GLADIS, the telnet version of the UC Berkeley library catalog, will be unavailable due to routine maintenance from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Friday, August 3. During this time, the following services will be unavailable:

» Availability information ("Circ status")
» Request function in Melvyl
» NRLF request in Pathfinder
» Library proxy server for off-campus access
»  ...and a few others.

Pathfinder and Melvyl will still be available for searching during this time. If you use the VPN, off-campus access to electronic resources will also be available.

The journal Science has decided to end its relationship with JSTOR, an online archive of scholarly journals. From Inside Higher Ed: "Under the agreement with JSTOR, the AAAS can end the relationship — which it is doing effective at the end of 2007 — but it cannot take back the material already in the JSTOR archives. So current JSTOR subscribers will continue to have access to the old issues of Science [Full story...]." Issues published in 2002 will be the last content added to the archive.

UC Berkeley will continue to have access to the existing archive (1883-2002) on JSTOR. In addition, we also continue to have access to current issues (1997- ) at Science.

Professional Engineering Publishing, publishers for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, recently announced their Engineering Open Choice option. From the press release (pdf):

"Engineering Open Choice gives authors the option of having their published research made available free to anyone throughout the world, on an open access basis. The service is available to authors of all papers accepted for publication, upon payment of a standard fee. Engineering Open Choice is designed to satisfy the needs of the community - authors, funding bodies, readers - who want research material to be made available on an open access basis."

With this announcement, Professional Engineering Publishing joins a growing number of publishers offering hybrid journals - that is, subscription journals that offer authors the option to pay a fee to make their research articles freely available online. Similar programs include the American Chemical Society's Author Choice, the American Physical Society's Free to Read, BMJ Unlocked, Springer's Open Choice, and Wiley's Funded Access.

For more information on hybrid journals and open access, visit the library's website about Scholarly Communication .

UC campuses now have access to the archives of Acta Mathematica (1882- ) and Arkiv for Matematik (1949- ) online. When Springer began distributing these journals for the Institut Mittag-Leffler, the Institut took down their freely-available backfiles because they were flawed. Springer has produced a new version of the backfiles, and we recently gained access to these based on our current subscriptions.

Find these electronic journals and more with the library's list of Electronic Journals A-Z.

ProQuest databases will be unavailable due to system maintenance this weekend for approximately 12 hours starting at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 21. ProQuest databases include Dissertations & Theses, Digital Sanborn Maps, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

"The Energy Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has set up a partnership with Internet Archive to provide uninterrupted access to more than a million online research papers from OSTI’s E-print Network.

The goal of the nonprofit Internet Archive is to build an Internet library that will offer permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive is also home to the Wayback Machine, a feature that shows what a given Web site looked like at different moments in its history.

OSTI worked with the Internet Archive’s archiving service, Archive-It, a Web application that helps harvest, manage, search and preserve collections of archived Web pages.

The OSTI collection is permanently archived at http://www.archiveit.org, where it can be viewed for free by the public. The E-print Network is the largest federal collection that has been preserved through Archive-It."

[Source: OSTI archives scientific data on the Web, Government Computer News - 06/29/07]

UCB students, faculty and staff now have access to the web version of the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. Access is by IP address so you should not be prompted for a password or login. Once you are at the site, click the link in the second paragraph titled “Login or use the Demo”. Once you enter a query, you actually are searching the Full database, if the system is working properly. Be sure to look at the bottom of your results page after you have entered a query, the "Demo database" text should have disappeared and only the notation, “Full database will be used if available after the first query is entered” remains.

Some people have reported difficulties in accessing the database so please note the instructions on the introductory page, especially this section: ICSD-for-WWW works with Win95 up to Mac-OSX & Linux, but not with old browsers. Do not disable popups, cookies or javascript. In the browser options, prefer to open new pages in a new window, not a new tab. If you have problems, use a modern browser like Mozilla Firefox. With Internet Explorer, please include ICSD as a "trusted site" under "security".

Also note the ICSD Conditions of Use, "Information retrieved from the database shall not be passed on to third parties not belonging to the group of authorised users."