Every year the Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society publishes a wonderful calendar – the Colors of Chemistry. Starting in 2010 this calendar is now available either as a free download or as an online interactive calendar.

Go to 2010 Colors of Chemistry Calendar and choose your option.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of British Columbia.

Here is my newest article – “A Library Journal Club as a Tool for Current Awareness and Open Communication: UBC case study” which oddly sees light online during the last week of 2009.

It is published in a free, open access, Canadian journal  – Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenwerk/

There are currently two very useful journal rankings SCImago and JCR. These rankings allow you to display amongst other things the h-index for a specific journal or a grouping of journals based on subject

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. There are also over 500 conference proceedings in the database.

For more information, go to SCImago

“Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.”
JCR Science Edition contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology.
JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 1,700 journals in the social sciences.

For more information, go to JCR (Journal Citation Reports)

It is important to be aware of the size of the body of literature (the number of journals and conference proceedings) being indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Journals listed in JCR are indexed in the Web of Science The larger the database, the greater the possibility that articles will be discovered, read, and hopefully cited. This is especially important for open access journals, some of which have not yet been indexed in the Web of Science.

Eigenfactor ranking is based on Web of Science data.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Science and Engineering

NYT today has an article on an issue of great importance to all science disciplines – data management. The article – “A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing” overviews the new book published by Microsoft researchers – “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery.”

The book is available in full text from Microsoft here – http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/4th_paradigm_book_complete_lr.pdf

This is a hot issue in science libraries too, as we are trying to understand how to deal with the vast amounts of digital data and whether libraries have a role to play to support, maintain and archive some of this data…

** photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/

Ron Simmer Patent and IP Expert has once agained issued his Patex Bizarre Patents Calendar.

This calendar documents the creative spirt of the human race reflected in patents.

Check out Ron’s excellent site of patent and intellectual property links at the Patex website.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

The AGU Digital Library is now available online. This collection gives you access to the archival content for the following AGU journals

Online access to the AGU Digital Library is for UBC faculty, students, and staff only.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

Great news for UBC folks:

A new $23.2 million Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) designed to advance Canada’s position as a global leader in new media, animation and games is to be hosted by the University of British Columbia.

The Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND) network will be headquartered at the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC), a joint academic collaboration between UBC, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

GRAND will offer student learning and research opportunities and comprise 30 projects clustered around five themes: new media challenges and opportunities; games and interactive simulation; animation, graphics and imaging; and cross-cutting themes of social, legal, economic and cultural perspectives and enabling technologies and methodologies. The network will involve 50 investigators along with collaborating researchers and industry partners.

http://www.science.ubc.ca/news/334

Author(s): Gerlich G (Gerlich, Gerhard)1, Tscheuschner RD (Tscheuschner, Ralf D.)
Source: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MODERN PHYSICS B Volume: 23 Issue: 3 Pages: 275-364 Published: JAN 30 2009
Abstract: The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature, it is taken for granted that such a mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper, the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Click here to read the full article.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

Please see below the backbone of our workshop. I don’t use those slides at the workshop, but they are useful as refer-to-later kind of material…

Sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz’ new book Lives in Science How Institutions Affect Academic Careers describes how the prestige of academic institutions often shapes the career of the individual.

“For all but a handful of the scientists he studies, the prestige of their institution pretty much determines their professional–and even their personal–destiny. Of the more than 4000 institutions of higher learning in the United States where a scientist can get a faculty post–ranging from world-renowned research universities to local community colleges–only a very limited number possess the resources, reputation, and connections needed for research careers at the highest levels of recognition.”

Click here for a full review of Hermanowicz’ book.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Physical Sciences and Engineering Liaison Librarian