News

Lib4RI joins national Read & Publish agreements with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and Cambridge University Press (CUP).

The Lib4RI team wishes everyone happy Holidays, relaxing winter days, and all the best for the new year 2024!

December 2023 marks the end of the first Read & Publish agreements with Elsevier as well as with Taylor & Francis. Entering 2024 without an agreement will restrict access to articles as well as stop free OA publishing for researchers in Switzerland.

cOAlition S recently published a proposal to transform the scientific publishing landscape. It envisions a community-based scholarly communication system in which all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports are openly available from the start, without authors facing any charges. Furthermore, it advocates that authors, rather than publishers, decide when and where to publish their work.

The library at WSL will be renovated from Monday, 4 December 2023, until the end of February 2024. In the week before, the collection will be relocated and the reading room can be used to a restricted extend only. Lib4RI will be there for you during the renovation albeit with some limited services.

Last week, Sampoorna Rappaz (University Library Bern Medical Library) gave a talk about "What you need to know when using AI for academic writing". The slides and video are now available within the four Research Institutes.

On Monday, Mark Cieliebak from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence at ZHAW gave a talk on "Language Models. Fundamental technologies and applications". The slides and video are now available for people within the four Research Institutes.

On Tuesday, Matthias Egger (President of the SNSF) held an inspiring talk with the title “Open access: the good, the bad and the ugly?” at WSL.

We are committed to Openness. And our commitment is now certified! Just in time for Open Access Week, Lib4RI was awarded the "Open Library Badge".

As the demand for information and better understanding of AI tools, their capabilities, limitations and implications for academia and the publishing domain continues to surge, Lib4RI is excited to announce a lecture series in October and November 2023!

In your day-to-day scientific work, copyright affects you when you publish or share your own work and when you cite or re-use the work of others, including modified or derivative versions. Learn now what you should know for your own publications as well as for the re-use of copyrighted content.

A number of Swiss libraries have joined forces to put together a wide-ranging programme of online, hybrid and local events in different formats for the OA-Week in Switzerland this year (23-29. October).

Lib4RI is looking for a Project Manager (80%) to coordinate two work packages in the two-year cooperative project "Open e-Learning Modules for Open Research Data (ORD) and Research Data Management (RDM)", co-financed by the ORD progamme of the ETH domain. Contribute to this unique project and join our team!

The annual quota for Open Access in Wiley and ACS journals for 2023 has been reached. Find out how it may impact your publishing options.

Join our team as Repository Manager! We are looking for an enthusiastic individual to manage our institutional repository DORA and various other exiting tasks.

Lib4RI is excited to announce the upcoming Open Access (OA) Week 2023, taking place from 23-29 October 2023. Taking up this year’s theme «Community over Commercialisation», Lib4RI will be present on all main campuses with OA information booths to promote the importance of OA within the research community. In addition, we are thrilled to host a lecture by Matthias Egger on OA at WSL.

Autumn is at our doorsteps and so is our biannual training series «Searching & Managing Scientific Information» for PhD students and other interested members of the 4 federal research institutes Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL. From September to December 2023, we offer eight individually bookable modules, this time also including a new module 7+ on data handling using Python, Pandas and Jupyter Notebook.

Most of Lib4RI's resources today are available and used digitally. But this has of course not always been the case. So, what do we do with the physical materials that have become obsolete? We upcycle them and give them a new life as a wall!

Lib4RI now offers IPscreener, a tool designed to assist researchers explore the intellectual property landscape and discover the knowledge of hidden patents.

We are happy to announce that Lib4RI entered into a 3-year agreement with Copernicus to support the newly launched journal "Aerosol Research", a Diamond OA journal published on behalf of the European Aerosol Assembly (EAA).

Five Journals of the Wiley Read & Publish agreement will be transitioned from hybrid to Gold OA by the end of August 2023. While flipping journal titles is a desired development, they will no longer be part of the Read & Publish agreement and corresponding authors will be required to pay APCs for those journals going forward.

Nowadays, as the research output is expanding exponentially, it is crucial for researchers to enhance their visibility. We created a page with information on how to increase one’s visibility, author research profiles, identifiers and open research.

