Beyond Impact Factor: Panel & Discussion

Beyond Impact Factor: Understanding & Supporting Scholarly Work in the New Academy
Wednesday, June 9, 2010, 9am-12:30pm
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, UNC

The UNC Libraries' Scholarly Communications Committee invites you to a half-day panel and discussion, exploring alternative forms of scholarly output and their impact on academia. Please register by Friday, June 4. Beverages and refreshments will be served.

Panelists include:

Gary Marchionini (moderator), Dean, School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Phil Edwards, Instructor in School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Molly Keener, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Wake Forest University
Erin O'Meara, Electronic Records Archivist, UNC
Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke

JournalTOCs a Useful Current Awareness Tool

JournalTOCs is the largest, free and searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) in the world. It contains TOCs for over 14,000 journals collected from over 500 publishers. JournalTOCs has taken special care to include all the highest rated journals in their fields, guaranteeing quality results. The content of JournalTOCs is directly collected using the URLs for TOC RSS feeds provided by publishers.

JournalTOCs is for anyone who's looking for the latest or most current papers published in the scholarly literature with international coverage. Academics, librarians, students, researchers, and anyone else should find it useful.

Developers can use the JournalTOCs API (application programming interface) to embed our search functionality within their web applications to make the most of the journal TOC RSS feeds metadata. Anyone with access to RSS Readers can also use the JournalTOCs API.

JournalTOCs is an initiative of the ICBL at Heriot-Watt University and is being managed by Santy Chumbe.

Read more . . .

Social History of Medicine Journal Seeks New Co-Editor

Social History of Medicine seeks a new co-editor to join Graham Mooney (co-editor), Anna Crozier (book reviews editor), and Ruth Biddiss (assistant editor). The new co-editor will succeed Bill Luckin, who will retire at the beginning of 2011.

Social History of Medicine is the leading international journal in itsf ield and covers all aspects of the social, cultural and economic history of medicine. It is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. The journal appears three times annually but we are currently exploring options toexpand to four issues per year.

We are looking for a experienced, competent and well established medical historians who will ensure editorial cohesion. Expertise in all areas of history of medicine and/or time-periods will be considered but we are in particular looking for candidates with a background in pre-1800 and/ornon-Western history of medicine.

Applicants are asked to send a C.V. and statement of interest to the Chair of the Society, Dr Lutz Sauerteig, Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University,Queen's Campus, Stockton-on-Tees TS17 6BH, UK (l.d.sauerteig@durham.ac.uk).

The application should provide a brief account of why the candidate is attracted to the post, an outline of what they would contribute to SHM, and a synopsis of their relevant experience. Informal enquiries about the nature of the post can be made by e-mail to Graham Mooney (gmooney3@jhmi.edu) or Bill Luckin (billluckin@googlemail.com).

Further details about the journal and the Society for the Social History of Medicine can be found at the Society's web site. The search is open until the position has been filled.

Fine Books & Collections Back in Print

Fine Books & Collections has now returned to print with the publication of its Spring 2010 issue. Among the items in the latest issue are:

:: Dard Hunter's passion for paper;
:: Biblio 360, a comprehensive guide to book-related events;
:: Edward Stratemeyer's life in New York;
:: Nicholas Basbanes interviews the new archivist of the United States;
:: A look into Baldwin's diary.

Subscription and other information is available on the magazine's web site.

See related post: Fine Books & Collections Returning to Print.

Dean Gasaway Tribute Symposium: Digital Publication and Libraries

The North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology of the UNC School of Law presents:

The Dean Laura N. Gasaway Tribute Symposium: Digital Publication and Libraries

Please join us in honoring Dean Laura "Lolly" Gasaway's three decades of service to copyright, libraries, and the legal and scholarly community.

March 19, 2010
1:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
The Carolina Inn
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Admission is free

The Symposium will comprise four consecutive panels:

:: Copyright and Libraries: The Challenge (Donna Nixon moderating)
Deborah Gerhardt - University of North Carolina
Julie Cohen - Georgetown University
Jessica Litman - University of Michigan
Sally Wiant - Washington & Lee University
Madelyn Wessel - University of Virginia

:: Copyright and Digital Distribution (Anne Klinefelter moderating)
Kate Spelman - Cobalt
Nancy Wolff - Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, LLP
Llew Gibbons - University of Toledo
Jon Baumgarten - Proskauer Rose, LLP

:: §108 and Google Book Search Revisited (Peter Hirtle moderating)
Laura Gasaway - University of North Carolina
Dick Rudick - Copyright Clearance Center
Glynn Lunney - Tulane University
Tony Reese - University of California at Irvine

:: §108 Lessons Learned (David Harrison moderating)
Mary Beth Peters - U.S. Register of Copyrights
Mary Rasenberger - Policy Advisor for U.S. Copyright Office & OSI
Kenny Crews - Columbia University
Ann Bartow - University of South Carolina

For more information, please visit the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology web site.

