Teses de Harvard

Estudantes da Universidade de Harvard avançam para a constituição de um repositório de teses.

A revisão pelos pares (peer review)

A questão é a de saber se a revisão pelos pares, tal como se encontra actualmente configurada, está adaptada aos desafios da rápida mudança na investigação, Um relatório publicado pela European Sicence Foundation (ESF) questiona isto mesmo e aponta algumas pistas conducentes a uma maior abertura à inovação.

Para aceder ao relatório use esta ligação.

Brain Atlas

Recurso interactivo com zoom de alta-resolução, incluindo imagens tridimensionais. Inclui dados completos de algumas espécies como Macaca mulatta, Chlorocebus aethiops, Felis catus, Mus musculus, Rattus norvegicus e Tyto alba.

Veja algumas imagens.

Acesso a publicações: PublicationsList.org

Com este serviço é possível ter uma página actualizada das publicações na Web com links para o texto integral dos artigos.

StORe project

Projecto dedicado a explorar as interacções entre os repositórios de publicações e aqueles vocacionados para os dados usados para produzir os resultados publicados.

Para ter acesso a outros detalhes sobre o projecto aponte para StORe project wiki.

Europeana, um contributo para a Biblioteca Digital Europeia

A importância da iniciativa sobre as bibliotecas digitais justifica-se quer pelo ponto de vista científico, quer cultural:

"The Digital Libraries Initiative aims at making Europe's diverse cultural and scientific heritage (books, films, maps, photographs, music, etc.) easier and more interesting to use online for work, leisure and/or study. It builds on Europe's rich heritage combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.

- The initiative consists of two strands, cultural and scientific.
- Read a Quick guide through the DLI (PDF file).
- Download the i2010: Digital Libraries brochure (PDF file)."

Open Medicine

Um título publicado por antigos editores do Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) juntamente com outros colegas do Canadá que deixa com os autores o copyright - através de uma licença Creative Commons -, e que torna o seu conteúdo imediatamente disponível imediatamente:

"We are launching Open Medicine as an open-access journal because we believe the current, closed-access model is inconsistent with the values of medicine," diz Anita Palepu, médica, co-editora do Open Medicine.

Depot: um novo serviço no Reino Unido para os repositórios institucionais

EDINA, SHERPA e JISC anunciaram o lançamento de um serviço para fornecer o acesso aos resultados da investigação. Veja http://depot.edina.ac.uk/FAQ/ ou http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/04/news_depot.aspx

Entre outros, o DEPOT constitui um medidador dos Repositórios Institucionais (RI) na medida em que:

1. Se a instituição já tem um RI, o Depot redirecciona o depósito, regista-o e assegura que será indexado pelos principais motores de pesquisa;

2. Se a instituição não tem um RI, o investigador pode depositar o seu trabalho directamente no Depot que assegurará o acesso a este trabalho pelo tempo necessário (até que a instituição tenha o seu próprio RI e o trabalho possa ser transferido).

BioMed Central anuncia três revistas pela PhysMath Central

A BioMed Central anunciou o lançamento de 3 novos títulos em OA pela PhysMath Central: PMC Physics A, PMC Physics B, and PMC Physics C.

Para uma descrição mais detalhada, veja-se a notícia reenviada por Peter Suber (parcialmente editada):

[ The PhysMath ] "Launched to meet the increasing need for open access journals from major research institutes (such as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and other funding organizations and government bodies, PhysMath Central seeks to make research in physics, mathematics and computer science more widely available and increase access to this research to all institutes and individuals, free of subscription charges.

The PhysMath Central publishing platform is based on the successful open access publishing model pioneered by BioMed Central. PhysMath Central will launch with three new open access journals in physics:

• PMC Physics A – covers particle, high-energy and nuclear physics, cosmology, gravity and astroparticle physics, and instrumentation and data analysis.
• PMC Physics B – publishes articles covering all aspects of atomic and molecular physics, optics, quantum physics, semiconductors and superconductivity.
• PMC Physics C – focuses on soft matter physics and covers biological physics, complex systems, plasmas and fluids, classical and interdisciplinary physics, and statistical mechanics.

These three titles will begin accepting submissions in April, 2007. Four more journals in physics and mathematics are planned for launch in 2007, with others to follow in the future.

PhysMath Central is currently recruiting some of the leading minds in physics and mathematics for its editorial boards. These experts will spearhead journal development and serve as editors and reviewers. Massimo Giovannini of the Theoretical Physics Division at CERN has agreed to serve on the PMC Physics A editorial board. Dr. Giovannini expressed support for open access publishing, citing the high subscription fees as a hindrance to scientific progress.

“I am happy to be working with PhysMath Central,” Dr. Giovannini said. “It is a noble endeavour to allow free access to our peer-reviewed research. This aim is desirable since various institutions in the world cannot afford the subscription fees required by other journals."

Christopher Leonard, PhysMath Central’s publisher, fully agrees, "Over 50 years ago one our greatest ever physicists, Albert Einstein, almost predicted the open access era when he said that ‘The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres of life.’ We recognize, as he did, that the lack of access to the latest research slows the process of discovery and that by making the research freely available we help to solve this problem, ensuring the swift and unrestricted communication of scientific information."

For more information on PhysMath Central, please contact Chris Leonard at or visit the website and associated weblog".

Colecções digitais de 9 países foram adicionadas à European Library

[Recebido de Peter Suber]


** THEEUROPEANLIBRARY.ORG PRESS RELEASE **

Learning from the New Member States - 11 April 2007

The advantages of being a second rather than a first mover are apparent
as the latest project of The European Library, TEL-ME-MOR, comes to a
successful conclusion. The aim of TEL-ME-MOR was to bring the digital
collections of 9 countries: the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia,
Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland and Slovakia into The European
Library.

