Read about the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) in the May 2010 issue of PLoS Biology. In Institutional Open Access Funds: Now Is The Time, authors Eckman and Weil describe how this innovative program has helped to increase the amount of Berkeley research universally accessible to readers by proving funding to pay open access fees. The project has also promoted faculty retention of publishing rights, fostered dialogue between libraries, researchers and journal publishers, and, ultimately encouraged a more sustainable scholarly communication environment.

UC Berkeley Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer is one of the initial signators to an Open Letter to the Higher Education Community affirming UC's support for increased public access to federally-funded research results.  The letter, which endorses the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373 and H.R.5073), was issued on April 23, 2010.  EVCP Breslauer was joined by 26 other university presidents, provosts, and research vice presidents, including John Etchemendy (Provost, Stanford University), Lawrence Pitts (Provost and Executive Vice President, Academic Affairs, University of California), and Enrique Lavernia (Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, UC Davis).

RSC ChemSpider Seminar -- Managing and Integrating Chemistry on the Internet to Build Community for Chemists

The LBNL Library is hosting a seminar for researchers interested in online collaboration, data storage and curation, data exchange, crowdsourcing, and open access. This seminar will explore ChemSpider ? a free access service providing a structure centric community for chemists and the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.

• Date: March 24, 2010 ? Wednesday
• Time: 3:00 p.m. ? 4:30 p.m
• Location: Building 50 Auditorium, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Bring your laptop for a hands-on demo session.

**** For UC Berkeley personnel only: Please contact Jeffery Loo (JLLoo@lbl.gov) by Monday, March 22, 12:00 p.m. for a visitor pass and shuttle bus directions. A visitor pass is required for entry into the Berkeley Lab by UC Berkeley guests.

ABSTRACT: The increasing availability of free and open access resources for scientists on the internet presents us with a revolution in data availability. The Royal Society of Chemistry hosts ChemSpider, a free access website for chemists built with the intention of building community for chemists.

ChemSpider is an aggregator of chemistry related information, at present over 20 million unique chemical entities linked out to over 300 separate data sources, ChemSpider has taken on the task of both robotically and manually curating publicly available data sources. It is also a public deposition platform where chemists can deposit their own data including novel structures, analytical data, synthesis procedures and host data associated with the growing activities associated with Open Notebook Science.

This presentation will examine chemistry on the internet, the dubious quality of what is available and how the ChemSpider crowdsourced curation platform is fast becoming one of the centralized hubs for resourcing information about chemical entities.

We will also review our efforts to provide free resources for synthesis procedures, spectral data and structure-based searching of the chemistry literature and how chemists can contribute directly to each of these projects. Following the presentation and a question and answer session, a hands on session showing how to search for, curate and deposit data on ChemSpider will be given for interested parties.

SPEAKER: Antony Williams, PhD, is a leader in the domain of free access chemistry. He is the Vice President of Strategic Development at the Royal Society of Chemistry and is the host of ChemSpider, a free online structure centric community for chemists.

ChemSpider began as a hobby project in a basement and went on to become one of the most popular Chemistry websites with the highest quality of data available online. Antony spent over a decade in the commercial scientific software business as Chief Science Officer for ACD/Labs, one of the domain leaders in scientific software. He is an accomplished NMR spectroscopist with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. During his career he was the NMR Technology Leader for the Eastman-Kodak company and has worked in both academia and national government research institutions.

Article-level Metrics at PLoS (an alternate way to evaluate impact): A talk by Dr. Peter Binfield

• Monday, November 9
• 12 noon - 1:30 pm
• 127 Dwinelle Hall*

Update: This talk has is now available online

• webcast.berkeley
• YouTube
• Slides only

(Please note that while the audio is fine, Dr. Binfield's image appears only in the small inset of the video image for the first 13 minutes of the 70 minute talk.)

The Impact Factor of a journal (a measure of the number of citations to an entire journal) is commonly used by scientists and administrators as one indicator of the quality of individual articles within that journal. With the advent of the internet it is now possible to measure the worth of an individual article via so-called 'article-level metrics' (metrics which include citations, usage, bookmarks, blog coverage, and post publication commentary for a single article), and in this respect PLoS leads the world providing the data to allow this analysis.

Dr. Peter Binfield is Managing Editor of PLoS ONE (an open access title; the third largest journal in the world; and the recent winner of a prestigious award for 'publishing innovation').

For more information, see the PLoS website on article-level metrics or watch this short video.

Cookies and coffee will be served.

* 127 Dwinelle Hall: Enter Dwinelle by the main entrance near Sather Gate. Once inside the lobby, turn left and head down that short hallway, then turn right. (Or, just follow the signs.)

Open Access Week is October 19 through October 23: Open Access (OA) is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. OA is gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.

Here are some of the OA Week events being held at Berkeley:

Mike Eisen, "The Future of Open Access Publishing."

An OA week talk by Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Tuesday, October 20, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location: Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library
Seminar Room (2101 VLSB).

Arrive early and get a PLoS t-shirt!!

Live Webinar from the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association
(OASPA)

Featuring representatives from five different publishers discussing the promise and perils of OA publishing. Participants include: Pierre de Villiers (African Online Scientific Information Systems), Matthew Cockerill (BioMed Central), David Hoole (Nature Publishing Group), Mark Patterson (Public Library of Science, PLoS), Saskia Franken (Utrecht University Library)

Tuesday, October 20, 9:00 am - 10:30 am

Location: Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library
Seminar Room (2101 VLSB)

"Take Control of your Publications with eScholarship," presentations
by Catherine Mitchell, Director, CDL Publishing Group

Monday, October 19, 12:30 pm -1:50 pm in 140 Boalt Hall and 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm in the Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College Building