Reference Management and ePublishing

Tracy Kent, Digital Assets Programme Advisor and EThOS advocacy Officer, University of Birmingham ( t.k.kent@bham.ac.uk )

Referencing and E-publishing

Developments in the Open Access movement are as far ranging as the introduction of the Penny Black in 1827. This is when the emphasis for access to information changed from the receiver (of the letter) paying to the writer (of the letter) having to do so. With open access it is the writer (or author) who pays. This affects specifically the where of information delivery. In addition, it implies free access to research information, as the author pays for the review and ‘formal publishing' process. However open Access is not undisputed: Is it fair? Who will be the real winner? Are we sure we will have to pay less in the end?

Useful publishing Repositories

DoIS (Documents in Information Science) is a database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the area of library and information science. http://wotan.liu.edu/dois/

E-LIS is an archive for scientific and technical documents, published and unpublished in librarianship, information science and technology. There is an e-mail alerting service and you can submit your own material if you wish. http://eprints.rclis.org/

ROARMap provides a r egistry of Open Access archiving policies across the world which is useful for evaluating the quality of the material. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

E-books

Is open access free and legal?

The Research Information Network released a major report on the costs and funding of scholarly communication in the UK ( http://www.rin.ac.uk/costs-funding-flows ). But to help with various useful guides, try The Association of Research Libraries, which has updated its Brown-Bag Discussion Guide Series on Issues in Scholarly Communication, adding new guides on Author Rights and New Model Publications. Although American in focus, it is a useful list of guides which apply the world over and are practical in their guidance. http://www.arl.org/sc/brownbag/

If you prefer to watch info on scholarly communication rather than read, then the following might interest you....with the backing of SPARC (a campaigning open access organisation): http://www.vimeo.com/1001482 .

SURF released a new guide for scholars: How to use copyright wisely within scholarly communication.
http://www.surf.nl/en/SURFActueel/Pages/usecopyrightwisely.aspx

Referencing software

Endnote X2

This latest version of Endnote has a particularly good new feature that allows you to select any number of references, for which Endnote will locate and download relevant full-text documents. This, combined with some new reference types such as blogs and standards, reinforces the usefulness of this desktop package. References can now be sorted into SMART groups (a feature taken from ProCite), which allow you, for example, to sort the subsets of references automatically by your own criteria. The use of the automatic date stamp to track when a reference was created or updated is a useful new feature. Likewise the preview pane now has a search facility. Endnote X2 for the Mac will be available in the autumn.
http://www.endnote.com/enx2info.asp

ThoughtMesh

ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovery because it is a tagged based navigation system that users keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different websites. It's like Del.icio.us , but ThoughtMesh helps trace thematic connections between particular sections of online essays. And Thought Mesh's tags (and the meshes that connect them) are determined (or at least validated) by the authors of the pages.
http://thoughtmesh.net