Fine Books & Collections Returning to Print

February 1, 2010, Durham, NC. Fine Books & Collections magazine, which targets collectors of rare and collectible books, will return to a regular print schedule in April 2010.

The magazine had suspended its bi-monthly publication schedule in November 2008, but published an edition in Fall 2009. Based on very positive results, the publishers will return the magazine to print on a quarterly basis. The annual subscription price will be $25.

In announcing its plans, the magazine said it would continue its monthly e-letter online and its very popular blog. According to associate publisher Kim Draper, the web site has grown tremendously in the past year, having just topped 50,000 monthly visitors.

"We don't hope to achieve as much readership in print, but we do think print has a certain charm and value that is impossible to obtain online," says Draper. "It remains a conundrum why collectors of print love reading online, but we are delighted to be able to serve both needs."

The online editor, Rebecca Rego Barry, will also serve as editor of the print edition. According to Barry, the content of the magazine will be a collection of some material used online as well as new features, columns, and resources that will not appear online. "We are intrigued with the idea of archiving some of our best online stories in a print format, but we will also be offering readers new content in each issue. It was a formula that worked very well for us with the edition we published last fall."

The magazine said that it plans some operational changes to make publishing more affordable, most notably that it will not process any subscription without a valid email address. According to Draper, "When we looked at our operation, we realized that contacting people via the postal service was just too expensive. We plan to handle all renewals and communication efforts via email, so there's really no point in having a subscriber with whom we can't communicate."

Writers in the upcoming print edition will include Nicholas Basbanes and Joel Silver, two stalwarts of the book collecting world. The magazine will continue its annual directory of booksellers started last fall that featured more than 700 book-related businesses, and it will add a feature called Biblio/360, an annual guide to classes, societies, fairs, and symposiums related to book collecting.

Digital Publishing at UNC Press

The program for the December meeting of the UNC Scholarly Communication Working Group will be "What's New with Digital Publishing at UNC Press." Dino Battista, Senior Director of Marketing at UNC Press, will describe some ongoing and new publishing programs at the press, such as ebooks, bringing out-of-print books back into print as print-on-demand titles, large-print editions, and audio books.

When: 12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m., Thursday, December 10, 2009

Where: Room 214, Davis Library

The Scholarly Communication Working Group is sponsored by the Odum Institute. For more information about the group, visit their web site.

International Open Access Week

The first International Open Access Week will take place October 19-23, 2009. The Open Access movement aims to promote free, online access to content that has traditionally been available on a subscription or fee basis. Many examples of open access journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently tallies 4,371 journals world-wide. BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are among the leading publishers that make scientific and medical literature freely available to the public.

The UNC Health Sciences Library has long been a strong supporter of Open Access, and a number of useful Open Access and Scholarly Communication resources can be found on the HSL web site. Beginning in April 2008, Congress mandated that National Institutes of Health-funded researchers must submit articles produced from such funding to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. To facilitate this process, HSL has prepared an NIH Public Access Policy Toolkit, and also manages a fund to support Open Access publishing fees.

On Monday, October 19, the UNC Libraries Scholarly Communication Committee will be sponsoring a panel on Perspectives on Open Access, which will feature Phil Edwards, UNC School of Information and Library Science; Kate McGraw, UNC Health Sciences Library; James Boyle, Duke Law School; and Kevin Smith, Duke Scholarly Communications Officer. The event will be held in Room 214, Davis Library, from 3:30-4:30pm, and is open to the public.

ICMJE Adopts Uniform Format for Financial Disclosures

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has adopted a uniform format for the disclosure of financial associations of authors. To date, different journals have had different reporting requirements, which has led to inconsistencies and confusion regarding potential conflicts of interest. The new form [PDF] is available on the ICMJE web site, as is a sample completed form [PDF].

Editorials announcing this new approach are being published by all journals that are members of the ICMJE. In this editorial, it is stated:

We ask authors to disclose 4 types of information. First, their associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work reported in the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section of the form is the life span of the work being reported). Second, their associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the general area of the submitted manuscript (the time frame for disclosure in this section is the 36 months before submission of the manuscript). Third, any similar financial associations involving their spouse or their children younger than 18 years of age. Fourth, nonfinancial associations that me be relevant to the submitted manuscript.

