Computer Science Archive - Science and Engineering University at Buffalo Libraries

Science and Engineering

Archive for the ‘Computer Science’ Category

Additional Power Outlets Installed in Silverman Library

Need to plug in your laptop or phone on the 2nd floor of Silverman Library?

It’s now easier than ever!

Additional power outlets were installed on the second floor of Silverman Library during Spring Break. Each study table in the area near the windows now has six power outlets, making it easy to connect laptops, phones and other electronic devices without having to rearrange tables and chairs in that area.

“The University Libraries are continuing to push ubiquitous power sources for electronic devices in a long-range effort to enhance the study spaces we offer,” says Ken Hood, Facilities, Space Planning and Safety Officer for the Libraries. “Over winter break, we converted space formerly occupied by microforms on Silverman 2 into user space; and over spring break, we added power outlets in that new study space. This is another step towards our goal.”

Enjoy!

Find an Available Computer on Campus

Wouldn’t it be nice to know if a computer is available in the Cybrary or other public computing site before heading there? Now you can do just that!

The UBIT Find an Available Computer web page provides information about computer availability in various locations on north and south campuses. Try it at:

http://www.buffalo.edu/ubit/service-guides/computing-sites/available-cybrary-stations.html.

(Please note that some locations are still awaiting to have this feature added.)

Open Access Journal Directory – New Milestones

Ever wonder whether there were any good open access journals in your field? The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), launched in 2003, now lists over 8,000 peer reviewed journals. Simply put, open access (OA) journals are freely available to all readers on the Internet and do not have subscription charges. Many studies show that OA articles are downloaded and cited more than equivalent articles locked behind subscription walls.

Using DOAJ, journal titles can be searched using keywords and browsed by subject areas. They just announced two important milestones:

1) More than 1 million articles are now searchable in DOAJ. They expect this figure to increase significantly in the months to come.

2) More than 50% of the journals are providing metadata at article level.

In February, the White House issued a new directive that open access will be mandated for most federally funded research within the next year. Visit our Scholarly Communications web site for more information.

Stunning New Open Access Publication / Data Directive from the White House

On February 22, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed any federal agency spending more than $100 million per year on R&D to create open-access policies within the next six months. The policy will require all research articles funded by these agencies to be made open access (free-to-read) within 12 months of publication. In addition, digital data must be made publicly accessible. Naturally, classified research is exempted.

One option for fulfilling these upcoming requirements is to deposit your publications and data in our UB Institutional Repository. Our new Scholarly Communications web site has sections on publicly archiving your scholarship and on data management. These web pages contain the contact information for library staff that would be glad to discuss this new development with you.

Agencies covered by the new policy include the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, and Transportation, as well as the EPA, FDA, NASA, and, mostly importantly, NSF. The White House announcement contains a link to the actual directive. A 3/7/2013 Chronicle of Higher Education article discusses the impact these new policies might have.

Database Snapshot: Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Full-text of the popular Springer book series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) includes Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI). Most volumes are conference proceedings. Major areas covered in this database are computer science, engineering, math, biology, statistics, GIS, information science, informatics, communication science, physics, bioinformatics, multimedia, and medical imaging. The database includes volumes from 1997-present. Some LNCS volumes in print are owned by the UB Libraries. Users can also refer to the LNCS/AI/BI Conference Acronym Index.

Tips for using Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Enter your terms in the search box in the blue bar (not the upper one). In the results list, full-text is noted with “Download PDF”. Refine your search using the left column of refine options. References for articles and related content are given on the item page.

2012 Knovel University Challenge

2012 Knovel University Challenge: More Questions, More Prizes!

The Challenge Has Begun!

Dates of the Contest: September 10 – December 1, 2012

Every year, the Knovel University Challenge allows students to compete for prizes while learning how to use Knovel, an engineering database and research tool that the UB Libraries subscribe to in order to make available the full-text of over 1,000 engineering handbooks that can help you with your homework and research.

Last year, students from more than 600 universities worldwide submitted more than 12,000 entries and a UB ENGINEERING STUDENT WAS THE GRAND PRIZE WINNER, taking home an iPad. We also had another UB engineering student win one of the contest-within-a-contest prizes. Let’s win again this year!

AND, this year there are even more opportunities to win, with new questions EVERY WEEK, and weekly prizes awarded as well. See below for the details.

What’s New: For the first time ever, there will be new questions and new winners EVERY WEEK, so there are even more opportunities for students to play and win great prizes, like Beats Audio earphones valued at $150 each and more. Knovel will also continue to award a randomly selected grand prize winner and the contest within the contest to schools with the highest number of participating students.

Who Should Play: The challenge is open to current engineering and science students. The only requirement is that you must use Knovel to answer the questions.

How to Play: Go to: http://www.knoveluniversitychallenge.com and click on the PLAY NOW button.

Note: There should be no need to log in to Knovel if you are on campus. If you are trying to access Knovel from off-campus, you should go instead to: http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=240 and from this page click on the name of the database: Knovel E-Books: Science and Engineering. It will ask you to authenticate with your UBIT name and password and then pass you in. Once connected, click on the University Challenge banner at the top of the screen. Also, if coming in from off-campus, if you usually run VPN (UB’s virtual proxy network software), turn it off. It interferes with authenticating/accessing library-subscription databases like Knovel.

Let the Games begin!

Web of Science/Knowledge: Left-hand truncation now available

Hopefully, you know that most databases permit right-hand truncation or word stemming using a special character, usually an asterisk or question mark. For example, in Web of Science, searching for ‘biodegrad*’ would retrieve references with biodegrade, biodegradation, biodegraded, etc. Truncating words is perhaps the simplest way to ensure more complete retrieval of relevant records.

However, very few large databases permit left-hand truncation as well which allows retrieval of word roots with varying prefixes. As of late this summer, this is now possible in the Web of Knowledge and Web of Science. It can be used alone or with right-hand truncation.

The query ‘*degrad*‘ now retrieves degradation, photodegradated, biodegrade, etc. Left-hand truncation might not be something you need every day, but it cam be a powerful tool in creating more comprehensive searches. We are not aware of another current, major interdisciplinary database or platform that has a left-hand truncation feature.

What’s New in Web of Knowledge

Earlier this month, Web of Knowledge began rolling out a series of new features and updates designed to give users a clearer and more complete view of scholarly material. These changes provide greater context and searchability, which developers hope will allow users to retrieve articles and citations with more efficiency and accuracy.

In terms of improving search capabilities, Web of Knowledge claims to now display more complete bibliographic descriptions, which include added context and data, in addition to adding more comprehensive information to it’s Cited Reference Lookup Table. The UK/US synonym dictionary has been expanded as well in order to pool results with more consistency. All together, these features create a more accurate and comprehensive picture of a work’s citation information.

At the user level, developers have also added a number of interesting functions to make searches more flexible and organizing retrieved works easier than ever. Users can now:

Mark and export cited references from an article’s bibliography
Search for a cited article or title
Display all known authors (and their positions) listed in a bibliography
Truncate values in the Topic, Title, UID, and ID codes fields

In all, these changes should continue to make life easier for those who use Web of Knowledge to any large degree, and are likely to precede future updates and innovations as databases become increasingly user-centric.

Web of Knowledge is a collection of multi-disciplinary databases containing leads to citations with bibliographical references for articles from over 8,000 journals. Many of the references include author-prepared abstracts, as well as links to the full-text of articles (when available).

Can We Afford This? The Elsevier Boycott

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.

Predatory Online Journal Publishers – Be Careful

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.