AIP UniPHY Professional Social Network
A revolutionary new approach to networking and collaboration in the physical sciences
There's no doubt that, for the scientific community, advances in communications technology have made the Earth "flatter" by helping to eliminate the physical boundaries to collaboration in the physical sciences. Now AIP UniPHY contributes to this phenomenon, providing your patrons involved in physical science research with a new tool for communicating with colleagues, identifying potential collaborators, and keeping up with current research.
AIP UniPHY is a first-of-its-kind professional social networking platform for physical scientists that is pre-populated with profiles of individual researchers based on their publication history. AIP UniPHY enables physical scientists to connect with over 200,000 colleagues from more than 100 countries. Scientists will discover the research each of their colleagues has conducted and follow a web of connections showing each co-author with whom these colleagues have worked. AIP UniPHY reveals with whom each of these co-authors has collaborated, as well. Researchers who have published at least two papers that have been indexed in AIP's SPIN database can validate their prepopulated profile and personal network by a simple procedure after they register. AIP's SPIN database includes bibliographic records and abstracts of about two million articles from many of the major physical science journals, magazines, and conference proceeding.
Pre-populated profiles include information such as the number of articles a person published in a given year, what specific fields these papers were in, and the number of co-author connections each has. Even individuals without pre-populated profiles are welcome to register on AIP UniPHY. They'll then be able to search for and connect to colleagues profiles and establish their own contacts.
AIP UniPHY at a Glance
- Enables physical scientists to analyze the profiles of more than 200,000 colleagues
- Allows researchers to explore their personal networks – starting with their direct co-authors and moving on to the co-authors of their co-authors
- Lets researchers identify and connect directly with individuals whose expertise they may need in future collaborations
By providing a website with pre-populated profiles that researchers can easily validate themselves, AIP hopes to facilitate the process by which they network and share data. We also hope that this will both increase the number of significant breakthroughs made across a range of disciplines, and decrease the time it takes to bring these innovations about.
SCITATION C³ ONLINE JOURNAL PLATFORM
Delivering Innovation across a Full Range of Subscription Products
C³ has arrived! Scitation's next-generation online hosting platform incorporates two critical pieces of infrastructure – an XML content server, with powerful content storage, access, and product development capabilities, and a robust web content management system, with strong contextual and connection capabilities. These components work together to connect your patrons with meaningful content in the context they choose and deliver the tools they need to interact with that content.
AIP is acutely aware of the sea change in usage habits that has researchers transitioning in ever-increasing numbers to the online editions of our journals. Take one look at the beta versions of any of our newly redesigned journal homepages, hosted on the C³ platform, and you'll see that they're no longer tied so closely to the linear design of their print counterparts. The new look – and new functionality – reflects our understanding that researchers today expect to find the information they need quickly and conveniently. Toward this end, C³'s XML infrastructure reduces discovery and reading time and makes it easy to connect similar concepts by exposing related content, even without user interaction.
Search has been enhanced as well, with more options and better controls to explore returned content with faceted results and the ability to expand or collapse additional data. In addition, users can search on peer-reviewed content, editorial/site content, or choose between them.
The new C³ journal pages have also been designed to automatically detect mobile devices and redirect to the mobile editions on devices such as the Google Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPod touch, and devices running Windows Mobile, among others. Researchers will find these versions to be excellent traveling companions, each with a clean, streamlined design that avoids elements that can make navigation cumbersome.
Along with improved accessibility options and user-friendly URLs, there are many other enhancements that we invite you and your patrons to discover as you explore our publications. These enhancements let researchers:
- Share articles on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites
- Browse all articles related to the one they're reading right from the article's abstract
- View the core components of figures and tables from the abstract page
- See an outline based on an article's sections and subsections on the HTML abstract
Our Scitation's C³ platform is continually evolving, so please check upcoming newsletters and our Twitter feed for more updates.
SCITATION eBOOKS HOSTING
A new electronic resource speeds discovery of valuable content for your patrons
The phenomenal rise in interest currently surrounding eBooks, coupled with a forecast of strong growth in the future, makes it likely that more and more of this new media is finding its way into your collection. What's behind this meteoric rise? No doubt a major factor is the demand for portable, convenient content, which is part and parcel of a growing trend among publishers to provide multi-publication content, with delivery options more closely tailored to end users' needs.
Just this past month, SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, launched an eBooks website on AIP's Scitation C³ platform. The site (http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ebooks) delivers content in a number of ways, including subscription and pay-per-view for books or chapters, and can mix and match eBooks with journals, conference proceedings, and other publications. The ability to provide your patrons with an increased amount of content in electronic form will facilitate discovery for them and spur overall use of your online subscriptions. SPIE offers its eBooks in three collections – Classics, Recent, and New – with pricing on the same tiered basis as the core SPIE Digital Library. To see institutional prices for 2009-2010, go to http://dlinfo.org/ebooks.aspx.
