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NISO/ALPSP release best practices for journal article versions The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), in partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), has published the Recommended Practice Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group (NISO-RP-8-2008). The publication is designed to provide a simple, practical way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication. This document is freely available from the NISO website at www.niso.org/publications/rp/.
In September 2005, NISO launched the partnership with ALPSP to bring together experts from the publishing, library, library systems, and user communities to examine the problems associated with the proliferation of different article versions. Led initially by Cliff Morgan, VP, Planning & Development Director at John Wiley & Sons Ltd., the group focused its attention on describing the important stages in the production of scientific articles.
The JAV Working Group also created use cases to explore the lifecycle of journal articles, starting from a base case that describes interaction among author, institutional repository, and publisher. The group focused on key stages in recording a document’s development rather than addressing all possible iterations of an article from origination to publication.
Several variables were considered as possible dimensions to identify a particular article version. These included time: from first draft to latest version; added value: from rough draft to polished publication; manifestation/rendition: different document formats and layouts; siblings: multiple mappings between technical reports, conference papers, lectures, journal articles, review articles, etc; and stakeholders: author, editor, referee, publisher, librarian, reader, funding organisation. Components of the JAV Recommended Practice include a narrative that explains the project background and rationale for recommended terms and definitions. The appendices comprise a set of use cases showing application of the recommended terms and a graphical representation of journal article versions and relationships with formal and gray literature.
NISO plans to aggressively promote use of the JAV recommendations in the information dissemination community over the coming months.
  New Release - Journals/Products/Services US Department of Energy launches open data repository The US Department of Energy has launched the DOE Data Explorer (DDE), a tool to find scientific research data generated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in various science disciplines. The data that can be found include computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia and scientific images.
The DOE Data Explorer includes a database of citations prepared by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) based on the information found at data-hosting web sites. It is intended to be particularly useful to students, the public, and to researchers who are new to a field or looking for experimental or observational data outside their normal field of expertise.
One can browse or search the database, then link to a data collection where it resides. Users will often find specialised search interfaces and software toolkits developed by the data owners. These allow the users to search deeper into the data files and help them understand, analyse and use the data within the context of their own research interests.
The publicly available data collections support DOE research results that are well documented in journal articles, conference literature and technical reports. Key DOE databases of R&D information are searchable through the Science Accelerator. The DOE Data Explorer will include enhanced search capabilities across specialised web sites as it continues to grow.
 Scientific Data Management , New Release - Journals/Products/Services OCLC and Index Data work together to expand discovery capabilities of WorldCat Local Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, is working with software development and consulting enterprise Index Data, Denmark, to extend the discovery capabilities of WorldCat Local to include all licensed and full-text resources of a library. Index Data specialises in information retrieval and metasearch solutions. The company offers a broad range of digital library services, including content management, metasearching, link resolution and harvesting, as well as gateways, database servers, indexing engines and numerous other customized IR solutions for libraries, museums, archives and their vendors.
WorldCat Local is the service that combines the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries worldwide with the ability to use WorldCat.org as a solution for local discovery and delivery services. WorldCat Local provides a discovery environment that presents localised results most relevant to the library user while at the same time allowing the user to search the entire WorldCat database of more than 100 million records.
OCLC continues to work with database producers to add article-level metadata to WorldCat.org to enrich the search experience and make collections from libraries more visible on the web. Index Data will help OCLC incorporate metasearch into WorldCat Local for searching databases that are not indexed in WorldCat.org.
OCLC recently announced that article-level metadata from H.W. Wilson and MLA will be added to the more than 50 million articles indexed from NLM MEDLINE, the Department of Education's ERIC database, the British Library Inside serials, the GPO Monthly Catalog and the OCLC ArticleFirst database to expand access and discovery of authoritative content through the WorldCat.org platform. The work with Index Data will help to ensure that libraries can provide access to their full collections.
 Alliances, Partnerships & Consolidations Reprints Desk and FIZ Karlsruhe sign cooperation agreement Reprints Desk, Inc., a US-based content re-purposing company focused on medical and scientific publishing, Inc., has announced a cooperation agreement with scientific information services provider FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany. The deal will integrate Reprints Desk as a document supplier in FIZ Karlsruhe’s full-text broker service FIZ AutoDoc.
With this agreement Reprints Desk’s single article service will become an option for FIZ AutoDoc customers. FIZ AutoDoc is a broker service and workflow management system for full-text document delivery which partners with national and international scientific libraries, publishers, and content aggregators.
