Thirty-five research institutions, all members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, are posting university-produced news articles about their activities on a new web site, Futurity.org. Items include news and latest discoveries in science, engineering, society, health, and the environment. UC Berkeley is one of the participating universities.

Adapted from a post that originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

UC Berkeley, in conjunction with four other UC campuses, is now providing access to the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL). NTRL is a searchable index of over 2 million reports from the National Technical Information Service, which archives technical reports from U.S. government agencies such as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. Easy access to full text (in PDF) is available for over 500,000 reports. NTRL is searchable by keyword or by report number. 

NTRL will replace Berkeley's current subscription to the NTIS database through CSA. Other technical reports databases can also be found through the Engineering Library's guide to technical reports.

On Monday, five major research universities - including the University of California, Berkeley - announced a new Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. The universities have each pledged to develop "durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals..." Besides UC Berkeley, the other participating universities are Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and MIT.

This compact further shows UC Berkeley's interest in open access, already expressed through our Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program to "subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication."

For more information, check out the coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Nature News has published a special issue on data sharing:

As two research communities who held meetings in May on the issue report their proposals to promote data sharing in biology, a special issue of Nature examines the cultural and technical hurdles that can get in the way of good intentions.

Contents include:

• Editorial: Data's shameful neglect
• Data sharing: empty archives
• Prepublication data sharing
• Post-publication sharing of data and tools

Adapted from a post that originally appeared in Open Access News.

All active ASTM Standards, technical publications, journals, books, and symposia papers are now available online through the ASTM Digital Library. The collections' coverage goes back to 1930 and also includes current publications.

Journals available through the Digital Library include:

• Geotechnical Testing Journal (GTJ)
• Journal of ASTM International (JAI)
• Journal of Testing and Evaluation (JTE)

Researchers looking for Redline, Historical, or Withdrawn standards should contact the Engineering Library for assistance in locating paper copies. Trying to access from off-campus? Set up the library's proxy server.