The capabilities eBooks offer are enabled by leveraging the enrichment and discovery tools of Scitation's new C³ infrastructure, setting the stage for content mixing, faceted browsing, guided search, and new features that allow researchers to find related content across a given publisher's website in a rich, user-focused environment. In addition, user activity is tracked and made available to subscribing institutions through AIP's COUNTER-3 compliant usage statistics service.
The growing popularity of eBooks is hardly surprising, and mirrors the demand by researchers, and indeed the public at large, for content that is in a flexible format and that provides greater latitude for manipulating the information provided. Check back with us from time to time, because in 2010, AIP will be launching eBooks sites for Society of Exploration Geophysicists and other scholarly publishers.
SCITATION LIBRARY SERVICE CENTER
Helping Librarians Manage Their Online Accounts Easily and Efficiently
The Scitation Library Service Center (SLSC) provides library administrators with the tools needed to administer the online journals to which they subscribe. From this unified site, librarians can:
- View a comprehensive list of subscribed publications
- Submit OpenURL syntax
- Manage IP addresses
- Access the COUNTER 3-compliant usage reports
In addition to the account management tools listed above, you can visit the SLSC to access help files and other resources, contact and licensing information for all the publishers whose content is hosted on Scitation, details about using the Scitation link resolver, and more.
Aside from providing a one-stop shopping site for day-to-day customer service functions, the Scitation Library Service Center offers support for the OpenURL standard by allowing you to register your resolvers through an online interface, The OpenURL standard enables a user following an article link to access the 'most appropriate' copy of that article based on librarian preferences. This selection is transparent to the user.
Library administrators can log into the SLSC to take care of a number of issues related to their IP addresses. They can view all the IPs associated with their account and request the addition, updating, or removal of an IP. They can also view a list of IPs under suspension and enter an explanation for the causal behavior, with the goal of having the suspensions lifted. The ability of AIP staff to deal with these individual requests from a single site significantly reduces the time it takes to resolve each case.
To visit the Scitation Library Service Center, go to http://librarians.scitation.org/.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF FREE TRIALS OF AIP JOURNALS
For more information, please contact Bruce Shriver at bshriver@aip.org or 1 516-576-2623.
From the Stacks
Lisa Johnston is the Physics, Astronomy and Geology Librarian at the University of Minnesota. She earned an MLS from Indiana University Bloomington, where she also earned a BS in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lisa is the web reviews editor of SLA's SciTech News. At UMN, she writes two patron-facing blogs, Physics and Astronomy Library News and Geology Library News. We wanted to speak with Lisa about her blogging and some of the Web 2.0 tools in use at UMN's Walter Library.
We enjoy reading your Physics and Astronomy Library News blog. Can you tell us about its inception, how you use it and how engaged your readers are?
I started blogging about library news early in 2008 and it started as more of an experiment to test out new communications strategies. Meeting with the faculty and speaking to classes you get a sense of how busy everyone is. I wanted to make library news as open and available as possible, but without filling up everyone's in-box, so a blog has been a great way to do this. Not only can I describe new books added to the physics and astronomy collections, but I also report on the latest issues or tools from the library community such as open access projects like SCOAP3 or even fun information tools like iPhone apps for arXive.org. Also, in order to reach everyone who might not be up-to-speed with blogs and RSS readers, I supplement my postings with the occasional brief email with upcoming library workshop information and teaser links to the latest blog posts. The social web is too big for anyone to keep track of, so I try to keep it as easy as possible.
Interacting with my users via the blog is great. I track readership to see which topics are most read (author's rights and copyright is a big hit!) and seeing the occasional comment like "Thanks for doing this" can be a real boost. When the chair of the physics department is responding to your thoughts on the scholarly publishing system, you know that something must be working. Best of all, I think the blog and the topics discussed, helps redefine some readers' perception of the library; it demonstrates that librarians face problems, and just like researchers, we are working on solutions to the everyday challenges of this digital information world.
We like Walter Library's Facebook page and we recently started following the Library's Twitter feed. How are these working for you, and are you using any other social networking sites to reach your patrons?
Facebook has been a great way to promote our events, like workshops, which take place year-round in the science and engineering library. Our invites get delivered automatically to all of our 70+ fans. Plus, with Facebook's advertising service, we know that we can reach our target audiences of people on campus. However, Facebook hasn't worked in all the ways that we expected. We started this project with the hope of creating a space for virtual reference, but so far, the students haven't made that connection – and that's ok. I think like most libraries we are still struggling to find what works in the Web 2.0 world, what has staying power and what just misses the mark.
