October 7, 2009
IDEALS Digital Repository Surpasses 1-millionth Download
NEWS RELEASE
7 October 2009
IDEALS Digital Repository Surpasses 1-millionth Download
Urbana, Illinois—The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has surpassed its one-millionth download.
The service, offered through the University Library and Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES), is sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Illinois and was launched in 2006. The campus institutional repository includes articles, working papers, preprints, technical reports, conference papers and, data sets in various digital formats provided by University faculty, staff, and graduate students. Although central to the University of Illinois, anyone can access and benefit from IDEALS collections and services.
“Today, over 12,000 items have been uploaded into IDEALS,” said Sarah Shreeves, associate professor and IDEALS coordinator. “The success of this service has surpassed what anyone envisioned two and a half years ago, and we hope that others in the Illinois community will take advantage of its services.”
The mission of IDEALS is to preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to digital research and scholarship in order to give these works the greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS endeavors to ensure that its materials appear in search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing and that the majority of the research is openly available for anyone to access. As a result of its efforts to disseminate research produced at the University of Illinois, IDEALS was recently ranked in the top 10 of institutional repositories worldwide.
“I am delighted with the exposure that IDEALS has provided us with. Whenever we place a thesis or a report, the downloads start and never stop. We get many comments back from readers and researchers who have seen our work only on IDEALS,” said Amr Elnashai, head, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
IDEALS contains a wealth of diverse information, from a Mid-America Earthquake Center report on the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005 to the Ethnography of the University Initiative’s publications and presentations, including campus folklore and cultural perceptions.
“I appreciate that my thesis is archived in a stable location for reliable long-term access. The document is now freely available to anyone in the world, yet I retain the copyright,” said David P. Hruska, an Illinois graduate. “Furthermore, my thesis is now displayed in search results returned by Google Scholar, improving the dissemination of my research.
"This depository has been exceptionally helpful in preserving in an easily-accessed archive, the extensive field data sets I accumulated over a 25-year period," said Lowell Getz, professor emeritus, Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution (now Animal Biology) at the University of Illinois. "There are no other such data sets and most likely never will be again."
For more information about, or to access, the IDEALS digital repository, visit www.ideals.illinois.edu.
###
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library holds over eleven million volumes, more than 90,000 serial titles, and more than nine million manuscripts, maps, slides, audio tapes, microforms, videotapes, laser discs, and other non-print material. The University Library is ranked highly nationally and globally, and its collections and services are used heavily by students, faculty, and scholars. More than one million items are circulated annually, and many more are used on site and virtually from anywhere in the world. For more information, please visit www.library.illinois.edu.
--
Heather Murphy
Assistant Director of Advancement for Publications and Public Affairs
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
435 Main Library, MC-522
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-333-3758
Fax: 217-244-7201
hmurphy@illinois.edu
www.library.illinois.edu/friends
"Uncover and Discover"
Posted by florador at 11:36 AM
September 17, 2009
Five Major American Universities Commit to Support OA Journals
From Open Access News...
A Compact for Open-Access Publication, press release, September 14, 2009.
Five of the nation's premier institutions of higher learning—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technoology, and the University of California, Berkeley—today announced their joint commitment to a compact for open-access publication. ...
Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal. While academic research institutions support traditional journals by paying their subscription fees, no analogous means of support has existed to underwrite the growing roster of fee-based open-access journals.
Stuart Shieber, Harvard's James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science and Director of the University's Office for Scholarly Communication, is the author of the five-member compact. According to Shieber, "Universities and funding agencies ought to provide equitable support for open-access publishing by subsidizing the processing fees that faculty incur when contributing to open-access publications. Right now, these fees are relatively rare. But if the research community supports open-access publishing and it gains in importance as we believe that it will, those fees could aggregate substantially over time. The Compact ensures that support is available to eliminate these processing fees as a disincentive to open-access publishing."
The Compact supports equity of the business models by committing each university to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication fees for open-access journal articles written by its faculty for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.
Additional universities are encouraged to visit the compact web site and sign on. ...
,,, the Compact's FAQ establishes a loophole for grant-funded research: "a compact institution may reasonably expect that ... the funding agency should be responsible for payment of the publication charge, and the article would not be eligible for underwriting by the institution whether or not the funding agency actually covers the particular charge."