The ICMJE is also soliciting feedback about the new form until April 10, 2010, and is calling this interval a period of beta testing. The ICMJE will be meeting in late April 2010, and will make any needed changes at that time.

Banned Books Week 2009

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year, and for 2009 it runs from September 26 to October 3. Established in 1982, this annual American Library Association (ALA) event urges citizens not to take the fundamental democratic freedom of reading for granted.

First Amendment rights protect the unhindered access to information that is essential to a free society. Banned Books Week celebrates freedom of expression, for both authors and readers, and serves as a reminder that attempts at bans, restrictions, and censorship of books are ongoing. According to the American Library Association, over 500 books were challenged in 2008 alone; for further information, visit the ALA website.

Scientific, medical & health-related books are of course no exception to controversy and have also been challenged over the years, including such notable works as Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . . . (1859), Margaret Sanger's Family Limitation (1914), and more recent titles such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

Ranking Journals in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

The editors of over 50 journals in the history of the science, technology, and medicine have published a joint editorial in their respective publications entitled, “Journals Under Threat: A Joint Response from History of Science, Technology and Medicine Editors,” in protest of the European Science Foundation’s (ESF) proposed European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). The background for ERIH is described on the ESF web site as follows:

Anecdotally, it is widely assumed that much of Europe’s Humanities research is first class. However, it is not possible to easily gather or access empirical data to support this claim. Nor is it possible to compare Humanities excellence with other sciences. . . . Nevertheless, in the view of funding bodies such as the ERC, it is becoming increasingly important to identify and compare Humanities excellence at a supra-national European level.

ERIH intends to contribute to the creation of appropriate tools to achieve this and operates as a process led by academics for academics. At present, it is a reference index of the top journals in 15 areas of the Humanities, across the continent and beyond. It is intended that ERIH will be extended to include book-form publications and non-traditional formats, and will also form the backbone of a fully-fledged research information system for the Humanities. This would be the first step towards the development of a framework that will enable Humanities excellence to be assessed and verified.

The editors, however, assert that the ERIH “initiative is entirely defective in conception and execution.” The ESF has employed expert panels to rank humanities journals into three tiers (A, B, and C) as part of the initial lists for the index, and as noted in the joint editorial, journals in the History and Philosophy of Science were evaluated by a committee of four, which the editors state “cannot be considered representative.” They also cite the 2007 report by the British Academy, “Peer Review: The Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences,” that concludes that “the European Reference Index for the Humanities as presently conceived does not represent a reliable way in which metrics of peer-reviewed publications can be constructed.”

The editors make the following public demand:

Along with many others in our field, this journal has concluded that we want no part of this dangerous and misguided exercise. This joint Editorial is being published in journals across the fields of history of science and science studies as an expression of our collective dissent and our refusal to allow our field to be managed and appraised in this fashion. We have asked the compilers of the ERIH to remove our journals titles from their lists.

In response to the joint editorial, the ESF this month posted “The European Reference Index to the Humanities: A Reply to the Criticism,” an attempt at reconciliation which concludes:

ERIH is led by scholars for scholars and the feedback mechanism enables scholars to communicate their views directly to the Expert Panels, and to the Steering Committee. The feedback that is being submitted by individual scholars and scientists as well as by expert communities will have an important role in the updating of the “Initial Lists”. In full recognition of the early stage of the process, and the shortcomings of the present version of the ERIH, we would like to ask the editors of journals to reconsider their decision not to contribute to the process, and to let the project benefit from their critique and comments.

Among the journals participating in the joint editorial are the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (the organ of the American Association for the History of Medicine), Medical History, Social History of Medicine, Early Science and Medicine, and dozens of others.

BMJ Offers Prize for Use of Its Online Archive

To celebrate online access to all research articles since the first published in October 1840, BMJ, or the British Medical Journal, is offering a 1,000-pound prize to the "most interesting use" of its archive. Entrants to the competition must describe their actual use of the archive in an article that is submitted by the September 30, 2009 deadline. Complete guidelines are available at the BMJ site.

To highlight some of the many influential contributions to medical scholarship and practice that have appeared in its pages over the years, BMJ is also producing a series of videos that describe the work of such people as James Simpson (chloroform), Joseph Lister (antisepsis), Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson (mosquitoes and malaria), Richard Dahl (smoking and cancer), Alice Stewart (x-rays and leukemia), and others. The first video in the series, "The Evidence," is now available online.

BMJ began as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal in 1840 and after various name changes became the British Medical Journal in 1857. BMJ was the first general medical journal to participate in PubMed Central, which offered to digitize and provide open access to the journal's back issues. Initial difficulties included assembling a complete run of the journal in all its incarnations as well as overcoming the many technical issues inherent in digitizing historical materials, such as poor paper quality and bleed-through during scanning.

