Math Library News

Does reading online instead of paper affect how you do research?

http://wulibraries.typepad.com/bionews/2008/07/does-reading-on.html

Citation Statistics, June, 2008, report from 3 math associations

There has been a lot of discussion this month about this report: Citation Statistics: A Report From The International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) [26 page pdf] Here are a few links to news items and summarizing discussions, in case you don't want to read all 26 pages:

• 3 Mathematics Associations Caution Against Overreliance on Impact Factor [Wired Campus] One of the comments "And the final irony: Mathematicians reminding us to read! It doesn’t get any better than this!"
• http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/417-guid.html [Stevan Harnad]
• http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/06/citation-statistics-report-from.html [Gerry McKiernan]
• Mathematicians Critique Journal Rankings [Wall Street Journal]
• http://beckerinfo.net/scp/2008/06/11/citation-statistics-report/ [Cathy Sarli in Becker Scholarly Communications Update]

Copyright and authors rights

I've been reading and thinking about copyright lately. I'm in a small group that has begun work on copyright information pages for WU. You will probably hear more about that in coming months, because we aim to address your issues and questions! I thought these 3 gems were worth sharing this month. I hope you find them relevant and interesting.
    - Cory Doctorow's column about Creative Commons, from Locus online, Nov. 2007
    - Law professor estimates $12.4 million in liability during an average day! - Infringement nation: copyright reform and the law/norm gap [13 page pdf] by John Tehranian. (not yet published in Utah Law Review) For a quick summary see this blog post from Nate Anderson: Overly-broad copyright law has made USA a "nation of infringers
    - Tutorials from MIT Libraries on retaining copyrights to increase research impact: Part 1: Copyright Law and Publication (5:38), Part 2: Retaining Rights When Publishing (9:46), Part 3: Publishing through Open Access Channels (8:55)