-----
Addendum: At the time this compact was signed, only Berkeley already had established an OA fund. But subsequently both Cornell and Harvard have also established OA funds to support the OA publishing of their faculty (follow links for additional information). It is expected that MIT and Dartmouth will announce OA funds eventually, too.
Currently the U of Illinois is a supporting member of BioMed Central, so our members get a discount on the publication fees when they publish in BMC journals. And we have a membership in Oxford's Nucleic Acids Research, which also provides our authors with a discount when publishing in NAR. If you have comments on whether the U of Illinois should join the Compact and set up an OA fund, please contact Paula Kaufman, the University Librarian.
Posted by florador at 11:07 AM
April 8, 2008
The University of Illinois is Now a Member of BioMed Central
News that many of you have been eagerly awaiting!
The University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana is now a Supporting Member of the open access publisher, BioMed Central.
What this means is that when you submit a journal article for publication in one of nearly 200 BMC titles, you will receive a 15% discount off the article processing charge!
Here's a list of the BMC titles:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/browse/journals/.
This discount also applies to articles submitted to Chemistry Central
http://www.chemistrycentral.com/ and to PhysMath Central http://www.physmathcentral.com/.
Here's a list of the article processing charges for the various BMC journals (before discount):
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq
For most of the journals, the fee is $1690, but may be as high as $2685 or as low as $500. A few are even free.
Many of the BMC journals have already earned quite respectable Impact Factors. See:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/faq?name=impactfactor
e.g., Genome Biology (7.17); BMC Bioinformatics (3.62); BMC Biology (4.43); BMC Evolutionary Biology (4.46)
Why should you consider publishing in a BMC journal?
First of all, know that all research submitted will receive rigorous and rapid peer review. If the article is accepted:
- It will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection - open access means no subscriptions or 'pay-per-view' charges for original research articles.
- It is more likely to be cited, as it will be freely available to the entire global biological and medical community
- It will be listed in PubMed within days of publication
- You retain the copyright of your work
- You will be able to view your article's access statistics, which average over 200 downloads per month per article
- Your articles will be securely and permanently archived in PubMed Central
Papers published by our colleagues:
The University of Illinois' "homepage" lists papers that were published in BMC jouranls by U of I authors in the last year -- at this point 30 research articles, software, protocols, etc:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/11700
For your interest, here's the U of I-Chicago's home page:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/48900
Submitting a paper:
If you are on campus within our recognized IP range when submitting a manuscript you will be identified as belonging to a member institution and automatically granted a 15% discount on article processing charges If you are at home or at an external terminal when submitting your paper, you can still claim this discount by stating that you are a affiliated with the U of I. Papers may be submitted either via a journal home page or via http://www.biomedcentral.com/manuscript/.
Posted by florador at 3:56 PM
July 10, 2007
Provost's Letter in Support of Retaining Publishing Rights
From Provost Linda Katehi, in an email sent to the U of Illinois Faculty, 7/10/07
==========
Dear Colleague,
New opportunities created by electronic publishing and archiving are changing the business of scholarly publication. Because traditional publication agreements transfer copyrights to publishers and restrict electronic distribution by the author and their institution, publishers appear to have captured much of the benefit of these changes.
In November 2006, faculty governance leaders from CIC universities discussed these issues that affect scholarly communication and called for a concrete strategy that would help faculty retain more control over their published intellectual property. Subsequently, the CIC provosts issued a
Statement on Publishing Agreements and an Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors. (http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/Report/CICAuthRtsFINAL16May07.pdf) The Addendum is intended to be used by faculty entering into publication agreements with journal publishers or presses. It supports authors rights to use their own published work in teaching and research, to post a publication on a personal website, or to deposit it in a repository maintained by their institution or a professional association. IDEALS (www.ideals.uiuc.edu) is the University of Illinois institutional repository.
Late this Spring, the U of I Senate endorsed the principles expressed in the CIC Provosts Statement and Addendum; encouraged faculty to consider using it as well as other publication agreement addenda that increase their rights in reproducing, distributing, and archiving their own work; and asked the CIC Provosts to provide leadership in negotiating with publishers to develop new publication agreements that provide CIC authors and institutions greater rights for use, distribution and archiving their published scholarly works.
