Biology Library News

Around the net, miscellaneous links

http://ed.ted.com/ (BETA) is already offering a few ideas which might be relevant to biology and environmental sciences teaching. Flip this lesson! A new way to teach with video from TED-Ed

New & Improved BHL Search & Interface

You've signed on to the Boycott, now what? A SPARC Guide for Campus Action: http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/sparc_boycott_next_steps.pdf OR http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/signed-the-boycott-now-what.shtml

Open sesame: When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge Economist editorial, Apr 14th 2012, with lots of comments

Search tip for HathiTrust: When a Simple Search Just Won't Do How to search for a word or phrase within the works of a particular author.

Recommended reading

An extraordinary week. This blog post by Kevin Smith, J.D from Scholarly communications @ Duke is another nice summary of Elsevier and public access legislation stories. See also my post.

The Elsevier Boycott and its relationship to WUSM Although written from WU School of Medicine perspective, the "Facts and Figures about Elsevier's Impact at Becker Library" is useful in describing pros and cons of the current WU no-cancellations contract with Elsevier and the situation that many Elsevier journals, especially the Cell Press titles, are still heavily used and prime locations for many biologists.. Even given the "pros" I can't imagine that the Danforth campus will continue this contract much longer. We'll see.

Is the pot calling the kettle black? This blog post, by Stuart Shieber in The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication, compares rising tuition/cost of attendance prices with rising journals prices (he calls this hyperinflation of journal prices). His price information is from what Harvard University pays. I think he makes a good case that what has been going on with institutional subscription prices in recent years is really something extraordinary.

The OA Interviews: Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science . The full recent interview with Richard Poynder is 19 pages long but worth browsing for a good look at the opinions of this biologist and open access advocate.

Interesting reading for researchers

This article, just published in Nature Genetics, outlines a common standard for data tagging currently in use in several diverse databases: Toward interoperable bioscience data Nature Genetics 44:121–126 (2012) doi:10.1038/ng.1054 Published online 27 January 2012. "Although ongoing activities hold promise, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the daunting challenges ahead: for example, the integration of clinical and biological data in translational medicine and the establishment of mechanisms to support credit for data sharing, which would benefit data producers for making their data accessible." More info on the ISI metadata tracking framework. News story: Researchers agree on standard for data sharing across the world.

The science of better science, by Gregory Goth. Communications of the ACM 55(2):13-15, Feb. 2012. This article talks a bit about some uses for VIVO, which is a system that has been implemented for WU medical faculty, but not yet all of WU. "Researchers are exploring networked computational analysis, formal classification, and topic modeling to better identify relevant scientists, ideas, and trends."

For fun you may be interested in these videos: Doodling in Math Class: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant

History of science events

I posted a list of Spring 2012 talks related to history of science at WUSTL. If you know about other events, please let Ruth know.

Resources added to biology library web pages in Sept. 2011

COBRA Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive Preprints, working papers, some peer reviewed journal articles

Nature Precedings

Full text, 2011+; freely avaialble; not really a journal but a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings. The archive allows for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts.

Here and there - Interesting sites and reading

    -- We now have online access to the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Biofolk may be interested in the extensive entry for Charles Darwin and others.
    -- The Biodiversity Heritage Library image collections are beginning to be a useful source. Searching isn't optimum but the images are lovely. http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/collections/72157627047804261/
    -- Want to Be a Good Researcher? Try Teaching [Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2011] "Graduate students in the sciences who both teach and conduct research show greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work, says a report to be published in the August 19 issue of Science. The report, "Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills," is notable for being among the first to examine gains in the actual research skills of graduate students rather than what they report about themselves."
    -- Do you miss me? The Biology Library has been closed for 2 years now and I do miss seeing many of you in the library, hallways, etc. I have a new introduction video you may want to view, just to remember what I look like! Keep in touch.
    -- How many research papers are freely available? A new chart from David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), shows that about one-third of new biomedical papers indexed in PubMed are OA. "The chart shows the proportion of papers indexed on the (largely biomedical) PubMed repository each year that are now freely accessible: in 2009, it's above 28%....Those numbers are even more impressive than a study last year which found that around 20% of research papers published in 2008 were freely available on the internet. The growth is due to various public access mandates by federal government and by funding agencies - as well as the success of open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. "What's interesting is the relatively stable linear slope here for more than 10 years," says David Lipman...."
    -- Mendeley 1.0 is here Mendeley, a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research, is no longer Beta. More information about Mendeley.
    -- The Method D list of publishers that submit to PubMed Central for NIH-funded authors continues to grow. Authors still need to monitor to ensure that deposit occurs at publication and that publishers know their work in NIH-funded.

Interesting reading: phage hunters, how to get published, the value of data

    - In the news: The PLoS One article by WU class was included in the March 2011 news but it's being featured in several news reports this month. Phage Hunting Students Find New Bacteriophages in Soils of St. Louis Suburbs | Phage hunting students publish in PLoS ONE
    - How to Get Published: A guide to publishing in scholarly journals Although a bit Elsevier-centric, this 20-page guide includes a lot of useful information for new authors.
    - The value of data. Barend Mons et al. Nat Genet 43 (4), 281-3 (Apr 2011) doi/10.1038/ng0411-281. I especially enjoyed the image, Figure 1: The current state of scholarly communication. I've seen various similar diagrams over the years but this one adds data to the mix.
    - Focus on beautiful bird drawings from Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://biodiversitylibrary.blogspot.com/2011/04/book-of-week-illustrations-of-ibis.html

Templeton talk at Math Club, March 29

WU Biology Professor Alan Templeton on "Some evolutionary consequences of superexponential population growth in humans, or why do humans have so many rare variants?," Tuesday, March 29, 5:30, Cupples 1. More info about math club talks.

Interesting reading or browsing

  * The Third Revolution: The Convergence of the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering, from MIT Washington Office, Jan. 2011
  * Did you know WU Prof. Ursula Goodenough is a blogger? In A Glass House: A Close Look At The Most Beautiful Unicells On Earth is a recent post. I've also been enjoying her posts about bonobos.
  * Quandary: Scientists Prefer Reading Over Publishing 'Open Access' Papers, results of the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) Project
  * Peer Review: Trial by Twitter Nature 469:286-287 (Jan. 19, 2011)
  * Annual Reviews now has a mobile app; click on "Mobile" in the upper right corner of the site. More info. It looks pretty complicated to me, so I would expect this will simplified soon; just using the WU Library proxy service might be simpler for now and doesn't need to be renewed every 30 days.
  * What is a DOI? Just the basics, from the Undergraduate Science Librarian blog from November
  * Becoming an Ethical Scholarly Writer, by Tim Hatcher. Journal of Scholarly Publishing V.42(2) January 2011.

Upcoming reference management classes in the library

We have a series on bibliographic reference management tools planned this spring, including RefWorks Jan. 26; 3-4pm, Zotero March 24, 3:30-4:30; Mendeley April 6, 3:30-4:30. All those classes will be in the Arc, Olin Library Level A. Please pre-register using the links provided. Watch http://wulibraries.doattend.com/ for future plans.

Update: I just learned that the Viktor Hamburger lecture for 2011 will be March 24 (at 4 pm). We moved the Zotero class from March 23 because it conflicted with Rebecca Skloot (author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) talk at Graham Chapel, so I don't think we can move it again. The Zotero intro class will still be taught March 24 at 3:30. Biofolk who want a Zotero intro but want to attend the Hamburger lecture, please email Ruth. If there is enough interest, I will try to schedule another class this spring.