FIZ AutoDoc is the document delivery system of choice for many of Europe's largest corporations. The service analyses incoming orders and sends them to the most suitable document supplier based on customer preferences such as preferred format and delivery speed. At present, nearly 150,000 journal titles are available through FIZ AutoDoc for automatic delivery.
Alliances, Partnerships & Consolidations German neuroscientist charges journal of publishing incorrectly interpreted data Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, has reportedly charged two of his former research students with pilfering data from his laboratory. The students then published scientifically incorrect interpretations of the data against his advice, it has been reported.
Logothetis further claimed that the journal Human Brain Mapping acted incorrectly by publishing the paper even after it was informed that the data were inappropriate. According to Logothetis, the journal has denied him the right to a timely reply. The journal has used the Max Planck Society (MPS) to excuse the mismanagement of the case, he claims.
Peter Fox, one of the two editors-in-chief of the journal, has said that the paper was correctly refereed, but refused to provide details.
After consultation with Logothetis, Max Planck Society (MPS) vice-president Herbert Jäckle had written to the authors giving approval for the use of the data. But he added that Logothetis' scientific concerns should be taken into account, in accordance with the MPS' code of good scientific practice. Small changes were made to the paper before it was published online on May 8, 2008, as planned. According to Jäckle, the journal misrepresented his approval of the use of the data as being permission to publish. He also noted that as neither of the two authors had been directly funded by the society, MPS should not have been listed in the paper as a funder of the project.
According to Logothetis, the paper does not give sufficient information to have allowed referees to understand the source of the data. He further adds that Human Brain Mapping has not guaranteed him the opportunity to publish a response with his own interpretation of the data. The journal has refused to retract the paper.
Copyrights/Data integrity Thieme launches WinkingSkull.com PLUS Thieme Publishers, part of STM publisher Thieme Publishing Group, Germany, recently announced the launch of WinkingSkull.com PLUS, an ancillary component to the anatomy study aid, WinkingSkull.com. While the website remains publicly accessible, PLUS is available exclusively to buyers of the Atlas of Anatomy.
A practical resource for students, WinkingSkull.com PLUS features additional clinical material including MRIs, CT scans, and sectional anatomy with explanatory schematics. The intuitive design of the website facilitates access to any body region of interest. After studying the images, users are able to test their knowledge by dragging and dropping labels onto the anatomical illustrations. The results are immediately available and users have the ability to compare their scores against those of other users.
WinkingSkull.com PLUS builds on the practical scope of Atlas of Anatomy and is designed to help students gain a firmer understanding of human anatomy in a clinical context. Each copy of Atlas of Anatomy comes with a unique authorisation code that provides access to PLUS’ premium content. New features include images from Thieme’s popular Pocket Atlas of Sectional Anatomy series by Dr. Torsten Bert Moeller and Dr. Emil Reif.
New Release - Journals/Products/Services Biology Direct and Algorithms for Molecular Biology receive first official Impact Factors Open access publisher BioMed Central, US, has announced that it has received confirmation from Thomson Reuters of official 2007 Impact Factors for Biology Direct (3.29) and Algorithms for Molecular Biology (1.63).
Impact Factors for these two journals, both of which focus on aspects of computational biology, were expected in June 2008, when the 2007 edition of the Journal Citation Report was released. However, technical issues delayed the calculation of Impact Factors for these particular journals. Impact factors are a metric that reflect the frequency that peer-reviewed journals are cited by researchers, making them one tool for evaluating a journal’s quality.
An open access, peer-reviewed online journal Biology Direct seeks to provide authors and readers with an alternative to the traditional model of peer review. This includes making the author responsible for obtaining reviewers' reports via the journal's Editorial Board; making the peer review process open rather than anonymous; and making the reviewers' reports public, thus increasing the responsibility of the referees and eliminating sources of abuse in the refereeing process.
Algorithms for Molecular Biology covers all aspects of algorithms and software tools for molecular biology and genomics. The journal publishes research articles; review articles; editorials; book reports; commentaries; debate articles; meeting reports; short reports; as well as software articles.
Citation analysis Attention Subscribers - Benefit now from the Content atomisation initiative from Knowledgespeak Knowledgespeak is planning to atomise its content. A preliminary but significant initiative has already been taken in this direction. For an internationally esteemed association, we have repackaged and categorised our news under various topics to suit the information needs of its members. We are exploring other possibilities of bringing a granular dimension to our content that we believe can help us reach a wider audience, such as providing RSS feeds categorised into various topics of interest.
Readers are invited to discuss mutually beneficial methods and possibilities of atomising such content, as we firmly believe this can help all of us in serving a better value proposition to our users. Please contact us at scope@scopeknowledge.com with your thoughts and for further discussions in this direction.
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