It is our responsibility as scholars to ensure that our work is available as widely as possible to maximize its scholarly impact, accessibility, and educational use. I encourage you to use the Addendum and to deposit your research and scholarship in IDEALS, which provides reliable and persistent access to its holdings.
===============
You may read more about what the U of I is doing at the Scholarly Communication website. See:
What the U of I is doing
What YOU can do.
Posted by florador at 9:46 AM
June 13, 2007
One Million University of Illinois Books to be Digitized by Google
Read my posting on this over at the UI Scholarly Communication News site!
Posted by florador at 9:47 AM
May 15, 2007
Senate Endorses the CIC Provosts' Statement on Publication Agreements
On April 30th, 2007, the U of Illinois Faculty Senate endorsed the CIC Provosts' Statement on Publication Agreements. This statement urges faculty to retain some of their copyrights when submitting papers for publication in order to maximize the scholarly impact, accessibility, educational use, and readership of their papers. To facilitate this, U of Illinois authors are urged to consider amending the standard publisher's Copyright Transfer Agreement with the Addendum to Publication Agreement for CIC Authors (Word doc).
The Addendum stipulates that the authors will be able to make their papers freely available on the Internet within 6 months of publication, thus granting publishers the right of first impact. U of Illinois authors are urged to submit a copy of their paper to IDEALS -- the U of Illinois digital archive -- with the stipulation that it be made freely available after 6 months. Of course, some publishers already allow authors to mount their articles on institutional web sites; check the Sherpa/Romeo database for publisher policies.
For more background on the CIC Provost's Statement on Publication Agreements, and why the U of Illinois Senate endorsed it, please read the background information provided by the U of Illinois Senate Committee on the Library.
Posted by florador at 4:14 PM
October 13, 2006
Having Problems Printing PDFs from ScienceDirect (Elsevier) Journals?
Many people have recently reported having difficulties printing PDFs from ScienceDirect (Elsevier) journals.
In a nutshell:
These problems are only happening if you're trying to use the "Discover" link from within databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, etc., and are due to limitations in the Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you encounter this problem, do one of the following:
1) Save the PDF file to your desktop, and print from there.
or
2) Access the journal article from the link to the journal found in the Online Research Resource (the ORR). You will need to tunnel down to the article of interest.
The problem is temporary, and should be resolved by early November.
-------------------------------------
If you want to read more, here's the tale from ScienceDirect:
Dear Sir:We are sorry that you are encountering problems with printing.
During the ScienceDirect Redesign, the PDF Address URL was extended from under 261 to (in most cases) 266 characters. This has unexpectedly created a conflict with Acrobat Reader 7 or greater.
The error "Could not start print job" is an Adobe Acrobat-generated error which occurs when printing a PDF in which the URL address is longer than 261 characters, from your browser. This is a bug associated with Acrobat Reader 6 and was fixed with a later release. For more information see http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/329146.html
Unfortunately, this bug seems to have re-emerged with the latest version of Acrobat Reader.
The problem has been reported to Adobe. However, with the best interest of our customer in mind, we will implement a fix which will shorten the length of the URL to one manageable by Adobe Acrobat. This fix is expected to be implemented by the end of October, 2006.
In the meantime, you will still be able to print by first saving the PDF to your computer, and then printing it. (Right Click on the PDF link, then select Save Target As, or use the Save button in the open PDF window, to the top left.)
Please do not hesitate to contact Adobe Acrobat if you find the above problem unacceptable. to locate a support center in your area please go to http://www.adobe.com/support/intlsupport.html
Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance or provide you with additional information on Elsevier products.
Respectfully yours,
James Hunt
ScienceDirect Electronic Support
360 Park Ave. South
New York, NY 10010
Email: usinfo@sciencedirect.com
Toll-free telephone: +1 (888) 437-4636 (Option.1)
Local: +1 (212) 633-3730 (Option.1)
Web Site: www.sciencedirect.com
Posted by florador at 2:20 PM
September 18, 2006
NCBI Workshops Coming Nov. 30-Dec. 1st
The UIUC Biotechnology Information Center, a virtual branch of the UIUC Library, and the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center are again pleased to be hosting several NCBI Workshops.
