AIP Journals Officially Launch on Scitation C³
Hosting platform delivers superior functionality to your patrons
It's difficult for us not to get excited about some of the really revolutionary functionality we've recently incorporated into the online versions of our 12 archival journals. You may already be familiar with some of the great new features that are now part of the "journal of record" for each.
In a nutshell, we've migrated every AIP journal to our Scitation C³ next-generation hosting platform. Central to the implementation is an agile development environment that utilizes a new Mark Logic content server and a Polopoly web content management system. With these systems in place, we've been able to infuse AIP journals with an XML-enabled functionality that most other STM publishers have yet to explore.
Key to the new design is a new object browser that allows your patrons to view all tables and figures in an article directly from the abstract view, where the majority of researchers begin their interaction with the article. Other objects from within the full-article XML, such as the article's acknowledgement section and an article outline based on the article's section structure, surface on the page providing quick access to the article's content.
AIP journals also feature a new, interactive, full-article HTML rendering, including greatly improved visual presentation of inline math. In-context links to actionable references, figures, and tables save researchers time navigating around the document. Other interactive features include the ability to highlight any term within an article to produce a list of related content.
To further facilitate discoverability, AIP journals now allow researchers to create "Smart ToCs," enabling them to tailor the TOCs to their interests, harvest citations, preview abstracts with a mouse click, and hide content that isn't relevant.
AIP has also added greater utility to the search functions of its journal pages, with more options and better controls to explore returned content with faceted results, based on article type, topic, author, keyword, PACS, journal, and publication year. Faceted search helps researchers find information quickly by presenting them with a set of filters to refine search results.
We hope that you're as excited as we are and that you'll pass the word to your patrons about how the new online editions of AIP journals will make their research more efficient and more productive.
ACCESS AIP JOURNALS ANYTIME — ANYWHERE
Publications make excellent traveling companions thanks to innovative new technologies
It wasn't long ago that when you closed the door to your home or office and stepped out into the world, you also closed a window to the world of information available on the Internet. Now, with smartphones and the like, the web is back at your fingertips wherever you go—and thanks to two new technological developments, AIP journals can be there as well.
One component of the ongoing initiative to upgrade our Scitation C³ hosting platform was the creation of new websites for each of our journals, optimized for display on mobile devices. We recognized early on in the design process that mobile users want information quickly, and they want it in a stripped-down version that loads quickly, as well. With this in mind, our new journal sites can be accessed rapidly and sport a clean, streamlined look that is absent the Flash content, huge images, and difficult navigation.
The development of a second product toward the end of 2009 proved truly breakthrough, and further solidified our position as one of the industry's leading innovators. Thanks to AIP's iResearch, a first-of-its-kind iPhone app in STM publishing, your patrons can now read AIP journal 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.
iResearch is also available for Apple's new iPad. In fact, while more than 100,000 apps can be downloaded to the iPhone, only a few hundred were available for the iPad when it launched this past week. AIP's iResearch app is free to download from the iTunes Store or from AIP's website.
AIP OPENS A NEW OFFICE IN BEIJING, CHINA
Move to benefit Chinese authors and AIP journal subscribers alike
As we've watched China rise to its current position as a major force in science and technology, AIP has been considering ways to partner and engage with the country's research community. Now AIP has opened a new office in Beijing and it's a move we envision as the first in a multi-phase plan to expand globally. Beijing was the logical choice for our first international office, as the number of scientific papers submitted to our journals from China is second only to the United States.
One of our goals is to increase the number of scientists from China who serve on the editorial boards of our journals, and we want to support important research in physics and related fields that is taking place in China. In addition, AIP is seeking to establish relationships with key academic and government organizations, explore joint publication development, and offer seminars to Chinese scientists on how to get published in Western journals.
The new AIP office is located in the Haidian District, in the center of the "Golden Triangle" of Beijing. The area is comprised of Tsinghua University, Peking University, and several major Institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The office will be headed by Xingtao Ai, a Ph.D. physicist with six years of experience at Science in China Press, a top Chinese publishing house.
JCP SPOTLIGHT COLLECTIONS
Articles on current hot topics and the seminal work on which they drew
The Journal of Chemical Physics has created a new Perspectives section, featuring invited papers on topics currently generating a great deal of interest in the chemical physics community. We've also added a new feature to the journal homepage—JCP Spotlight Collections—which is home to the perspectives and the collections of seminal papers referenced in these articles. JCP Spotlight Collections provide background on the field and a forward-looking perspective on where it is headed.
