Effective, today, May 14th, the third floor of the Silverman Library in Capen Hall is closed to the public for the summer for major New York Power Authority grant-funded energy conservation renovations. UB faculty should continue using the Delivery+ service.

Science and engineering materials from the third floor are available to others as follows:

• Current Periodicals:  First floor.
• Books and Bound Periodicals:  By request from the Circulation Desk on the first floor.
• Map Collection CD-ROMs:  First floor.
• Map Collection Materials:  Contact library@buffalo.edu.

Work will include updating heating, cooling and lighting systems and replacing the ceiling tiles. The renovation work should not have a significant impact on other operations within Silverman but is expected to create some construction-related noise and dust. Thank you for your patience as we work with the campus to improve library facilities.  Please contact library@buffalo.edu if you have additional questions or concerns.

UB students are invited to take a break from studying for final exams during the University Libraries’ Stress Relief Week, set for May 1 – 4, 2012. During the 4-day event, students can meet and pet certified therapy dogs, sign up for a relaxing chair massage, enjoy free coffee and snacks, and listen to soothing music in two UB libraries.

South Campus: Health Sciences Library - Room B-15, lower level

North Campus: Lockwood Memorial Library – Basement Staff Lounge

• Tuesday, May 1st               10am – 2pm
• Wednesday, May 2nd        10am – 2pm
• Thursday, May 3rd            10am – 2pm
• Friday, May 4th                  10am – 2pm

Some photos from last semester’s popular Stress Relief Week in the Health Sciences Library offer a glimpse of the fun that awaits.

Hope to see you there!

If you follow publishing news sources or social media, you may have read about a scholars’ boycott of Elsevier, the largest science, technical, and medical journal publisher in the world. This boycott originated with a blog post by Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a winner of the Fields medal, mathematics’ highest honor.

This triggered the creation of a web site, the Cost of Knowledge,  by others that encourages scholars to join the boycott to not edit, write, and/or review for any Elsevier journal. The rationale for the boycott as given by the web site is the high cost of Elsevier journals, the bundling of journals into large “Big Deals”, and their support for certain legislation designed to limit free access to scholarly materials. Over 8,000 people have signed up for the boycott, though the only verification is a one-time email message to the registrant.

This boycott has been widely reported on the internet including in Nature magazine and the Chronicle of Higher Education. One tangible result of the boycott seems to be that Elsevier withdrew its support of the Research Works Act which  contains provisions that would prohibit  open access mandates for federally funded research. To be fair to Elsevier, it should be noted that:

• Elsevier publishes an immense spectrum of journal, varying greatly in cost, cost per page, and prominence in the field.
• Other publishers such as Taylor and Francis have journals with high prices (in excess of $8,000 per year) and high cost per page.
• Elsevier disputes the allegations and undoubtedly is unhappy about being singled out. [Read the Chronicle article cited above.]

One can search the Cost of Knowledge to see which scholars have signed up from any given city or institution. Although it is not the intention of the library to, in any sense, dictate where our scholars should publish, the boycott does call attention to the long developing, but extremely serious crisis, in journal pricing. Over the past few years, journal price increases have finally moderated slightly, inflating an average of about 8% per year, but they have inflated annually at an unsustainable double-digit rate for over three decades. This graph shows the trends from 1986-2003.

Whether you personally decide to join the boycott or not, we suggest that affordability, which can directly affect the availability of your scholarly work, be a regular part of your decisions as to where you publish. Many disciplines now have peer-reviewed open access options where anyone in the world can read your material freely with no subscription barriers.

Have you received an email soliciting manuscripts or offering an editorial board position from a publisher you have never heard of before?  The journal may have a great sounding name and you may recognize some prominent names already listed on the editorial board.

Unfortunately, it may be from an unscrupulous publisher whose main goal is to publish as many papers as possible while exacting high publication charges (article processing fees) while providing minimal if any peer review and exposure. Some of the people on the editorial board may not even know they have been listed or may be trying unsuccessfully to have their name removed. The fact that manuscripts require publication fees may be buried in the fine print or communicated only after acceptance of the manuscript.  There have even been reports of flawed manuscripts being published despite the author’s objections.

A March 4, 2012 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Stratford highlights this problem, discussing the publisher OMICS in detail, http://chronicle.com/article/Predatory-Online-Journals/131047/. We know such email solicitations are occurring here at UB as a number of our faculty have made inquires about these publishers. One of our librarians with a business background received an email asking him to join the editorial board of a “new peer-reviewed, open access journal titled Conference Papers in Oncology” published by Hindawi which is based in Egypt.  Be aware that some publishers use U.S.-based address to disguise their true location. To add to the confusion, some publishers like Hindawi actually do publish some reasonably well established journals. However, there are concerns about how effectively Hindawi and other publishers can effectively oversee scores if not hundreds of new titles.

If you have any questions about a publisher solicitation, feel free to contact your subject librarian listed at http://library.buffalo.edu/libraries/askalibrarian/inperson/index.php#subject. You may also want to check out a list of predatory open access publishers maintained by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Unfortunately, a few disreputable OA publishers reinforce the persistent myth that all open access (OA) journals are low quality and have no peer review. In fact, rigorously peer reviewed OA journals with respectable journal impact factors now exist in many disciplines. This post is a follow up to a December post noting that there are many high quality, reputable open access (OA) journals http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/blog/faculty/?p=733.

