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British Library
Listen to British scientists from the 1940s onwards talking about their work via a new, freely-available British Library online sound archive launched on November 28th. Featuring over one thousand hours of sound recordings of interviews with scientists and engineers gathered by the Oral History of British Science programme, Voices of Science has been created in association with the Science Museum, with support from the Arcadia Fund and others, including individual donors. Content includes selected audio and video clips, images, biographies and links to the full interview recordings and transcripts. I’m looking forward to listening to Geoff Tootill talking about when he worked with Alan Turing in Manchester.
Open Access
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has taken action against three of its members following a sting by John Bohannon of Science Magazine who authored and submitted a flawed paper to open-access journals. The OASPA has cited, “a lack of sufficient rigour in editorial processes”, in their blog as their reason for ending the memberships of Hikari and Dove Medical Press for at least 12 months and putting the membership of SAGE under review for six months. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have also responded to the sting, robustly defending their position and that of the OASPA, “who work hard to establish best practice among open-access publishers”.
Web of Knowledge/Google Scholar
On November 8th Against the Grain reported on a new reciprocal linking agreement between Thomson Reuters’ Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, due to roll out to all academic institutions by January 2014. Comments posted to the same article from November 20th, and much traffic on Twitter, alleged that Summon (ProQuest), Primo Central (Ex Libris), and EBSCO Discovery customers were receiving word that Web of Science content would no longer be indexed in those discovery services. Then on November 22nd Infodocket posted a Thomson Reuters letter to Web of Science customers confirming continuation of the service: “We have been in the process of evaluating our relationships with the three major discovery service providers [EBSCO/Proquest/Ex-Libris] and have decided to continue the indexing of Web of Science in them”. The original article in Against the Grain had already noted that similar services such as Elsevier’s Scopus and NIH’s Pubmed Central could also engage in reciprocal linking agreements with Google Scholar, and that Google Scholar, “has now existed for ten years without a visible business model”. Meanwhile, with an announcement on November 19th, Google Scholar launched their new “My library” tool which enables saving citations. The sequence of events has raised a lot of talking points about possible future developments to Google Scholar and what impact they could have on discovery services and their customers.
World War I
An important new online archive was launched by Welsh Government AM Huw Lewis, minister for education and skills and Business, in Merthyr Tydfil on November 28th. The project to create Cymru 1914: The Welsh Experience of the First World War has been made possible through JISC funding, led by the National Library of Wales and partnered by five Welsh universities and BBC Cymru Wales, The People’s Collection Wales and ARCW archives and local records offices. “The library and its Welsh partners are providing a really valuable, openly accessible, resource that can search collections of newspapers, images, sound and archival material both in English and Welsh” (Paola Marchionni, JISC). One of collections revealed is the wartime correspondence of Ifor Leslie Evans, a young man detained while travelling in Germany at the beginning of the World War I and who subsequently spent most of the war in a German prison camp. He learnt Welsh from a fellow inmate and many years later, in 1934, he became Principal at Aberystwyth University.
The National Archives have also announced a five-year programme of rolling online releases of digitised records, events and educational resources on their First World War portal.
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