We now offer bibliometric analyses for individual researchers, research units and institutions. Our portfolio currently includes reports on publication output, research areas and collaboration analysis.

Join our team! We offer a multifaceted and exciting position as Project Manager (m/w/d) 80-100% at Lib4RI.

We’re excited to celebrate our new website with you and answer all questions you might have! Come by one of our information booths on the main campuses of Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL next week from 6-9 June 2023.

We are happy to announce that we licensed the RCC-MRx code (Design and Construction Rules for mechanical components of nuclear installations) through the CObaz - AFNOR database for researchers from PSI.

The Swiss agreement with the publisher Nature covers article processing charges (APCs) for a fixed number of articles per year. This article quota is now exhausted for 2023.

114.77 km, 2’747 m of ascent, 14 legs, more than 14’000 people, 1025 teams – and among them “DORA Express: Lib4RI & Friends”. Our team with the starting number 509 successfully completed the 48th SOLA-Stafette on Saturday!

ChatGPT ‘s usage in scientific writing has been debated since the AI driven language processing tool has become available to the wider public. We assembled a page with information related to ChatGPT and scientific writing for your convenience.

We are thrilled to announce the relaunch of our website with a completely new look, added features and improved navigation. Through the changes, our website has become more user-friendly and hopefully easier for you to access the information and resources you need.

Check out our new Lib4RI-Info Sheet about scientific writing! It gives an overview of the important steps when writing and publishing an article.

How could data stewardship be organised at the four research institutes? Which resources are needed and how do other institutions such as TU Delft and ETH Zurich do it? These red-hot issues were debated, among others, at the online Lib4RI-Event «Data Stewardship: Concepts and Implementations” last Friday.

We are excited to share our new website with you! It not only has a completely new look, but also offers some additional services and an improved navigation.

Do you want to be part of an incredible event and run with 14’000 people in the greater Zurich area? Join our team now for the 48th SOLA-Stafette! Our team “DORA Express: Lib4RI & Friends” is still looking for fellow runners.

We cordially invite all members of Eawag, Empa, PSI, and WSL to the Lib4RI event “Data Stewardship: Concepts and Implementations” on Friday, 31 March 2023, 10:00-11:30 (online).

It’s no surprise: much like in our natural environment, our digital world is full of trash. Pointless emails, redundant files, unused apps, blurry photos and video duplicates – all of it digital waste. It sits in backups, lies on severs, cloud services, and it continuously needs energy causing digital pollution, even when we have forgotten about it. On international Digital Cleanup Day this Saturday, 18 March, we want to improve this situation!

Spring is coming and so is our biannual training series «Searching & Managing Scientific Information» for PhD students and other interested members of the 4 federal research institutes Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL. From March to June 2023, we offer eight individually bookable modules, this time also including a new module 5+ for intermediate/advanced LaTeX users.

Celebrate Love Data Week with us! Every year around Valentine’s Day, universities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals host and participate in data-related events and activities. This year’s theme “Data: Agent of Change” aims to inspire people to use data to bring about changes that matter. If data is accessible to everyone and guides our decision-making, we can move mountains regarding policy, environment, and society.

Publishing Open Access (OA) has become the new normal in scientific publishing. Research funders and institutions support OA to make research available to the broader public, thereby allowing for better visibility, higher chances of usage, and increased impact of outputs.

Swissuniversities and Springer Nature have extended the Springer Compact agreement for three years (as detailed in the press release).

We are delighted to announce the new library subscriptions and Read & Publish agreements for the year 2023. Our core subscriptions have been maintained, while our commitment to providing our users with any additional scientific literature resources they may need remains a priority.

Lib4RI recently subscribed to the full CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform including the modules SciFinder-n (the successor of SciFinder Classic), Formulus and Analytical Methods.

We are pleased to announce that the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries has successfully concluded negotiations with ACS and entered into a three-year Read & Publish agreement. Under its terms, corresponding authors affiliated with Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL now have the opportunity to publish their research OA at no cost, provided certain conditions are met.