Biology Library News

Freely available in PMC may not be enough?

True open access (including availability to computer manipulation of text, etc.) has value that has only begun to be explored by various science communities. In some cases it may be worth it to pay the money for OPEN CHOICE publishing or to choose journals that publish with Creative Commons/Science Commons reuse policies. The more I learn about copyright, the more questions I have and the more annoyed I am with the U.S. copyright law. This month, among all the discussion of the NIH Public Policy implementation date, I keep seeing discussions about this topic also:
    - No data- or text-mining at PMC
    - Open access is not just a free pdf, which refers to an editorial in PLoS Computational Biology Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content
    - Open Access and using molecular structures in education
    - Open Access Week - Green is not enough - from Peter Murray Rust's blog which often talks about Open Science issues; updated by A better interpretation of green and gold
    - and the conversation continues Strong and Weak OA - weak open access (OA) is relatively common, removing price barriers to access; strong OA removes permission barriers, such as, unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions.

ITeach 2008

The Libraries are once again co-sponsoring ITeach with The Teaching Center and Arts & Sciences Computing. ITeach 2008: Student Learning, Teaching and Technology will be held January 10, 2008. Please see the ITeach 2008 website for more information and to register.

Teaching and Technology, spring, 2007

The spring 2007 edition of Teaching and Technology, the ITeach newsletter, is now available online at http://iteach.wustl.edu/newsletters/sp07/. Highlights include ITeach 2008: Save the Date (Jan. 10, 2008) and Call for Proposals, a chemistry faculty profile highlighting strategies for using both hi-tech and conventional tools to improve student learning, New Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology (IT), how to set up email alerts in Keeping Up with Research and Current Events, Using YouTube in the Classroom, and more.

Best science books, PLoS, Nature gateways, Endnote web, and dbGaP

• Best Science Books of the Year (as discussed on Science Friday, Dec. 8, 2006)
• We have renewed the WUSTL membership in PLoS (Public Library of Science). This means that WU researchers can get a 10% discount on the author publication fees for publishing in the PLoS open access journals.
• In December, Nature Publishing Group announced a Functional Glycomics Gateway and Pathway Interaction Database. Nature Gateways and Databases are worth exploring. They often allow free access to selected publications.
• Web of Knowledge/Web of Science subscribers (WU does subscribe) now have free access to Endnote Web. I haven't fully explored this product yet but initially it looks like it may be useful for Endnote users who occasionally work away from their own desks and possibly undergraduates who need to create extensive bibliographies. There are several online training options available. I would like to hear about your experiences with this tool. I'll report more after I've learned more about it myself.
• dbGaP, is a new NCBI database of Genome Wide Association Studies. Currently it is populated with studies on age-related macular degeneration, age-related cataracts, and Parkinsonism, but it is expected to grow of course. Press release.

YouTube for Biologists?

I just saw a notice about Journal of Visualized Experiments in Peter Suber's Open Access News. It's a way to share Flash or QuickTime files documenting a particular experiment or procedure. This "journal" isn't indexed (yet) in standard databases but you can browse or search tags at the site. It looks to me like this may be a useful educational tool.

Encyclopedia of Earth

Encyclopedia of Earth a new wiki-based electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public. There seems to be a fair amount of biology in this source already, for example: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Biodiversity; http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ecological_energetics

Alternative writing assignment idea

Wikipedia: School and University Projects - assign your students wikipedia entries in the subject area of your class to correct or enhance. I thought this might be an interesting method to have students' learning and writing contribute to the world and at the same time teach good lessons about the nature of information on the web (and actually in all published sources to a certain extent.)

Wikipedia alerts

Would you like an alert when your "favorite" entries in Wikipedia are revised? There are rss or atom links on the left margin of the "history" page of each entry. Just copy the feed link into your favorite RSS reader. For example:
RNA entry | RNA history page | RNA rss or RNA atom

News from various sources

    -   New database: PsycCRITIQUES now available at WU - book reviews, etc., in psychology
    -   Nucleic Acids Research web server issue now freely available | Especially interesting: HubMed: a web-based biomedical literature search interface
    -   Amazing pictures from Wellcome Trust Biomedical Image Awards 2006
    -   Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science, freely available article in BioMedical Digital Libraries | Discussion: The Citation Tracking Wars
    -   EDUCAUSE Pocket Edition #6: Uses of Wikis, approx. 11 minute audio discussion about using wikis in academia for peer review, collaborative research, student portfolios, class projects, faculty information sharing (on a secure wiki), long-distance collaboration, and digital media production.
    -   E-mail Alerts for Articles from your Favorite Journals, new PubMed tutorial
    -   Top 5 science blogs, compiled by Nature, July, 2006 | 50 popular science blogs
    -   How To: Create an RSS Feed for a Feedless Journal with PubMed | How to: Generate a Custom RSS feed from PubMed (tutorials from David Rothman)

Is Wikipedia for students?

I've heard some stories of biology students citing Wikipedia for papers and lab reports so I thought I'd share this post from the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog: Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation; the comments are fairly interesting also. See also Comparing Wikipedia and Britannica.