Not only did these countries have proportionally more material digitised
they were also able to bypass the legacy non-web technologies of the
early adopters.

Nearly half of the collections submitted were OAI compliant and thus
able to be harvested into a central database and manipulated in a way
that remotely held collections cannot. Between them these 9 new member
states of the European Union added nearly 1 million digitised items to
The European Library.

As well as increasing the sum of material available to the user,
TEL-ME-MOR produced several reports of continuing relevance to the
creation of a European digital library. The importance of research and
development in shaping the potential of cultural institutions and
enabling them to be competitive in a European arena was shown in a
report on 'Research Activities of the European National Libraries in the
Domain of Cultural Heritage and ICT.' This report also underlined that
there is no gap in knowledge and research between old member states and
new - the playing field is very equal.

Several investigations were made into the necessary multilingual
development of The European Library portal. To ensure that all the
languages of the participating countries can be searched and displayed,
input has to be standardised. The languages of these countries and the
material the libraries hold use different character sets. Searching and
displaying these character sets means enforcing uniformity in the
underlying data through standardisation. The 'Report on TEL Unicode
requirements' recommends the use of Unicode, UTF8, for all multilingual
portals. Two further reports summarise the state of multilingual
search, retrieval and display and make recommendations for prototyping
systems to deal effectively with the problems as well as highlighting
areas for further research: ' Analysis of cross-language access options
in distributed databases' and ' Report on Authorities Options'. The
concrete results of these language related reports will be a series of
prototypes during 2007 based on the final report in the series:
'Scenarios for Multilingual Access'. The European Library will
therefore test the concepts and recommendations proposed in TEL-ME-MOR
under the new project www.EDLproject.eu that brings in the remaining EU
and EFTA National Libraries as well as continuing the work on
multilingualism and interoperability started under TEL-ME-MOR.

All the reports are openly accessible on The European Library at
http://libraries.theeuropeanlibrary.org/cooperation/archive/telmemor/res
ults.php as is the complete archive of material for the project.

For further information about this press release or The European Library
please contact: Fleur Stigter, Fleur.Stigter@TheEuropeanLibrary.org, Tel. +31 (0)70 314 0182


Notes for Editors:

TEL ME MOR was a EU funded project under the IST technologies FP6
programme. TEL-ME-MOR supported 9 national libraries from the New
Member States, which are partners in the project, to become full members
of The European Library, an initiative, established under the aegis of
the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), providing unified
access to the electronic resources held in Europe's National Libraries.

The European Library is a service of the Conference of European
Librarians. It is a portal offering multilingual federated searching
across and within the collections of the national libraries of Europe.
It allows an individual to search for all items on for instance Voltaire
within databases of 23 national libraries and retrieve a set of results
including, where available, the digitised item. It is a free resource
for all and it is the organisational and technical starting point for
the proposed European digital library where museums, archives and other
holders of digitised and digital cultural heritage material will
hopefully participate.

Subscribe online for The European Library newsletter at:
www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/newsletter

Estudo francês sobre o auto-arquivo

Está disponível um estudo francês sobre a prática de auto-arquivo, encomendado pelo INRA: "Open Archives: Towards A Deposit Mandate?" por Dominique L'hostis e Pascal Aventurier. Trata-se de um trabalho de síntese sobre implementações existentes, as práticas dos investigadores e o papel das instituições.

Existe uma versão em inglês disponível no mesmo endereço.

PhysMath Central cobre todas as áreas da Física e Matemática

A PhysMath Central, tal como as suas congéneres - BioMed Central e Chemistry Central-, está vocacionada para a divulgação de resultados através da publicação de títulos em OA. Veja a Open Access Central.

O impacto da tecnologia digital visto pela UCLA

Excerto da notícia:

"The word “technology” as it applies to university research often brings to mind the equipment and facilities that contribute to developments in medicine, engineering and the sciences. But digital technology is also revolutionizing advances across the spectrum of research and teaching at UCLA — in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well. With digital technology, UCLA scholars can re-create historical buildings, produce digital access to once-inaccessible archaeological treasures and transform ancient transcripts and art into online resources that can be viewed by anyone with Internet access. UCLA researchers are at the forefront of applying digital technology to all academic fields".

Aponte para o site para ver exemplos de iniciativas neste domínio.

Dados topográficos digitais em OA

Excerto da notícia:

«Experts and other users of digital topographic data will no longer have to pay to use digital versions of government maps and data. The Honourable Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, today announced that as of April 1, 2007, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) began making its electronic topographic mapping data available to all users free of charge over the Internet.

"Our Government recognizes the importance of providing Canadians with access to the latest digital mapping information at no cost," said Minister Lunn. "Not only will Canadians now have free access to digital maps, but Canada will be known as an important source for digital mapping data around the world."»

Acesso aos BMJ

Nos próximos meses estarão progressivamente disponíveis todos os fascículos das 23 revistas da BMJ (cerca de 4800 números). Para aceder ao arquivo basta fazer o registo. É também possível personalizar e salvaguardar informação e receber alertas de informação relevante. Para os utilizadores já registados, basta aceder como habitualmente.

Distribuição mundial dos repositórios (ROAR e OpenDOAR)

Stuart Lewis da Uninversidade de Wales Aberystwyth criou um mapa no Google Map chamado Repository 66. Este mapa usa os dados do ROAR e OpenDOAR e permite visualizar a distribuição dos repositórios.

Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication

A tese de doutoramento de Tim Brody orientada por Stevan Harnad e Leslie Carr está disponível em texto integral.