Adds Publishers

Swets Signs Seven New Publishers eContent (Dec 21) -- "Swets Information Services has recently signed seven new publishers to SwetsWise Online Content. SwetsWise is a Web-based, modular service for the procurement, access and management of subscriptions and online information. SwetsWise now carries a total of 8,553 full text ejournals from 323 publishers."

Open Access

Thomson Releases Study on Open Access Journals Press release (Nov 2) "Thomson Scientific, a business of The Thomson Corporation, has released a new White Paper entitled: "Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns." "

Infotrieve

Infotrieve Releases ArticleFinder 2.0 EContent (Sept 10) Infotrieve, document delivery and e-journal service, has released ArticleFinder version 2.0. Individual subscriptions are $99/year.

Infotrieve's new search

Infotrieve Launches New Federated Search Solution Information Today (Aug 23) - Infotrieve offers a federated search to libraries as part of Article Finder.

IngentaConnect - 3rd Beta

Ingenta been adding features to IngentaConnect, now at the third beta version. Features of this and the planned 4th version are described at The Latest Beta Release of IngentaConnect . IngentaConnect will replace Ingenta.com (based on the old Uncover for journal listings) and IngentaSelect (the electronic journal arm).

Scientific journals

Access all areas Economist (Aug 5) "Scientific publishing is having to change rapidly to respond to growing pressure for free access to published research"

"An impressive industry has built itself around the dissemination of academic research—particularly scientific work. There are over 2,000 publishers in what is called STM (scientific, technological and medical) publishing alone. Together, they publish 1.2m articles a year in about 16,000 periodical journals. It is a huge success. Not everyone, though, is entirely satisfied. Academics, universities and governments are worried that publishers have grown a little too fat and happy. "

On a similar note, Joseph Esposito has an article in First Monday on The Devil You Don't Know: The Unexpected Future of Open Access Publishing. (Aug 2004) - Sees two groups for research publication: author pays vs user pays. But the old publication model of user pays a publisher is breaking down. Blogs are part of that change. We might question whether blogs will ever be accepted as authoritative, but the author points to the wide acceptance of wireless communication as evidence of the kinds of changes that are taking place.

But as options for self-publishing increase, so might the costs. "It is important to emphasize this point: OA, through the range of new services it will provide, will increase the overall cost of scholarly communications. This may be counterintuitive, especially to all those individuals who are building new cost models for the coming OA paradise, models that are quick to point out that electronics requires no inventory costs and the elimination of user fees means that there are no circulation departments or a need for user–authentication software. OA is a paradise — for publishers. Expenditures will rise and fleet–footed publishers will profit from this. The question for the current generation of user–pays publishers is whether they are swift of foot or not."

Infotrieve Federated Search

Infotrieve Releases Federated Search Solution eContent (Aug 13)

"Infotrieve, Inc. has announced the launch of its federated search solution, ArticleFinder eXtreme (AFX), designed to shorten discovery cycles and deliver cost savings to special libraries by leveraging their existing resources."

IngentaConnect

Ingenta Beta Tests New Interface by Barbara Quint. NewsBreaks (June 7) - Outlines the schedule for enhancements to Ingenta for document delivery and collection management planned over the next few months. Apparently Google has started to index the free metadata at the rate of 20,000 to 30,000 pages per day and Ingenta is seeing an increase in traffic.

Thomson studies OA journals

Thomson ISI Releases Open Access Journals Information EContent Xtra (April 16) Thomson ISI has been studing the preformance of Open Access (OA) journal. The Web of Science collection of 8,700 journals includes 191 open access journals. According to the study, there is no "discernable difference in terms of citation impact or frequency with which the journal is cited."

E-Journals

Electronic Journal Management by Don Taylor. SLA Wired West (April 2004) - short article that reviews the nature of subscriptions, licenses, and access considerations.

Emerald uses JADE

Emerald Introduces New Journal Publication System by Jim Ashling. Newsbreaks (Feb 2) -- "Emerald (http://www.emeraldinsight.com) has developed a new article submission and peer review system, called JADE (Journal Article Delivery Engine). Emerald publishes 130 journals in library and information sciences, management, engineering, and applied science and technology. " Sounds like a gem.