News

The Lib4RI team wishes everyone a wonderful Christmas, relaxing holidays, and a good start into the new year!

From Saturday 12/13/2014 on, Lib4RI users will not have access to Science Express anymore. Science itself is still fully accessible, but we cancelled the online first service Science Express, where Science articles are released before print. Science is the only journal we know of, where these articles are not included into the subscription fee, but have to be paid separately. We cancelled this “extra service” to partially compensate for the immense price increase of about 30% from the publisher of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

It has been more than a month since Springer announced the release of their new SpringerMaterials platform (refer to our news). Today, they finally provided us with fulltext access to its content.

In 2015, Lib4RI will have a full subscription to the five most frequently used IEEE journals. These are: IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics. The subscription range of these five journals will go back to 2005, a distinct improvement compared to the current situation.

Maps from all regions of the world held by Swiss libraries and archives can be accessed via Kartenportal.ch. This portal released yesterday has been developed in order to simplify access to both current maps and those which could not be previously accessed due to copyright restrictions. Until now such maps had to be retrieved in the various traditional library catalogues; this proved to be a time-consuming and cumbersome task.

In 2015 Lib4RI will be able again to provide full access to all e-journals of the American Physical Society (APS) for all affiliates of the four research institutes within the ETH domain. This is an important improvement regarding the last year. As reported in detail on the 6th of March, we had to cancel most of our APS subscriptions for 2014 due to inacceptable price increases for the APS content.

Depending on the type and settings of your antivirus software, you might have encountered problems with Web of Science recently. Particularly in conjunction with Avira Professional Security, an antivirus software commonly installed on Eawag computers, Web of Science may not show any results at all to your search queries. It seems, Thomson Reuters – the company behind Web of Science – made some changes in their website resulting in an apparent security issue detected by the antivirus software.

Yes, we subscribe to SpringerMaterials and you can access the database and all of the full texts at http://www.springermaterials.com.

Again it is time for our biannual introductory course for PhD students and other affiliates of the 4 federal research institutes. Due to frequent demand, this autumn the course is split into three separate and individually bookable modules. During Oct/Nov 2014 sessions will be offered, if possible, at most major research sites.

The library Lib4RI invites interested researchers from Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL to join this free SciFinder workshop held by Philippe Kamalaprija, a representative for CAS (ACS International). Philippe is an experienced trainer and will include many important aspects of SciFinder. He is particularly happy to discuss individual examples from the audience, so you can also work on your own subjects.

The Independent Scholarly Publishers Group (ISPG) is a new and expanding coalition of publishers of high-impact journals and related academic content. Among others, the group includes the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Company of Biologists, Duke University Press, the Genetics Society of America and the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. Currently, they offer 42 e-journals, with 8 of them being Open Access, and one book series. All content is in the field of life sciences.

Open Access (OA) means unrestricted, online access to scholarly research papers for reading and productive re-use, not impeded by any financial, legal or technical barriers. The transition from “Closed Access” to “Open Access” has increasingly gained momentum in the last years. A recent study concludes that one-half of all papers published in 2011 are now freely available. In addition, more and more funding agencies require that research results of funded projects are published Open Access. The debate about the quality of the peer review process of OA journals has recently gained much attention.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) are organising the ACS Campus on July 9-10, 2014 at ETH Zürich (Hönggerberg).

Our Newsletter «Lib4RI-Update #08» is now available! Get a print copy at the library or read the online version.

Lib4RI will no longer provide full access to all journals of the American Physical Society (APS). As of now Lib4RI only offers access to the most frequently used e-journals Physical Review B and Physical Review Letters. Additionally, this access is restricted to users of PSI.

For a two month trial period starting on May 1st, you can access the complete e-journal collection of World Scientific.

We are happy to announce our introductory course for PhD students and other affiliates of the 4 federal research institutes.

The Electrochemical Society (ECS) announces plans to migrate its 4 peer-reviewed journals to Open Access. As a first step toward this long-term goal, ECS gives authors the choice of making their articles Open Access under a Creative Commons licence. Usually, the Article Processing Charge is USD $800 per accepted article. However, all authors belonging to Eawag, Empa, PSI or WSL publish Open Access in any ECS journal for free! This is a special condition for authors from subscribing institutions for the duration of 2014.

Since 2013 our stock in e-books has been increased by many new books.

We have licensed several new databases and reference works.

On 27 January 2014, Empa , the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) signed a 5-year collaborative agreement on co-publishing the open access journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM).

Nucleonica allows user-friendly access to the latest reference data from internationally evaluated nuclear data. A unique feature is the wide range of web-based nuclear science applications. Also provided is a variety of social networking tools for scientific collaboration.