When:
Thursday and Friday, November 30th - December 1st
What:
Four mini-courses will be offered, each 2.5 hours in length:
#1. Making Sense of DNA and Protein Sequences
Thursday, Nov. 30, 9-11:30 AM
#3. Identification of Disease Genes
Thursday, Nov. 30, 1-3:30 PM
#5. BLAST Quick Start
Friday, Dec. 1, 9-11:30 AM
#7. Structure Analysis Quick Start
Friday, Dec. 1, 1-3:30 PM
Learn about the classes:
To learn more about the courses, as well as to take a peak at the types of problem sets you'll do during the hands-on portion, please go to the NCBI Mini-course web site.
Who should attend:
These sessions are designed for molecular biology grad students, post docs, staff, and faculty.
Who is teaching the courses?
Medha Bhagwat and Steve Pechous, biologists from the User Services staff of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, (NCBI) will provide the instruction.
How much does it cost to attend?
There is no fee for participants, but pre-registration is required.
Read more, and sign up for one or more classes!
NCBI Mini-courses, Fall, 2006
Posted by florador at 5:46 PM
July 18, 2006
UIUC Library Catalog Enhancements
Library users will notice several updates to the UIUC Online Catalog since Spring 2006. One of the most exciting is that you now can use non-Roman scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Russian to search for library materials published in a non-Roman language. This is accomplished by choosing the desired language from the language toolbar on the library's public terminals. These scripts display better with the Firefox browser than they do in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Note that non-Roman searches may produce incomplete search results; at this time, not all catalog records for non-Roman publications include information in the non-Roman script.
Another change is that title searches can provide results for search terms found in chapter titles as well as in book titles. Note that not all records in the catalog include table of contents information, thus some searches will not include results from chapter titles.
Please also note that UIUC users can no longer use the I-Share statewide catalog to request items from the UIUC Library, unless they want to pick them up at an off-campus library. Rather, we suggest starting your searches in the UIUC Online Catalog (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/catalog), where you can request items from UIUC - and then move to the I-Share catalog from the I-Share Catalog link, which is located at the top of the UIUC Catalog screen, if you need more items than you can find locally. Requesting items from other Illinois libraries through the I-Share catalog and requesting UIUC items through the UIUC Online Catalog both are unchanged: the only change pertains to requesting UIUC items through the I-Share catalog.
As always, feel free to contact the Library by phone (333-2290), online (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/askus/), or in person at the Information Desk on the second floor of the Main Library if you have any questions about these changes or any problems searching for or requesting items.
Karen Hogenboom
Assistant Government Information Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
200-D Library
1408 W. Gregory
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone (217) 333-2472
Fax (217) 244-2058
hogenboo@uiuc.edu
Posted by florador at 10:27 AM
Buy a Book...Help the Library!
The University Library has created a web page with links to various booksellers -- local, electronic, and otherwise -- to help you with your book purchases.
If you purchase your books through one of the options listed (Amazon), the library will receive a modest referral fee. So if you're buying from Amazon anyway, please consider using the link provided on the Book Purchase Referral Site!
ps.. if you'd like to bookmark the link to Amazon, here is a short link to it:
http://tinyurl.com/rso8e
Posted by florador at 8:44 AM
March 31, 2006
More Blogs and RSS feeds from the University Library!
Did you know that you're reading a "blog"?! Yes! A blog is merely a way to put news and opinions up on the web. Blogs can be read by going to the blog website (e.g., going to the Biotech Info Center's News site, or via an RSS feed reader such as Bloglines. Bloglines and other RSS feed readers are handy because they let you easily keep track of "what's new" from many resources -- blogs, newspapers, CNN, table of contents of journals, new books, etc. If you're curious about RSS feeds, please read our short page explaining about RSS feeds and how to get started with Blogger.
The University library is using Blogs and RSS feeds in several instances. For example, the following libraries have blogs as vehicles to tell you "what's new" --
Biology
Business & Economics
Engineering
Undergraduate
Biotechnology Information Center
and others.
You may also want to keep up to date on what's happening in issues such as open access, author copyrights, google, etc. by reading the Scholarly Communications newsletter.
