by Willow Dressel

February:

1. SLA announced Ruth Kneale as a new Fellow. The people of PAMNet responded with many congratulations.
2. Jill Lagerstrom shared an article from the Library of Congress Gazette, featuring a donation from PAM’s Sally Bosken.
3. Dana Roth pointed to an article in Nature issue 481 titled ‘Database tallies US emissions’, that is based on the EPA Greenhouse Gas Data sets.
4. William Jacobs compiled responses for his inquiry about activities people are engaged in beyond the traditional science library duties. Results were posted on the Science-Technology division website.
5. Marsha Bishop reported that the IAU General Assembly, Working Group Libraries will meet in Beijing on Thursday and Friday, August 23rd and 24th. The program includes a panel discussion with scientists and librarians on the topic “The Need for Libraries in the Age of the Internet”. IOP, IEEE, and SPIE are helping to provide travel stipends.

March:

1. Rich Hunt pointed to the ACM Institutional Profile pages which compiles information about publishing based on ACM authors’ affiliations. Institutional Profile pages can be found in the course of a search of the Digital Library. To find a particular instution, go to the Advanced Search and search for the institution in the affiliation field. Click through to the article details and click on the link for the institution.
2. Bob Michaelson pointed to an essay in Inside Higher Education on problems with the publish or perish model and fake or low quality journals.

April:

1. Nature Publishing Group stopped accepting submissions to Nature Precedings as of April 3, 2012. Started in 2007, Nature Precedings is the Nature Publishing Group’s “preprint server for the Life Sciences community”. It is being cancelled due to unsustainability. Read the press release or get more information.
2. Bob Michaelson sent a link to an opinion piece “Reading Into the Future” by Richard Smith in the April 1, 2012 issue of The Scientist about scientific journals and pre-publication peer review.