“The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge.

Core functions and aims of the project for now and the future are to provide the identification of repositories, the indexing of full-text documents, the extraction of author relationships and personalization services.”

ScientificCommons.org.

This site produced by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Spain is your link to world universities’ & other organisations’ Open Access files, ie similar to UQ’s own eSpace.

The aim of this Ranking is to support Open Access initiatives and therefore the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to other academic material. The web indicators are used here to measure the global visibility and impact of the scientific repositories.

Publish, not Perish: The Art & Craft of Publishing in Scholarly Journals.
If you have the chance, check out this site from the libraries of the University of Colorado.
It describes the world of academic publishing, how to prepare your manuscript, how to find the most likely journals to target your paper to, it defines the “impact factor”,  gives you the details of the actual publishing process, the world of Open Access, & how to fit writing papers into your already busy schedule. A very useful resource for researchers just beginning to publish and for those who want to update their knowledge of the 21st century’s publishing world in academia.

We have reviewed the contents of the Reference Collection on Level 2 and many handbooks, encyclopaedias and general reference books have moved upstairs to the general book collection on Level 3. Many reference books are now available online e.g. Kirk-Othmer encyclopedia of chemical technology and updates to many handbooks are no longer available in print. All books moved to Level 3 are available for borrowing.

If you have any queries or problems locating any items that are no longer available in the Level 2 Reference Collection please let us know.

For information, the library website provides access to online dictionaries, dates, figures, addresses, statistics and more via its Quick Reference website of Internet websites.

The free scientific search Scirus provides access to websites, journals and other document sources in science, technology and the medical disciplines. Scirus filters non-scientific information. Search results are presented under three tabs ‘Journal sources’ ‘Preferred Web sources’ and ‘Other Web sources’. The ‘Advanced Search’ page provides a list of the ‘Journal sources’ and ‘Preferred Web sources’ indexed by Scirus. Search results can easily be exported to EndNote.

Scirus was developed by Elsevier and is linked from the Compendex and Inspec databases on the Engineering Village platform. A full review of Scirus is available from the online journal Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2007.

Students can now make online bookings for Group Rooms in the Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library. To make a booking follow the links at http://www.library.uq.edu.au/fbs.

Bookings may be made one week in advance and will be released daily at 4 pm. Students may use the Group Study Rooms for a total of two sessions per week. One session is up to two hours. Offering two sessions per week will enable the group rooms to be shared equitably among all students. Additional information here, or ask at the Loans Desk in the Library.

Two new websites of interest:

1) Intute - http://www.intute.ac.uk/sciences/
Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology covers resources for teaching, learning and research, covering the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science.

2) Tech-Xtra - http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/
Tech Xtra is a cross-search of 4million items from 25 different databases. TechXtra cross-searches 25 different collections relevant to engineering, mathematics and computing including ArXiv, CISTI, CiteSeer, DSpace at MIT, DOAJ, NASA technical reports, COPAC (UK catalogues) some journals and Australian resources like ADT digital theses, and the ARROW repository. Not all are full-text.

Here is a list of some of the new sites and tools available on the Web. The listings are divided into categories. Previous lists are also available.