If you're using an RSS feed reader, you can set up RSS feeds so you will be notified when new electronic journals and databases are added to our ORR registry or when new books (or other materials) are received and added to the Online Catalog. In both cases, you can specify the subject area in which you're interested.
Posted by florador at 11:15 AM
December 2, 2005
"Discover" Full Text for Research Articles!
Starting this week, you will begin to see a new button, the Discover Button, next to all the citations in many of our electronic resources, including index and abstract databases.
WHAT IS THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THE DISCOVER BUTTON?
The primary function of the button is to give you a link to the full-text version of the article, if UIUC has rights to it.
While many of the databases already have links to the full text in them (e.g., PubMed, Web of Science), through the Discover button, you should uncover e-access for even more publications! If we don't have e-access to the article, the Discover window will provide you with other tools for obtaining the article.
WHAT DOES THE DISCOVER BUTTON DO?
When you click on the Discover button, a new window will pop up that will contain links to various types of resources:
1] Links to the full text of the article (if UIUC has e-access).
2] A link to the UIUC Online Catalog record for the journal (so you can see if we have print / e-access to the journal)
3] A link to Interlibrary Loan, with the citation information already filled in.
4] A link to RefWorks, which will automatically add the citation to RefWorks ***
5] A link to Google Scholar, so you may search for other articles by this author, or other articles on the topic in the Google Scholar database.
WHERE CAN I FIND THE DISCOVER BUTTON?
We're starting by putting the Discover button in all the citations in the Engineering Village databases (Compendex and Inspec), and the databases and journals that we get access to via the ScienceDirect interface. It's also already available in RefWorks*** and in Google Scholar.
The Discover button will appear in most other indexes and abstracts (e.g., PubMed and Web of Science) before the start of the Spring term, 2006. Stay tuned for announcements!
Learn more about the new Discover service, go to:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/biotech/discover.htm
***RefWorks:
If you don't know about RefWorks, please go to: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/refworks.
Training is available in December, see:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/bicnews/archives/2005/12/refworks_traini.html
RefWorks is like a web-based "EndNote"! That is, it's a place where you can build your own database of citations, and then pull these citations out of the database to use in your papers -- automatically formatting the citations in the proper format for whichever journal you're submitting your paper to! And, pertinent to this e-mail, ALL of your citations in RefWorks will have a Discover button, providing you with easy access to the full-text of the article!
Faculty: Get your students, grad and undergrads, using RefWorks! It's available for free (courte$y of the Library and CITES) for everyone on campus to use.
Katie
Posted by florador at 3:21 PM
August 18, 2005
RefWorks Help for UIUC
We recently told of a new resource available for UIUC, Refworks. A simplified set of instructions for using RefWorks at UIUC has just been created. Find out how to get access to this resource, how to import citations into it creating your own reference database, and how to use it with Word to create documents with cited references.
Posted by at 5:44 PM
May 27, 2004
New Online Research Resources Site Available
The new UIUC Library Online Research Research Resource (ORR) is now in production mode! We now have access to over 25,000 journals & magazines and nearly 300 bibliographic databases, as well as hundreds of reference resources.
Posted by at 1:28 PM
August 8, 2003
Merger of UIUC, UIC, and UIS Elsevier Journal Subscriptions
In the past UIUC, UIC and UIS shared electronic access to the Elsevier journals for which any of the three campuses held print subscriptions. Frequently several campuses had subscriptions to the same journal, especially UIUC and UIC. However, as a cost-cutting measure, we have been successful in negotiating with Elsevier to consider us as one school: as long as one campus has a print subscription to an Elsevier (or Academic Press) journal, all three campuses will have electronic access. We have negotiated carefully with UIS and UIC to determine which journals we will continue to subscribe to in print, and which titles one of the other campuses will maintain. Overall this will result in about a $200,000 savings for UIUC. So, yes, we will be "canceling" a lot of Elsevier journals, but we will continue to have e-access to them. And by so doing, will have to cancel far fewer non-Elsevier journals, since that saved money can be used to cover inevitable inflationary costs. A list of the "cancelled" titles will shortly be posted.
Posted by at 12:56 PM