DeepDyve - a developing model for sci-tech information access?

DeepDyve is a site that allows you to search, browse, preview, and read approximately 32 million scientific, technical, and medical articles from publishers such as Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Elsevier.


Many of the journals included in DeepDyve are open access, meaning anyone can read them at no charge. However, DeepDyve also includes many journals that are typically accessed full text via subscription only. Users can preview those articles at no charge, but - much like Google's Book Search or Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature - cannot those previews can't be printed or saved. What makes DeepDyve different from other deep web search engines is the option to 'rent' the full text of an article normally available via subscription only for 99 cents. This 'rental' allows the user to view the full text of the article for an unlimited number of times for 24 hours.

DeepDyve also offers two different 'rental plans', each at different price points, allowed viewing periods, and number of downloads permitted per month. DeepDyve currently only accepts PayPal for payment, but is investigating other payment options.

Use the basic search:

or click on the 'Refine' button to the left of the Search button to refine your search using DeepDyve's advanced filters.

DeepDyve allows users to enter full sentences, or even full paragraphs, as search terms. You'll typically get a large number of results, but those can be easily narrowed using those advanced filters.

Having electronic access to scholarly information is vital to researchers and continuing research, and is important to everyone for educational and information discovery purposes. This might be an emerging model for electronic access to scientific and technical information, but is certainly still only in its beginning stages. It will be interesting to watch this type of site and see how it develops, and how it affects electronic access and scientific and technical publishing.

Check out data.gov for government statistics and info

data.gov was launched in 2009 under President Obama's Open Government initiative in order to increase public access to government databases, statistics and publications. This site includes publicly-available information provided by federally funded agencies, including NASA, but also continues to grow due to user suggestions and feedback. Notice that a particular federal agency doesn't have a site or data included in data.gov? Let data.gov know!


Users can search or browse data.gov via three catalogs: the "Raw" Data Catalog - downloadable documents in XML, CSV, and other file formats; the Tool Catalog - links to agency-specific websites, applications or tools; or the Geodata Catalog - links to various image maps, historical data sets, and other geospatial information. Click on any catalog's tab to select it (the "Raw" Data Catalog is selected below) and narrow your search by agency, category, or keyword, or browse through all of the available information.


data.gov also links to state and local data sites similar to data.gov. At present, few such sites are available.

data.gov notes that by accessing datasets or tools offered on data.gov, users agree to the Data Policy, which users should read before accessing any dataset or tool. The policy includes information on privacy, security, and public information.

U.S. Army Heritage Collection Online

Looking for some info on a period in U.S. Army history? Interested in photographs of the Civil War? Whether you're a casual history buff, or a researcher looking for technical documents or Army field manuals, the U.S. Army Heritage Collection Online might be just the place to look.

For a comprehensive search or browse of the various resources and media formats available at the site, use the 'Research Catalog' or the 'Resource Guides/Finding Aids' links near the top of the page.


However, say you're specifically interested in a visual piece of U.S. Army history. You can search or browse through photos or images of historical pieces in the Army Heritage Museum by using the 'Photos' or 'Artifacts' tabs. If you're more interested in technical documents, field manuals, or manuscripts and oral histories, check out the 'Manuscripts/Archives' or 'Military Publications' collections.

Learn more about Army and U.S. history through the U.S. Army Heritage Collection Online.

Wolfram|Alpha, a computational knowledge engine

Want to know a diffraction pattern for a circular aperture? Need to compare several different ions? Or just can't remember who sang "Stairway to Heaven"? Try Wolfram|Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base instead of searching the web and returning links.


Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine, but can certainly help with comparisons, computations, and those little trivia questions that you come across on a daily basis. Since it isn't a search engine, it does have certain limitations: it can only know things that are known, and are somehow public. It only deals with facts, not opinions. It limits the computation time for each query. And, of course, it's in continual development. However, that also means that new knowledge will continue to be added to its knowledge base, making it more valuable and helpful as it grows. Check out some of the examples to see what it can do.

Wolfram|Alpha is free for personal noncommercial use as described in its Terms of Use; try it out today!

