“PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the media industry: a licence to print money. An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’ content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research.”
Continue reading online or in the Economist’s print edition from 14th April.
Author: PP
Elsevier available again
For reasons which are still being investigated, our Elsevier access was cut, impacting the ScienceDirect, Sciverse and Scopus products. Access has been restored as of 14h today.
Apologies for any inconvenience.
Elsevier available again
For reasons which are still being investigated, our Elsevier access was cut, impacting the ScienceDirect, Sciverse and Scopus products. Access has been restored as of 14h today.
Apologies for any inconvenience.
Maintenance Wiley Saturday 24th March 11h-15h
The Wiley website and all Wiley eJournals will be unavailable this Saturday from 11h onwards for a maximum of 4 hours.
Reason: Wiley is updating their website.
Apologies for any inconvenience!
Dalloz-revues.fr de nouveau disponible
Le problème d’accès pour dalloz-revues.fr, via http://www.dalloz-revues.fr.proxy.bnl.lu/ est résolu.
Veuillez noter que les mêmes revues sont disponibles via le site Dalloz.fr avec une interface plus simpliste, sans Flash: http://www.dalloz.fr.proxy.bnl.lu/
Mendeley training sessions @uni.lu
Mendeley is a free desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online.
Mendeley’s aim is no less than change how research is done!
In the training sessions you will discover how…
… to create your personal bibliographic database by automatically extracting citation details
… to read, search the full-text, annotate and highlight PDF papers in Mendeley
… to synchronize your bibliography across multiple machines, including iPhone and iPad
… to cite papers in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice
… to capture citations from websites using the Web Importer
… to create groups to share and collaboratively annotate research papers
Speaker: Christophe Trefois (University of Luxembourg – LCSB)
5th March 2012 / Campus KIRCHBERG – Room A.11 – 16h00
6th March 2012 / Campus LIMPERTSBERG – Room BS 012 – 16h00
13th March 2012 / Campus WALFERDANGE – Room Tic 2 – 16h00
(All three sessions are identical, no need to attend all three)
Please confirm your participation via email: bibliotheque@uni.lu
An event organised by the Library of the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with Consortium Luxembourg.
If you can’t make it to the training sessions, check out the Mendeley video tutorials.
You can automatically search articles available from findit.lu from inside Mendeley. Go to your Mendeley Web Account, choose Account details and there Sharing / Importing. Then add a new library access link by copy/pasting this link http://sfx.etat.lu:9003/sfx_local/
findit.lu offline Wednesday 22nd February 7h-8h30
The findit.lu portal will not be accessible from 7h onwards until 8h30.
What will happen? The portal is powered by a software called “Metalib” from ExLibris. It will be updated to enable new backend functionality. No changes are planned for the end-user.
NZZ Online: Wie Wissenschaftsverlage den freien Zugang zu Informationen zu blockieren versuchen
Der ETH-Bibliothek soll per Klage verboten werden, Dokumente in elektronischer Form an ihre Nutzer zu verschicken, Nutzer sollen die Artikel für 30 EUR (!) direkt beim Verlag kaufen.
Wissenschaftsverlag Elsevier unterstützt US Gesetzesvorschlag der die Open Access Plattform “Pub Med Central” mittelfristig den Garaus machen soll.
Mehr: Ein Bärendienst an der Forschung – Hintergrund, Wissenschaft, NZZ Online, 02.02.2012
Ausserdem: Petition by researchers against Elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Open Access statistics and Luxembourg
Lots of statistics about Repositories, updated live at OpenDOAR – Open Access Repositories.
Some examples: Most used software by far is Dspace and repositories hold on average 1433 journal articles.
Nothing from Luxembourg either in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) which also provides interesting statistics on the repositories’ activity levels.
On to the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) which manages a curated list of quality controlled open access journals, also showing massive growth. And there is one registered journal from Luxembourg, called Articulo (published via the French open access platform revues.org)!
The same astounding growth of Open Access publishing can be seen in BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
All of this is made possible through open access policies and lots of open source software under the hood, such as the metadata exchange protocol OAI from Open Archives.
The big questions: Is Luxembourg missing a megatrend, or is there simply no awareness to register open access publications and repositories?
Dalloz-revues.fr temporairement indisponible
Il y a un problème d’accès pour dalloz-revues.fr, via http://www.dalloz-revues.fr.proxy.bnl.lu/
Aucun abonnement n’y est disponible.
Jusqu’à résolution du problème, veuillez utiliser le site Dalloz.fr, qui contient les mêmes revues, mais avec une interface plus simpliste, sans Flash:
http://www.dalloz.fr.proxy.bnl.lu/
Update 20.02.2012: De nouveau disponible