Interestingly, what has really worked was a Facebook parody poster display that we created called "FaceTime."Using the look of the Facebook website, we create a rotating display of featured science and engineering faculty members. FaceTime highlights the professor's area of interest, his "friend" collaborators on campus, and his favorite library resources. Our interviews with faculty take no time at all and the best part, the students are just drawn to it!
How do you prepare for "Web Reviews," your quarterly newsletter column in SLA's SciTech News?
Discovering and writing about useful web resources can be challenging, but sharing them is the fun part. I always like to have one or two "cool new tools" to demonstrate to patrons at the reference desk or to colleagues outside the library. I think that librarians are natural techies. Our skills of information management combined with our need to help others magically put us on the cutting edge of the latest web tools. Our users are so impressed by that! And librarians, unlike our students who want just one "amazing" database and not a choice of 10, we want a wide range of resources that can help us, and our patrons, improve their digital life. So I try to tackle topics like collaborative software and web-based social citation managers that appeal to the everyday business of being a librarian. Often times I can take my research for an article and turn it into a workshop for library users. For example, the piece on Google tools librarians can learn to love, lent itself perfectly for the workshop we now call "Google for researchers." And I'm hoping that the column helps others do the same.
MapHappy seems to be a very useful tool for making your collection discoverable through a user-friendly interface. What inspired you to create it, and do you have any other mashups in the works?
Like most projects, I was inspired by what other librarians had done; in this case it was a beautiful map mashup by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. After seeing that I emailed a couple of my colleagues here and asked, "How hard can it be to geocode our entire map collection and display it on a Google map?" Well, it was hard, but we did it! Using API's to build custom library tools is something that any librarian should try. It's a lot of fun tweaking and developing the user-interface to meet the more sophisticated demands of our digitally-savvy users. In fact, the biggest complaint in user-testing has been "I thought all the maps would be online [digital]." We'll get there one day, it just takes time.Other projects in the works?
Lots! The next project I'd like to do with the maps is take the born-digital maps produced by our state's geological survey and overlay them in a KML file for display and exploration in Google Earth. Also, still in the idea stage, I'd like to mash-up our reference eBooks with what's called a cover flow visualizer, so users can browse the electronic reference collection like they would flip through albums on their iPod. Reference print collections in libraries don't circulate for a reason – so they are always accessible when people need them. Now that they are increasingly available electronically – they should be flying off the virtual shelf, but that's not generally the case. I think if we make browsing possible, and fun, people might have better access to all the great stuff we have.
A NEW APP LETS RESEARCHERS DOWNLOAD AND STORE ARTICLES ON THEIR IPHONE OR IPOD TOUCH
Thanks to iResearch, your patrons can now read AIP article content offline and store articles locally. All they need do is log on to your network and open the iResearch app. They can browse by issue and when they find an article they'd like to download, from a journal to which you subscribe, they can simply click on it. A PDF of that article will appear on their iPhone or iPod touch screen, and they can then save the article by clicking the "Save Locally" button. The PDF is saved on their Apple device and may be read at any time without a wireless or Wi-Fi connection. AIP's iResearch app is free to download from the iTunes Store or from AIP's website at http://scitation.aip.org/iphone.
AIP JOURNALS DOMINATE THE FIELD OF APPLIED PHYSICS
Four journals in applied physics published by AIP produced more than a quarter of the total articles in the field in 2008, and garnered nearly half of all the cited references, even though they constitute only 4% of the titles indexed in applied physics by Thomson Reuters.
Two AIP journals, Applied Physics Letters and Journal of Applied Physics, were once again ranked as the first and second most highly cited journals in their category. Since the first issue of Journal of Applied Physics in 1931, these publications have covered important breakthroughs in applications of physics to all branches of science, engineering, and technology. In 2008, Applied Physics Letters, the #1 most highly cited of the 95 journals Thomson Reuters tracked in applied physics, recorded 179,925 citations, and Journal of Applied Physics tallied 113,773 citations. A third AIP journal, Review of Scientific Instruments, moved into the "Top 5"most-cited titles in applied physics in 2008.As a result, AIP accounts for 28% of the applied physics articles indexed by Thomson Reuters, and 44% of the total citations.
AIP is also pleased to announce the results of JCR rankings for a number of its other highly respected journals:
- The Journal of Chemical Physics was the most highly cited of the 31 journals in the Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Physics category, nearly equaling the total number of citations to the next three journals combined. Out of all 314 physics journals in JCR, The Journal of Chemical Physics was the fourth most highly cited, with a total of more than 164,000 citations.
