Open Science

Happy Spring Break, everyone!

Since you don't have any classes this week, you might have time to watch a video of the panel presentation: "Open Science: Good for Research, Good for Researchers?" that took place at Columbia University on February 19, 2009.

The speakers are:

• Bora Zivkovic, Online Discussion Expert for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and author of "A Blog Around the Clock." (The "useful knowledge" image above is from his talk.)

• Jean-Claude Bradley, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Coordinator of E-Learning for the School of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University and a practitioner of Open Notebook Science.

• Barry Canton, founder of Gingko BioWorks and the OpenWetWare wiki, an online community of life science researchers committed to open science that has over 5,300 users.
  

They discuss some interesting issues surrounding open science. What is it? How does it work? What are the benefits?

Barbara Liskov Wins 2008 Turing Award

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Barbara Liskov, the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. from a computer-science department and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the A.M. Turing Award for 2008."

From the ACM press release:

"The award cites Liskov for her foundational innovations to designing and building the pervasive computer system designs that power daily life. Her achievements in programming language design have made software more reliable and easier to maintain. They are now the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java, and C#. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize..."

HCDE moving to Sieg Hall on March 18th

Just an FYI: the department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE), formerly Technical Communications, is moving its offices from Loew Hall to Sieg Hall on March 18, 2009.

The announcement can be found here: http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/navpeople/quickcontacts

A major new sci-tech search portal

With Scitopia.org you can search over 3.5 million documents, plus patents and government data from the following societies:

Acoustical Society of America, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Audio Engineering Society, AVS, ECS, IEEE, Institute of Physics, IUCR Crystallography Journals Online, Optical Society of America, Professional Engineering Publishing, Royal Society, Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics, SPIE, The Society for Information Display, DTIC Science & Technology, European Patents, Information Bridge, Japanese Patents, NSF Publications Database, US Patent & Trademark Office Database

This search engine is free and on the open Internet, like Google Scholar, but with less noise. It's not full-text, so in most cases you'll still have to depend on your dear old library to provide you with the content, but this looks like a great search engine to use when you're beginning your research.

According to Library Journal, its content "...includes such significant scientific papers as Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking." (Those links will open as PDFs.)

Articles delivered to your computer FOR FREE

UW Libraries is temporarily offering free desktop article delivery!

What is "desktop article delivery"?

It means libraries staff will pull and scan journal articles from print volumes held by the UW Libraries and deliver them electronically to your desktop free of charge.

This is a pilot project that will only be available from March 1st through June 30th. The purpose of the pilot is to gather data about the actual demand and costs for such a service. At the end of the academic year the results will be evaluated and we'll determine if a permanent pull and scan service is feasible.

So, if you're tired of dragging yourself to the brick and mortar library to pull and copy journal articles that aren't available electronically, this pilot is for you. Take advantage while it lasts.

For more info see: http://www.lib.washington.edu/ILL/pilot.html

Special IEEE Xplore Workshop

Wendy McCarville from IEEE will be on campus next week and will be offering a special one-hour workshop on IEEE Xplore just for UW faculty, staff, and students. She will go over new features and enhancements to IEEE Xplore and show you tips on how to get the best search results in the database. She'll also be able to answer any questions you may have about IEEE Xplore.

Workshop details:

Thursday, March 12
10:30-11:30 am in the Engineering Library Instruction Center (3rd floor of the Engineering Library)

If you would like to attend, please send an email to lcwhang at u.wash or call 206-685-8370.

Wendy will also have some great IEEE items to give away!