Harvard University Library's open-access repository

Harvard University Library has announced the launch of DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), an open-access repository for papers and scholarly works written by the Harvard University community. DASH currently includes over 1,500 items, with additional items added each week. This repository gives the global research community access to Harvard-based research in topics such as biochemistry, nanotechnology, numerical analysis, thermodynamics, and more.

University departments currently contributing to DASH are the Harvard Law School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Other departments, such as Engineering and Applied Sciences, will also contribute to DASH as the repository grows. Visitors to DASH can search and browse both of these collections, and view PDFs of each submission:

Sign up for alerts and find out when new material is added to the repository - see the latest in Harvard research, as well as past scholarly works from the Harvard community, now made available through the DASH repository.

Open access, peer-reviewed journals in biology, chemistry, and physics

BioMed Central is an open access, peer-reviewed publisher of 199 journals covering topics medical and biology topics such as biotechnology, biochemistry, plant chemistry, cheminformatics, and more.


Many BioMed Central journals are citation-tracked by Scopus and Google Scholar, and many also have Impact Factors. BioMed Central also offers additional products and services that require a subscription, but the majority of BioMed Central information is open access and freely available to all. Register for free with the site for alerts and updates, as well as additional information.

BioMed Central also supports open access publishing as a sustainable model for scientific publishing, as it allows increased and more timely access to and dissemination of current and developing research:

"Authors publishing with BioMed Central retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This license allows articles to be freely downloaded from the BioMed Central website, and also allows articles to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited..."

Visit the BioMed Central website for more information, or to browse their growing journal collection. You can also visit PhysMath Central and Chemistry Central for open access chemistry, physics, and math journals.

Historical Math Monographs from Cornell University Library

The Cornell University Library Historical Mathematics Monographs is a collection of selected monographs with expired copyrights chosen from the mathematics field. These were monographs that were brittle and decaying and in need of rescue.


The collection currently consists of:

• 456 General monographs
  
• 42 Cornell Dissertations (not available for viewing due to copyright restrictions)
• 576 Math books (512 titles, 576 volumes)
• 691 New York State Historical pamphlets and monographs

Search the collection, or browse by title or author. Many of the titles in the collection are also available as print-on-demand paperbacks and can be ordered directly from Amazon.com If a title is available in print, it is labeled as 'available in print' on the browse pages:

Check out these historic materials today!

Library product trial - try Scopus today!

Scopus, an abstract and citation database, is available via a three-month product trial provided by the NASA Digital Library (NDL). Scopus covers:

• Over 16,500 titles from more than 4,000 international publishers, including coverage of
  
  • 15,400 peer-reviewed journals (including approximately 1200 Open Access journals)
  • 575 trade publications
  • 315 book series
  • Extensive conference coverage (3.6 million conference papers)

Scopus also covers 433 million quality web sources, including 23 million patents. Web sources are searched via Scirus, and include author homepages, university sites and resources such as the preprint servers CogPrints and ArXiv.org, and OAI compliant resources. Topics covered include the physical sciences, as well as life and health sciences, and social sciences.
To access the product during the trial, visit http://www.scopus.com/home.url (NASA access only). For additional information, or help with any issues accessing Scopus during the trial period, please contact the Glenn Science & Engineering Library Science Librarian at 3-5778.

Visit the Public Library of Science online

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. Everything published by PLoS in its seven journals is Open Access, and is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish. Work published by PLoS is also deposited in PubMed Central, and PLoS publications are covered and reviewed by major news organizations such as Reuters, BBC, and The New York Times. Learn more about PLoS journals and Open Access at the PLoS website.

Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) includes free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals covering a variety of subjects, including materials, mechanical engineering, optics, and more. There are currently over 3300 journals in the DOAJ, and 1100 of those journals are searchable at the article level.

Open access publications are those that do not charge individuals or institutions for access to materials. For any journal or publication to be considered for addition to the DOAJ, it must include readers' rights to not only read but to download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the material. 'Quality control' is considered to be through either peer review or editorial quality control.