by Willow Dressel

November:

1. Cancelled:
OSTI federated search products EnergyFiles and Federal R&D Project Summaries as of October 1st, 2011.
National Biological Information Infrastructure as of January 15th, 2012. See http://www.nbii.gov/termination/index.html for more details including an FAQ about the termination.
Scitopia Federated Search tool as of December 31st, 2011.

2. University of California announced a new data management plan tool created in a partnership with the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, DataONE, and the UK’s Digital Curation Centre.

3. AIP Refocusing Scitation: There was discussion of AIP’s decision to discontinue agreements with non-member societies. Non-member societies will move to other platforms over the coming months. The list of societies affected is available at http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/LIBSVC-home/nms_list.jsp

4. Liz Bryson announced that she would be retiring as the CFHT librarian at the end of November 2012 and will not be replaced. Members of PAMNet responded with well wishes and gratitude. As Debra Kolah put it “Thank you Liz, for being you.”

5. An update about the arXiv sustainability initiative was posted and several conference calls were held during November 2011.

6. The new edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics came out in November 2011.
New Tables in the 92nd edition include:

Abbreviations Used in Analytical Chemistry
Basic Instrumental Techniques of Analytical Chemistry
Correlation Table for Ultraviolet Active Functionalities
Detection of Outliers in Measurements
Second Virial Coefficients of Polymer Solutions

Revised tables include:

Thermophysical Properties of Selected Fluids at Saturation
Properties of Cryogenic Fluids
Characteristic Bond Lengths in Free Molecules
Atomic Radii of the Elements
Bond Dissociation Energies
Electron Affinities
Atomic and Molecular Polarizabilities
Electron Inelastic Mean Free Paths
Threshold Limits for Airborne Contaminants
Physical Constants of Organic Compounds
Viscosity of Liquid Metals
Viscosity of Gases
Thermal Conductivity of Gases

December:

1. Randy Reichardt sent a link to Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers on Jeffrey Beall’s blog.
Some pointed out that the list was a bit biased and it is always best to evaluate each individual title.

2. Cambridge University released a digital library with over 4,000 pages of Isaac Newton’s work.

3. The December 2011 Issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter included an article, “Open access journals from society publishers,” with an update list of full open access journals.

4. From Martha Tucker: Former University of Washington faculty member, Richard Bass, released an open access text book to help graduate students study for qualifying exams.

5. David Willetts, UK Science Minister, announced that the results of UK funded research will be made open access.

January:

1. An article from Inside Higher Ed was posted regarding JSTOR’s announcement to make “Early Journal Content”, or pre-1923 for US content and pre-1870 for all other countries, open access.

2. In response to a query about a national translations item, Caroly Greenberg sent the following summary of the “collective wisdom” of the current state of the National Translations Center collection:

– CISTI has the NTC holdings for 1989-1993. Requests must be placed via InfoTrieve, they are able to check the CISTI collection.
– The British Library has 1979-1988, however, that section is unavailable until July 2012 because of asbestos remediation.
– The Library of Congress Technical Reports section has translations prior to 1979.
– The World Translations Index (Dialog File 295) is no longer available, although I used it in 2011.

Further open questions:
– The microform set – is it the entire collection? Who filmed it? Does anyone have the microforms? BRI, CISTI, LOC?

With thanks to Dana Roth’s column in the August 2010 issue of the PAM Bulletin.

3. Physics World released a report on scientists and online tools.

4. There was discussion of the recently proposed bill the Research Works Act which would, if passed, “prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding.” Links to many different takes on the bill were sent to the list, including:

• A statement from the Association of American Publishers – http://www.publishers.org/press/56/
• An article from the Atlantc Wire – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/01/darrell-issas-sopa-stance-doesnt-carry-over-public-access-research/47045/
• An article from Wired – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/congress-considers-paywalling-science-you-already-paid-for/
• Federal Register open call for comments (both closed) http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623 http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621
• NSF comment period on open data – http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122702&WT.mc_id=USNSF_62&WT.mc_ev=click
• Chronicle of Higher Education article – http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-Published/130403/
• A blog post at Digitopoly – http://www.digitopoly.org/2012/01/26/elseviers-economic-case/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+digitopoly+%28Digitopoly%29
• A wiki post on the PolyMath site about journal publishing reform – http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform
• Post on SLA’s Public Policy blog – CALL TO ACTION: Oppose H.R. 3699, a Bill to Block Public Access to Publicly Funded Research http://slaconnections.typepad.com/public_policy_blog/2012/01/call-to-action-oppose-hr-3699-a-bill-to-block-public-access-to-publicly-funded-research-.html

On a related note, Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers put up a blog post titled “Elsevier, my part in its downfall.”

A website was put up where researchers can sign on to publicly declare that they will not support Elsevier. http://thecostofknowledge.com/