13 May 2013

A new research repository has been announced: Zenodo which has been created through funds from the European Commission's Framework Programm 7 (FP7).

The intention of Zenodo is to provide a platform that allows researchers to share and showcase multidisciplinary research results including publications and especially data which are not part of the existing institutional or subject-based repositories currently available.

The announcement, posted on isgtw (international science grid this week), can be found here

2 Apr 2013

Papers included in the ESO Telescope Bibliography (telbib) have been enhanced with Altmetric scores. The Altmetric score is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that a scholarly article has received.

In addition, the telbib database can now be queried automatically through an API (Application Programming Interface). For more inforamtion, see http://telbib.eso.org/api-docu.php

21 Jan 2013

Recently, news was circulated regarding the idea that mathematicians will launch and run (ideally at zero cost) an open access journal, based on arXiv ("arXiv overlay journal"):

"The idea is that the parts of the publication process that academics do voluntarily — editing and refereeing — are just as they are for traditional journals, and we do without the parts that cost money, such as copy-editing and typesetting."

The plan is to start in April. The group behind the initiative consists of international mathematicians and is called the Episciences Project. If indeed a model could be found where both reading and publishing articles is free, the organizers would call this the "diamond open access".

More information can be found in Gower's Weblog and on Nature.

19 Oct 2012

A recent study published in Science (Oct. 11) brings a positive note to authors of papers that have been rejected by journals: it seems that overall, previously rejected manuscripts in the end are cited more often. The research is based on a survey among 80,000 authors of life science papers.

A scientist who was interviewed for a report on the study in the online magazine The Scientist found the following possible explanation:
“Papers that are more likely to contend against the status quo are more likely to find an opponent in the review system”—and thus be rejected—“but those papers are also more likely to have an impact on people across the system,” earning them more citations when finally published.

Read the Scientist report ("The Benefits of Rejection") and/or the Science paper.

18 Sep 2012

The following new journal has just been announced:

Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation World Scientific, online ISSN: 2251-1725 http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/ja

"JAI will publish papers describing astronomical instruments being proposed, developed, under construction and in use [...] JAI will consist of high-quality, refereed papers that are electronically accessible (open access)."

The Guidelines for Contributors (http://www.worldscientific.com/page/jai/submission-guidelines) state that article processing fees will be waived for submissions in 2012; however, they do not indicate what the price will be afterwards.

13 Sep 2012

The following new features have been added to the ESO Telescope Bibliography (telbib, http://telbib.eso.org):

(1) We implemented stabilobj, a tool that allows users to select an astronomical object in a web page and retrieve information from CDS databases like SIMBAD and VizieR. Text anywhere in the page can be selected. If it is recognized as an astronomical object, a dedicated tooltip (pop-up window) will be displayed with links to the remote databases.
stabilobj has been developed by Sebastien Derriere, CDS; a demo page is available at http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/~derriere/stabilobj/

(2) A new webpage provides an overview of ESO publication statistics (1996-2011). In order to make our statistics more transparent and reproducible, the numbers are linked to the corresponding records in the telbib database:
http://www.eso.org/libraries/telbib_pubstats_overview.html  

In addition, we continue to maintain the "Basic ESO Publication Statistics" document (available from the ESO libraries homepage or directly at http://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/edocs/ESO/ESOstats.pdf) which provides more detailed metrics including instrument-level statistics. 

16 Aug 2012

A recent post on the O'Reilly radar blog describes text mining projects using ADS abstracts of MNRAS, ApJ, and A&A back to vol. 1. They originate from the recent .Astronomy Hack Day and lead to interesting results, for instance on the use of certain keywords in the literature over time or the number of authors per paper. Some of them can be guessed, e.g., the decreasing number of single-author papers during recent years, but now there are numbers to prove it. 

One noteworthy finding is that since approx. the 1960s, there is a steep increase in the number of active research astronomers. At the same time, the number of scientific papers is increasing too, but at a slightly lower rate. In summary, this means that nowadays more astronomers are needed to write the same number of papers.

The blog entry, along with an interview with Robert Simpson, one of the project leaders and some some visualizations can be found at 
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/08/data-mining-the-literature.html

11 Jul 2012

The library is organizing a session on Open Access Publishing which will take place
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 3 pm (Garching) / 9 am (Chile)
in the ESO Council Room. A video link to ESO Santiago will be provided. 

We will discuss
- why it might make sense to publish in an OA journal
- which criteria can be used to judge the quality of OA journals and publishers
- how you can identify so-called 'predatory' publishers
- what the current situation is of open access publishing in astronomy

Some background information can be found in the introductory presentation given at the Faculty meeting on June 25 (http://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/edocs/ESO/OApublishing_ESO_Faculty.pdf)

We are looking forward to a lively discussion.