The National Library of Medicine, and later, the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee, provided financial support for the project, with an estimated expense of $1 per page for the 824,183 total pages of the print journal. At present, BMJ is available both at the BMJ web site and at PubMed Central. Access to article type, however, varies between the two resources. In January 2006, BMJ stopped offering free online access to non-research articles, although research articles are still available from the time of publication at both bmj.com and PubMed Central. Further information on the online archive can be found in a recent BMJ editorial.

The History of Eugenics in North Carolina

In North Carolina over 7,600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1974 under the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program. Indiana was the first state to implement such a program, and eventually over 30 states followed suit, including North Carolina in 1929. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina reviewed petitions for sterilizations and authorized sterilizations in over 90% of cases. Of those sterilized, approximately 38% were black and 84% were female; moreover, 71% were classified as “feebleminded.” While most states’ sterilization programs diminished in scope after World War II, almost 80% of North Carolina’s cases occurred after 1945. By the late 1960’s over 60% of those sterilized in North Carolina were black and 99% were female.

North Carolina Governor Michael Easley established a committee to investigate the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program, and currently the General Assembly of North Carolina is considering two bills: House Bill 21, Eugenics Program – Support and Education and Senate Bill 179, Sterilization Compensation.

House Bill 21 is: “An act to provide counseling benefits to eugenics survivors, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a database of eugenics program participants and verify the status of persons contacting the state to determine their participation in the state program, to erect a historical marker about the program, to direct the State Board of Education to include information about the program in its K-12 history curriculum, to recommend creation of an ethics training module for state, county, and local government employees, and to direct the Department of Cultural Resources to digitize existing records for preservation and study purposes, as recommended by the House Select Committee on Compensation for Victims of the Eugenics Sterilization.”

Senate Bill 179 proposes that: “Any person who, as a result of the eugenic sterilization program in this State, was sterilized between the years of 1929 and 1975 shall receive compensation as provided for in this section if the person submits a claim before June 30, 2012."

The current status of both bills, as for any pending legislation, can be tracked online at the web site of the General Assembly of North Carolina: House Bill 21 and Senate Bill 179.

Readers interested in learning more about this topic can visit Eugenics in North Carolina, a web project of the State Library of North Carolina. The Winston-Salem Journal also has an online eugenics project, entitled Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization Program.

In addition, Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library, in collaboration with the Carolina Digital Library and Archive, has digitized all volumes of the Biennial Report of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina [1934-1966], as well as North Carolina journals and documents in public health and other areas as part of an ongoing digital initiative.

New Wendy Moore Biography on Mary Eleanor Bowes

Wendy Moore, journalist and author of The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, has just published a new biography entitled: Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore.*

Moore delivered a delightful and erudite Bullitt Club lecture on John Hunter on September 23, 2008 (see Bullitt web site for an MP3 recording), and her biography is equally so. The subject of her new book was born 260 years ago, on February 24, 1749, and was a friend and patient of Hunter's. Wedlock opens with a scene of swordplay, and is just as intriguing throughout; as described on her web site:

'Wedlock' tells the remarkable true story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, who became Britain's richest heiress on the death of her entrepreneur father when she was 11. After an unhappy first marriage to John Lyon, the 9th Earl of Strathmore, who left her a widow when he died of TB, she was lured into marrying an Irish fortune-hunter named Andrew Robinson Stoney. Squandering her money and laying waste her vast estate, Stoney--who adopted the surname Bowes on marriage--reduced Mary to a wretched, starved, petrified shadow of her former self. After suffering eight years of cruelty and torment, Mary Eleanor finally found help in the most unlikely of places. A barely credible tale of survival and triumph against overwhelming odds, 'Wedlock' reveals an eighteenth-century world of sexual intrigue, terrifying adventure and court room drama.

* As a bibliographical note, the American edition of Moore's Hunter biography is entitled: The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery. The UK edition of the Bowes biography is entitled: Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match.

Enduring Editions at UNC Press

UNC Press is launching a new series, Enduring Editions, to bring back into print many titles not currently available. More information is available at the press' blog and website. A list of projected titles can be downloaded here.

Duke University Press has made much of its backlist available electronically, as the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection, which those affiliated with UNC can access via the UNC online catalog. The collection is described in a press release.

Both presses have published a number of titles on health-related topics; for example, UNC's series, Studies in Social Medicine, and other medical books, and Duke's books on medicine and medical humanities, as well as a few medical journals.