Scholarly Communication

Open Access Week event: “Doing Science in the Open” webcast – Tuesday at 12:30

Join us at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 25, in 90 Snell Library for a webcast on open science, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Michael Nielsen, author and an advocate of open science, will discuss opportunities for collaboration in the sciences using online tools such as blogs and wikis. In particular, the Polymath Project illustrates the possibility that such tools can be used to transform the way we work together to make scientific discoveries. Audience members will have the ability to participate in discussion via Twitter. More information about the event is available here. For a full schedule of our Open Access Week events, visit our News & Events page. Refreshments will be served.

Open Access Week: October 24-30, 2011

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fifth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. Open access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. During the week of October 24-30, the Northeastern University Libraries will host a series of events to celebrate Open Access. The events will cover a range of topics:
  • open collaboration in the sciences
  • the effects of Wikipedia and social networking on student research
  • open access works by Northeastern faculty
  • free and open college textbooks
  • data gathering and storage needs of grad students
⇒ Click here to view the full schedule of events for Open Access Week. The Library has supported Open Access in the Northeastern community since 2006 in the form of the University’s digital archive, IRis. The goal of IRis is to collect, manage, preserve, and share the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. IRis provides open access to NU researchers who want to promote and preserve their materials, to NU students who require digital storage and promotion of their dissertations and theses, to NU administrators who need to save important university records, and to anyone who is seeking information on the intellectual productivity of the Northeastern community. Since its start, IRis has expanded to hold 531 faculty publications and approximately 600 dissertations and master’s theses. And since January 1, 2010, there have been over 230,000 downloads of full-text items from IRis, which include scholarly content as well as university archival content. Building upon the success of IRis, the Library will soon offer a robust digital repository and preservation service to the campus for digital collections, images, media, and data, as well as accompanying metadata and consulting help.

Extended back files of Web of Science now available

An article on a revision of the US Government’s socio-economic index, published in 1982 in the journal, Social Science Research, has been cited by other articles in a broad array of academic journals over 300 times, with the most recent citation being from an article published in June 2011. By extending our offering of Web of Science back files from 1975 through 1992, we are able to provide Northeastern researchers with these historical statistics, allowing them to identify the most important articles, journals, institutions, and authors in their field or subject area of study. When viewing any article in the Web of Science database, a list of citations from that article are provided as well as a list of other subsequent articles and conference proceedings that cite the original article. Links connect to the full text of the cited articles when the full text is available. And don’t be fooled by the title of this database.  As the above example illustrates, Web of Science covers scholarly articles in all types of sciences that include journals in the humanities and social sciences. Visit our News & Events page to read more about this collection or visit our full listing of online databases and trials.

Use NIH RePORTER to learn about grant-funded research at Northeastern

Did you know you can easily find out about research at Northeastern that’s being funded by the National Institutes of Health? The NIH RePORTER is “an electronic tool that allows users to search a repository of NIH-funded research projects and access publications and patents resulting from NIH funding.” It’s a component of NIH’s RePORT service (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools), and it “satisfies a legislative mandate included in the NIH Reform Act of 2006 to provide the public with an electronic system to search NIH research projects using a variety of codes, including public health area of interest, and provide information on publications and patents resulting from NIH-funded research.” RePORTER shows that there are currently 96 active projects at Northeastern being funded by the NIH, from award years 2009 through 2011: Since 1987, Northeastern University researchers have worked on 1,023 NIH-funded projects: NIH RePORTER gives details of each funded project, including the award amount, the principal investigator(s), the project abstract and keywords, and any related projects or subprojects. It links each project to its published results in PubMedCentral as well as any related patents. As well as being able to search by institution, you can also search by investigator name, topic, geographic location, and specific funding agency, institute or center within NIH. If you create a free account you can receive weekly e-mailed alerts on your saved search queries (RSS is not yet available, but I hope it will be soon.) I highly recommend this resource for anyone who wants to learn more about health sciences research being conducted at Northeastern.

Marginalia as Scholarly Communication

Although we may think of scholarly communication as the process of disseminating research through formal publication or online distribution, scholars have been communicating with and responding to each other since well before the advent of the Internet or even print journals. One way in which modern scholars can understand earlier processes of communication is through the study of marginalia, or the notes to themselves or others that previous scholars have left in the margins of the texts they read. Works have been published on the marginalia of single writers, such as Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Havens, 1971), or on marginalia as a topic unto itself. H.J. Jackson has published two books on marginalia: (Note: Both titles are available as e-books to members of the NU community.) Recently, the personal library of Charles Darwin was digitized and made available freely online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Darwin himself frequently made notes in the margins of his books, and one special feature of this online collection is the full transcription of all his marginalia. Being able to read the notes that Darwin made to himself as he read gives scholars today insight into how his ideas, well, evolved over time. Marginalia were also a way for Darwin and others to share their ideas informally with their contemporaries through exchanging personal copies of their books. Of course, marginalia aren’t only created by the greatest scientific minds – one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, wrote a poem on the margin notes left by everyday readers:
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive – “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” – that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote “Don’t be a ninny” alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. — From “Marginalia” (Billy Collins) (Read the full poem here.)