The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) website, including its online journals, will be unavailable this weekend due to an essential upgrade. The downtime will last from 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 1 until 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 2.

AccessScience, the online version of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology and the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, recently released an upgraded version of its search interface. AccessScience also includes research updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science and Technology, biographies of more than 2,000 scientists, image and video galleries, and the latest news from Science News®.

According to their website, "The new generation of AccessScience gathers and synthesizes vast amounts of information, and organizes it to give you fast, easy and accurate access to authoritative articles in all major areas of science and technology."

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

Welcome to Berkeley on behalf of the Science & Engineering Libraries! (Or welcome back!) Many of the libraries will be offering tours and workshops during Welcome Week to help students learn about the wealth of resources available to them. Check our list of Library Events for more information.

Throughout the semester, many of the science and engineering libraries will offer additional workshops on using article databases, electronic journals, and EndNote. Links to our instruction schedules can be found at the Center for Science and Engineering Information Literacy (CSEIL).

From the American Mathematical Society (AMS) News 2007: "Readers may now view online the first century of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, from 1891 to 1991, searchable and fully integrated with the modern Bulletin [more...]."

The archive (1891-1991) is also freely available at Project Euclid. It was digitized by the Digital Mathematics Library Project of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The Mathematics Statistics Library at Berkeley also donated one of its sets of the Bulletin to this worthwhile project.

The Scientist reports on Yale's recent decision to drop its membership to BioMedCentral (BMC), an open access publisher. As noted in the article, UC Berkeley has no plans to discontinue its institutional membership.

In 2006, the California Digital Library (CDL) negotiated a "supporters membership" for the UC system, where the libraries pay a flat rate so that authors can take advantage of a 15% discount on article processing charges when publishing in the BMC open access journals. BMC journals include:

» BMC bioinformatics
» BMC evolutionary biology
» BMC genomics
» BMC molecular biology
» BMC public health
» ...and many more.

In the last 12 months, Berkeley researchers have published 50 articles in BMC journals. The member discount also applies to Berkeley authors who publish in Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central open access journals. The libraries are happy to continue supporting our researchers' use of these open access resources.

On his blog Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit reports that the editorial board of the Springer journal K-theory has resigned. They have formed the new Journal of K-theory, which will be published by Cambridge University Press at "significantly less than half [the price] of the old journal" (Another Journal Board Resigns).

This joins two other recent announcements about mathematics journals. Earlier this year, the École Normale Supérieure announced that Annales Scientifiques de l’École Normale Supérieure will no longer be published by Elsevier in 2008. The journal will be published by the Société Mathématique de France instead. In addition, the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology resigned last year and formed the new Journal of Topology at Oxford University Press. Note that Mathematical Sciences Publishers also offers the low-cost alternatives Geometry & Topology and Algebraic & Geometric Topology.

Update: Details continues to surface about the K-theory resignations. See the Nature article (Journal Presents a Mathematical Conundrum) and Peter Woit's update (Latest on K-Theory Journal Situation) for the latest information.

Recently, the UC-eLinks window was revised to make it easier to use. UC-eLinks is a tool that links you to full-text articles online from citations in article databases, Google Scholar, and more. It also helps you to look for print copies in the UC Berkeley libraries or request items from other libraries through interlibrary loan.

As a result of conducting usability tests with UC students, several changes were made to the interface. These changes include more logical grouping of services and clearer, more user-friendly labels.

If you have a citation to an article, and you want to get it online, you can also try the UC-eLinks Citation Linker. This tool allows you to enter your citation information (journal title, date, volume, page numbers) and create a link to the full-text article, if available online through our library subscriptions.

IEEE Xplore will be unavailable for approximately 12 hours starting at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 4 due to scheduled maintenance. IEEE Xplore provides access to journals, conferences, and standards published by IEEE and IET.

Update: IEEE is now estimating that IEEE Xplore will be unavailable for approximately 15 hours for service upgrades.