- Review of Scientific Instruments is now the most highly cited of the 56 journals in the Instruments & Instrumentation category.
- Physics of Plasmas was the most highly cited journal dedicated entirely to plasma physics.
- Physics of Fluids was the second most highly cited of the 112 journals in the Mechanics category.
- Biomicrofluidics, a new electronic-only journal that launched in 2007, debuted as the ninth-ranked journal in the Physics, Fluids and Plasmas category, and recorded an impressive first Impact Factor of 2.318 overall.
AIP JOURNAL CATALOG NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
We're pleased to let you know that the 2010 AIP Member Societies & Publishing Partners journal catalog, which includes publications from some of the world's most prestigious scholarly publishers, is now available online. To request a print copy of the catalog, or to view or download a PDF of the catalog, go to: http://www.aip.org/journal_catalog/.
IMITATION ISN'T ALWAYS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
Crosscheck Aids in Verifying the Originality of Scholarly Content
AIP now indexes all of its journal content in CrossCheck, an initiative of CrossRef that helps scholarly publishers verify the originality of submitted manuscripts by checking them against a vast database of proprietary and open web content. Launched just over a year ago, the service proved so successful that it was awarded the 2008 ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation.
CrossCheck allows editors and publishers to check manuscripts against its own database or against work submitted by other publishers participating in the program. Reports show the percentage of a document that matched other content, where that content came from, and the matching content itself. At present, the CrossCheck database covers more than 25,000 publications from 50 participating publishers. The number of journal articles covered is well into the millions, with more being added at an accelerating rate.
SCITATION USAGE REPORTS ARE NOW COMPLIANT WITH COUNTER RELEASE 3
We're pleased to let you know that our Scitation Usage Report Service (SURS) (http://scitationreports.org) is now fully compliant with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases. For anyone unfamiliar with Project COUNTER, it is an international initiative that provides standardized guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers.
The main objective of Release 3 is to improve the reliability of the COUNTER usage reports by incorporating new protocols designed to mitigate the potentially inflationary effects on usage statistics of federated and automated search engines, internet robots, crawlers, etc. Other important aims are to provide tools that will facilitate the consolidation, management and analysis of the COUNTER usage statistics; to improve the COUNTER usage reports for library consortia; and to better report the usage of journal archives.
Release 3 represents Project COUNTER's attempt to make the sweeping changes needed to meet these objectives. These include:
- Implementation of the XML-based SUSHI protocol, which allows for the automated retrieval of COUNTER usage reports into local systems.
- Usage reports in XML, in addition to the existing prescribed formats (Excel, CSV, etc.).
- Reports on the number of successful full-text article requests from our journal archives by month and journal, or by year of publication and journal.
- Separate reports on search and session activity generated by federated search engines and automated search agents.
- Two new reports for library consortia that are specified only in XML format.
- Separate reports that isolate federated and automated searches from bona fide searches by genuine users.
With Release 3, you'll find many new changes to the Scitation Usage Report Service. We hope they're helpful in monitoring your patrons' online activity and in evaluating your subscription choices.
SEE US AT THESE UPCOMING EVENTS
| CONFERENCE | LOCATION | DATES |
|---|---|---|
| Charleston Conference | Charleston, SC | Nov 4 - 7 |
| AVS International Symposium and Exhibition | San Jose, CA | Nov 8 - 13 |
| Materials Research Society Fall Meeting | Boston, MA | Nov 30 - Dec 4 |
| Online Information 2009 | London, UK | Dec 1 - 3 |
| ALA Midwinter Meeting | Boston, MA | Jan 15 - 19, 2010 |
STAY CURRENT WITH WHAT'S HAPPENING AT AIP
Subscribe to AIP Library Matters
Subscribe to AIP Library Matters and we'll send each quarterly issue as soon as it's ready. We'll keep you abreast of new AIP products and services, industry initiatives, upgrades to our Scitation hosting platform, and include an interview with one of your colleagues on a topic you're sure to find interesting. To subscribe or to modify your existing subscription, or, read past issues of AIP Library Matters, go to http://librarians.aip.org/newsletter.html. If you have any comments about this newsletter, please contact Bruce Shriver at bshriver@aip.org or 1 516-576-2623.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT!
There are many physical science journals out there competing for your institution's dollar, and we want you to know how much we appreciate your choosing AIP. We hope you received your 2010 renewal notice by now, and that if you haven't, you'll get in touch with us. If you have any questions regarding your renewal notice or your subscriptions, please contact us via e-mail at subs@aip.org, by phone from the U.S. and Canada at 1-800-344-6902 or from other locations at 1 516-576-2270.
