Science Library Updates

A two-for-one for chemistry! Our renewal of SciFinder Scholar has given us two new upgrades!

Substructure Module (SSM)
This is a feature that some of you have requested, and was a free upgrade when we renewed. From the CAS website:

" . . . ability to include variable groups and R-groups in your structure. By default, substructure searches retrieve exact results, plus substances with additional substitution and/or ring fusion."

Two Concurrent Users
Where previously only one person from W&L was able to use SciFinder at a time, we will now have two concurrent users. This will increase access greatly, and reduce turnaways.

These upgrades will not take place until March 1. Stay tuned for software upgrades, if necessary.

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 9:25 AM | Permalink

Biochemical Journal is celebrating 100 years by providing full-text open access to all issues at http://www.biochemj.org/bj/toc.htm.

This journal is published on behalf of The Biochemical Society by Portland Press. Many of the recent issues not only provide PDF format for viewing, but also EESI-View, a new way to view journal articles. Older issues provide PDF.

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 7:53 PM | Permalink

Another open access journal has been launched: Biointerphases. Edited by Michael Grunze (University of Heidelberg), and with an editorial board including premier scientists, this will likely become another pioneer in the open access movement. Biointerphases is published by AVS.

From the journal's homepage:

The Biointerphases journal provides an interdisciplinary platform for scientific exchange among the biology, chemistry, physics, and materials sciences communities. It offers a discussion forum for rapid dissemination of scientific theories, results, and interpretations. Biointerphases serves as a global vehicle for the biomaterials interface community as well as a platform that encourages dialog between scientists and the public with respect to cogent policy issues.

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 8:48 AM | Permalink

Immediate release from Association of College and Research Libraries Science and Technology Section:

The Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (BJOC) is now included in PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov ), the world's largest digital archive of freely available full-text journal literature. PubMed Central hosts over 200 journals, mainly in the life sciences and medicine. BJOC is one of the first chemistry journals to be accepted for inclusion in the database, which will bring its articles to the attention of an enormous worldwide readership of biomedical scientists.

BJOC is published by the Beilstein-Institut, a name synonymous with quality in organic chemistry for two centuries, in co-operation with BioMed Central, the leading global publisher of open access journals. As one of the first open access journals in chemistry, BJOC allows readers free access to all content immediately upon publication. BJOC has no publication charges, is fully refereed and offers rapid publication. Authors may submit their articles online to the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Jonathan Clayden of the University of Manchester, UK. (www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc ).

Continue reading " Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry included in PubMed Central" »

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 1:05 PM | Permalink

There is a SciFinder Scholar e-Seminar, "Exploring Structure Similarity" that will be presented on March 24. (There is another scheduled to be presented on April 4.) The 1-hour seminar will focus on the newest feature of SciFinder, similarity structure searching:

• Why similarity structure searching can enhance your research process
• How SciFinder has implemented the Tanimoto structure similarity search algorithm
• How similarity searching functions in SciFinder
• How to use variation with control by combining similarity searching with substructure searching

Continue reading "SciFinder E-Seminar" »

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 12:52 PM | Permalink

According to ScienceCommons.org, the world's largest protein database now has a Creative Commons license. This means it is free for use by the public, and is another step into the fight for Open Access. Please read the following statement from the Science Commons blog:

Uniprot.org, the world's most comprehensive catalog of information on proteins, is now using Creative Commons licensing. We spent a lot of time talking to the Uniprot folks over the last year. I'd encourage everyone to check out the FAQ we wrote on database licensing and Creative Commons licenses to understand exactly which elements of the database are copyrighted and which are not.

But the important thing is, as the terms state, you are now free to copy, distribute, display and make commercial use of these databases, provided you give credit where it's due. That means the data, the layouts, the entry sheets, everything. Congratulations to the Uniprot consortium and to Eric Jain.

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 8:40 PM | Permalink

I have pasted a message from CAS regarding the discontinuation of older versions of SFS. Most of you already use the 2006 version, but if you have not upgraded, please do so. If you need assistance installing or upgrading, please let me know and I will do the magic.

On March 31, 2005, CAS will discontinue access to versions of SciFinder Scholar older than v 2006, regardless of whether they are for Mac or PC.

To download the software go to http://my.cas.org and using your administrative id log in and upgrade to SciFinder Scholar 2006.

SciFinder Scholar 2004.2 is the only version that will be available for Mac 0S 9 users. So users who are using SciFinder 2004 still need to upgrade to SciFinder Scholar 2004.2. It is a patch for SciFinder Scholar 2004 and has enhancements as well.

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 7:18 PM | Permalink

We now have access to Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Full text is available from 2006 on, and abstracts are available from 1994. If you have a personal AGU membership, you may be able to access the full text of these articles.

Continue reading "JGR: Atmospheres now available" »

Posted by Mary Abdoney at 9:59 AM | Permalink