Science Magazine online

Unfortunately we have had to cancel our online subscription to Science magazine, as the cost of renewing for 2013 has doubled from $3,000 to over $6,000. We have access to back volumes up to 2006 via our subscrition to JSTOR and we still have a print subscription - copies can be found up on Level 4 of the Library. Academic staff can request for articles to be scanned by the Library in order to make them available via Moodle.

We hope that we may be able to resume our subscription in 2014.

Open Access Week

This week is Open Access Week - promoting open access to publicly-funded research.

Want to know more?

It's all at http://www.openaccessweek.org/ where you can find out more about open access, watch videos, find out about events that are taking place as part of Open Access Week and even buy the tee-shirt!

American Chemical Society event for researchers





There is an ACS on Campus event at UCL next week (October 24th) and students from all colleges are welcome. There will be presentations on topics such as careers in Chemistry, how to publish your research and copyright and ethics in scholarly communication, as well as refreshments at the Science Cafe networking event.

More details here http://acsoncampus.acs.org/events/university-college-london-london-uk/



Wallace Online

Following on from the Darwin Online project http://darwin-online.org.uk/ which saw Darwin's works and letters made available online, a new project has made available the writings of Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, and announced it in tandem with Darwin in July 1858. The archive is at http://wallace-online.org/ and there is an article about both archives on the BBC web site here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19744135

Welcome to new Science students

Welcome to all new Birkbeck Science students. If you'd like to learn more about the Library and its resources, come along to a Library tour and/or a Saturday workshop this term.

The Library tours are at 5.30pm every day Monday-Friday and last about 20 minutes. There's no need to book, just come to the Library entrance on the ground floor.

The Saturday workshops cover using the Library catalogue and ejournals - details are here
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/news/infoskills

To familiarise yourself with the resources that are most useful for you, take a look at the Library subject guide for your subject - there are guide for Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences and Earth & Planetary Sciences

A great example of how Open Access can change the world

A teenager has discovered a new test for pancreatic cancer by using journal articles that were available on open access http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19291258


Just one great reason to publish your research in open access journals.

Another good reason is that many funding bodies and research councils now require that research funded by them is put on open access.

Read the new policy from Research Councils UK here http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx
and from the Medical Research Council here http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Ourresearch/Ethicsresearchguidance/Openaccesspublishing/index.htm
The Wellcome Trust have a video here http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/index.htm

More information on open access is here:
http://open-access.org.uk/
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/authors.html

ScienceDirect Apps

ScienceDirect has moved into the world of apps and developers have provided some useful extra add-ons to make searching ScienceDirect even more useful.


Some of the ones that caught my eye are:

BrainLink For all articles in select neuroscience journals, this application identifies all neuro-anatomical structures, provides their 2D- and 3D-images (in a mouse, rat, monkey, or human, if available), and links them to the structure within BrainNavigator.

eReader Formats The eReader Formats application allows users to convert ScienceDirect articles as seen in the browser into ePUB or Mobipocket format, whichever is appropriate for the user's electronic reader device.

Protein Viewer A Jmol-based application for ScienceDirect which is displayed below the abstract if the article contains author-tagged protein identifiers, allowing you to browse through all protein models tagged in the article and interactively explore each of them.

Snippets Easily take and save snippets from the different articles you are reading, along with the article citation in MLA or APA formats. Snippets can then be exported to Google Docs for easy sharing.

Interactive Map Viewer displays supplementary geospatial data from Elsevier online articles as an interactive map.

You will need to sign up for a personal account with ScienceDirect and then you can add the apps to your profile. There are currently 90 apps available - see the gallery of available apps here
http://www.applications.sciverse.com/action/gallery?currentSelection=product&productFilter=ScienceDirect