UC campuses are experiencing access problems with the Taylor & Francis electronic journals. Currently, about 15% of our licensed content is available, but the majority is not. The problem has been reported to Taylor & Francis, and we hope that it will be resolved by tomorrow.

Update: Access problems were resolved this morning (June 29). Our access has been restored.

Science Express is Science Magazine’s pre-publication venue, where articles accepted for publication are made available prior to the online publication of the complete issue. While almost all other society and commercial publishers provide this service at no additional cost, AAAS does not. UC libraries have decided not to pay the extra charge for Science Express for various cost and licensing issues. See CDL's Challenges to Licensing from Some Publisher for more information. At the present time, if individuals need access to the SE content, they will have to use their existing AAAS memberships or become AAAS members.

The backfile for the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is now available via Blackwell Synergy. The backfile goes back to Volume 1, Issue 1 (December 1879). UC-eLinks from article databases should now take you to the full text of Annals articles, or you can access the journal directly via http://uclibs.org/PID/102498.

According to Jorge E. Hirsch, a physics professor at UCSD and creator of the h-index, the h-index is a way to estimate the broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contributions. The magazine Chemistry World recently published an article on the h-index that included a link to a list of living chemists with scores greater than 50 that was constructed by Harry Schaefer at the University of Georgia and his colleague Amy Peterson.

Whether you think the h-index is a valid metric or not, you can easily see your own h-index as determined in the Web of Science. To do so, first do a general search, not a cited ref search, in Web of Science on your name. If you have used different names/initial combinations over the course of your career you will have to “or” those variants together to get a comprehensive retrieval of your publications. The author index feature is a useful option for finding all your name variants. It is located just to the upper right of the author search box. Conversely, if you have a common name and need to limit the retrieval to just your own articles, use the address field along with your name to limit by the various institutions where you have worked. Often just a zip code such as 94720 is sufficient if your work has been done at UCB and or LBNL.

Once you have your results, click the Citation Report button on the right side of the screen. The Citation Report generates graphical displays of your publications by year as well as citations in each year. It also sums your total number of times cited, calculates your h-index and lists all of your publications, sorted by times cited. If there are papers on the list which are not yours you can eliminate them by checking the check box next to those papers and then clicking on the “go” button. A new Citation Report will be generated without the papers you selected.

If you would like to fine-tune your results you can use the Analyze Results button before you use the Citation Report button. For example, you could analyze your results by document type to eliminate meeting abstracts to increase your average citations per paper or you could eliminate review articles to determine the impact of just your research papers.

Hirsch's article describing the h-index in PNAS can be found here. 

We now have access to Pharmaceutical Substances, Thieme's online compendium of information on active pharmaceutical ingredients of interest to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Entries include information on:

• Chemical structure
• Synthetic route
• Nomenclature
• Medical applications
• Toxicological data
• Patent information
• Commercial information
• Bibliographic information

Once you are at the site, click the blue "Login" button in the top left corner to open Pharmaceutical Substances. If you want to do structure or reaction searches, click on the "Advanced Search" button. Three structure editors are supported: ISIS/Draw, ChemDraw and Java/Applet.

Access is available from all campus computers. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can also access these resources from off campus via the Library Proxy Server.

Beginning Monday, June 18, we have trial access to Current Protocols in Stem Cell Biology from Wiley. The trial will run through the end of December 2007.

The Library also licenses these series on protocols:

BioMed Protocols (Humana Press)

Cold Spring Harbor Protocols

Current Protocols (Wiley Interscience)

Molecular Biology Protocols (Horizon Press)

More methods and protocols are available free from several websites, listed here.

Currently, the California Digital Library (CDL) has no plans to license Nature Protocols. Two major challenges to licensing Nature publications include pricing and lack of perpetual access to licensed materials.

UC Berkeley now has access to the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences online. This core resource "is viewed as the cutting-edge reference of choice for those working in statistics, probability theory, biostatistics, quality control, and economics with emphasis in applications of statistical methods in sociology, engineering, computer science, biomedicine, psychology, survey methodology, and a host of other client disciplines." The online version includes the full text of the second print edition, the entire original edition, plus supplements and updates.

Sample articles include:

» Cancer stochastic models
» Empirical bayes theory
» Financial time series
» Lucien Le Cam
» Neural networks
» Jerzy Neyman
» Semiparametrics
» ...and more.

Access is available from all campus computers. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can also access these resources from off campus via the Library Proxy Server.

From the Knowledgespeak blog: "Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced an agreement with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to preserve the society's journal collection. This inclusion brings the number of titles in the Portico archive to over
6,100 [more...]"

Developed in consultation with libraries and publishers, Portico is an initiative to build a sustainable archive of electronic journals. Portico was launced with initial support from JSTOR, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Annual contributions from publishers and libraries, including the University of California Libraries, are helping to support this permanent archive.

Portico has signed agreements with over 35 participating publishers to preserve their electronic journals.