When you download the EndNote software, it will only contain the top 100 “most popular” style formats, not all of the 3,000+ style formats that are actually available. The ASCE style format, used by civil, structural, and environmental engineers, is not in the “top 100,” and so, for you to be able to use it in EndNote, you need to download the ASCE style file from the EndNote.com website and save and then copy it into the EndNote file folder on your computer.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to: http://www.endnote.com/support/enstyles.asp
2. In the search box in the top middle of the page labeled “Style Finder,” where it says “Publication Name,” type in: ASCE
3. Click on the dark green “Find Styles” button over to the right.
4. On the next screen, click on “Download.”
5. Depending on your browser, you may (or may not) get a pop-up window or bar asking you if you want to proceed with the download; click to allow the download.
6. You will then be given the option to SAVE or OPEN the file. Select the SAVE FILE option.  NOTE: The file will be called ASCE.ens (the “ens” extension stands for EndNote style).
7. Next you need to find where your computer saved the downloaded file; often, unless you have changed the setting, the default setting for saving downloaded files will be C:\Downloads.
8. Find the ASCE.ens file, copy it from the downloaded location, and paste it into your C:\Programs\EndNoteX5 folder. NOTE: On some computers, this may be labeled C:\Programs(x86)\EndNote X5.
9. Now, open up EndNoteX5.
10. In the upper left portion of the top EndNote tool bar, there is a box for selecting style formats (it may be set to “Annotated,” which is the default setting, or to whatever style you used last). Find that box. It has a drop-down menu; use it to highlight and select the “Select Another Style” option.
11. This will open up a “Choose a Style” box. You should now be able to see there ASCE as a style format option. Highlight it and then click on the “Choose” button.
12. This will make ASCE style your default style format setting in EndNote. To check it, highlight one of your EndNote references. At the bottom of the screen in the box you will see there, click on the “Preview” button; the citation should display in the preview windowpane in ASCE style format.

If you have problems with the above procedure, contact: Nancy Schiller, Engineering Librarian, schiller@buffalo.edu.

If you cannot find the output style format you need in EndNote, contact your subject librarian for help.

What is the melting point of Nylon 6?

What is methyl ethyl ketone peroxide used for?

What equation is used to determine Coulomb’s law of force?

These were some of the questions thousands of students worldwide set out to answer in this year’s Knovel University Challenge as they competed for prizes while learning how to use the Knovel database as a research tool.

To qualify, students had to belong to an institution that subscribes to Knovel and answer three questions correctly to be placed in a random drawing. Knovel received 12,000 entries from over 5,600 students at 600 schools in 93 countries.

UB students participated in record numbers this year and carried off two of the 18 prizes, including the contest’s top prize, the Grand Prize iPad2, which was awarded to Rahul Thakkar, an undergraduate in his senior year at UB double majoring in mathematics and electrical engineering.

Vivek Kamath, a graduating Master’s student in computer science, was one of eight winners of Knovel’s “contest-within-a-contest.” The “contest-within-a-contest” rewards outstanding participation at universities with 100 or more correct entries.  Vivek’s prize?  An iPod nano.

Knovel helps students find answers to technical and scientific questions from reliable sources. The database contains over 1,000 handbooks and textbooks. Knovel is just one of several hundred databases that the UB Libraries provide to students, faculty, and staff, who increasingly rely on these resources for class assignments, research, and teaching.  They are available 24/7, wherever library users have access to a computer.

You can read the Knovel press release announcing the winners on Knovel’s website:  University Challenge Breaks Participation Record Again. While on the Knovel site, you can check out a complete listing of all the winners.

There is a persistent myth that all open access (OA) journals are low quality and have no peer review. In fact, rigorously peer reviewed OA journals with respectable journal impact factors now exist in many disciplines. Open access journals are free for all to read. They generally are funded through direct grants or article charges paid by scholars, their institutions, or their research grants. To review open access journals in your discipline, consult the Directory of Open Access Journals maintained by the Lund University Libraries.

Unfortunately, a few unscrupulous publishers have flooded the market place with low quality, minimally reviewed journals. They hope to entice authors to pay significant fees to publish online in what is, in effect, a vanity press title.

So how do you tell the good OA publishers from the bad ones? Some OA titles are published by well-established societies and commercial publishers that you will readily recognize. For example, Wiley, Springer, and the American Physical Society provide options for open access publishing. In some cases, the entire journal is open access.  In other cases, authors can choose to make their individual article open access. But what about a solicitation for an article from a publisher you have never heard of?

Feel free to contact your departmental librarian liaison to assist you in evaluating the publisher.  I also highly recommend Jeffrey Beall’s (University of Colorado) annual review of the bad actors, Beall’s List of Predatory Open-Access Publishers, also available as a PDF document. Jeff provides a concise and insightful analysis of each publisher indicating exactly what the shortcomings are of each.

Open access publishing in the right places definitely increases your readership. It also gives researchers in organizations and countries that cannot support expensive subscription titles access to your work. In addition, a number of studies indicate that it may well increase citations to your work.

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library provides access to bibliographic information, abstracts, reviews, and selected full-text for articles and papers appearing in ACM publications including journals/transactions, magazines, conference proceedings and newsletters for 1947-present. It also provides access to selected works published by affiliated organizations.

Tips for using ACM Digital Library

Enter your terms in the upper search box. In the results list, full-text is noted with PDF or HTML icons. Refine your search using the left column of refine options. Bibliometric information is given for each item.