Our first three Spotlight Collections are now available. The first, "Ionic Liquids," was written by Edward W. Castner, Jr. and James F. Wishart and deals with this emerging class of materials that possess a diverse and extraordinary set of properties. "Frontiers in Electronic Structure Theory" by C. David Sherrill looks at current and emerging research areas in electronic structure theory, which promise to greatly extend the scope and quality of quantum chemical computations. Finally, David W. Chandler's paper, "Cold and Ultracold Molecules: Spotlight on Orbiting Resonances," examines the production of cold molecules, at temperatures below 1 K, and ultracold molecules, at temperatures below 1 mK.
Perspectives will be a regular feature of the journal and both the Perspectives and the Spotlight Collections will be freely available to the community. We hope these collections will be a useful research tool, as well as a valuable resource for those interested in learning more about leading topics in chemical physics today.
AIP PROVIDES FREE ACCESS TO JOURNAL CONTENT IN MORE THAN 90 DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Programs open doors to previously unattainable scientific literature
AIP participates in two programs that provide greater access to its journals in the developing world. One is with the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP); the other is with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).
ICTP offers a free electronic journal document delivery service (eJDS) to researchers in developing countries classified as "low income" and "lower middle income" by the World Bank. AIP allows ICTP to distribute journal articles without charge to registered scientists in more than 90 such countries, from Algeria to Vanuatu.
The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) works in developing countries to build the infrastructure to support scientific and scholarly communication. This includes IT training, library development, and services for researchers, authors, and editors. AIP participates in INASP's PERii (Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information) to provide free access to its full-text journal collection in Africa, Asia, and South America. There are currently 190 institutions from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe enrolled to receive AIP content.
AIP has also agreed to provide metadata to the ELIN database at the University of Lund in Sweden, which allows researchers in INASP partner countries to interact with the metadata records on local area networks and not wider Internet information transfers. This is a significant benefit for institutions that have limited external internet connectivity, but which have reasonable local area networks.
From the Stacks: Jill Taylor-Roe
Jill Taylor-Roe is Head of Liaison & Academic Services at Newcastle University where she manages both the academic liaison librarians and the resources budget. Throughout her career, she has been actively involved in projects and organizations that have helped publishers and librarians negotiate our rapidly changing world, including COUNTER, TRANSFER, UKSG and JISC. Jill is an active presenter at many conferences and willingly shares her knowledge and experience with colleagues. We wanted to speak with Jill to find out her latest thoughts on usage metrics, e-resources and Big Deals.
We have enjoyed learning about the usage metrics and KPIs you have developed over the years to evaluate e-resources at Newcastle University. Now that COUNTER 3 has incorporated some of the items you have found missing in the past, can you give us an idea of what you think the next revision of COUNTER should include?
Interesting question! My big interest at the moment is article level metrics, as I am working on a research project where we are managing a central fund for OA publication fees and I need to find ways of demonstrating that the money we are paying out to fund open access publication is having a positive impact in terms of citations and usage. Although some publishers are currently willing and able to give us article level usage data, others are not. It is very frustrating when you are paying several thousand pounds in fees and cannot get the usage data and we may begin to take a view that if we can't have the usage data, we won't pay the fee. The trouble with any usage data is that the more you get, the more questions you find yourself asking and you constantly feel the need to dig deeper and understand what is happening at a more granular level.
How are OA author fees allocated at Newcastle? Are they paid from the library's acquisitions budget? In the future, will steadily increasing author fees reduce the amount of money you spend on journal subscriptions?
At the moment I have been allocated additional funding of £70K by executive board to pilot a centrally managed OA service. This is quite separate from the library grant. I also manage a £60K pa grant from the Wellcome Trust to pay OA fees for articles arising from Wellcome funded research. Without a centrally co-ordinated approach there is no way of knowing how much OA publishing is going on at the University so we are hoping that our pilot will be seen to be beneficial and will be given further financial support. In terms of impact on our core spending for journals, I am hoping that as OA increases globally, the cost of our e-journal collections will diminish—(it certainly should!) Some publishers are already saying they will take account of the amount of OA fees we have paid in calculating subscription fees, and over time I would expect there to be a see-saw effect with journal subscription costs diminishing and OA fees increasing. As long as the overall effect is greater visibility of high quality research together with a fair and transparent charging system, I think that's fine.
One of the key findings of the 2009 ALPSP Survey of Librarians, which you helped design, recommends that publishers make every effort to maximize usage of their version of the article. How can publishers work with librarians to ensure that their version of an article is identified as the most appropriate copy?
I think this links in to your first question. The most appropriate copy is inevitably the one that has the validation of the journal imprint and which can be identified by its own unique DOI. However, it's not just publishers who want and need visibility, academics need to be able to maximize their visibility in their research community and increasingly in their professional base, i.e. the University. Thus we want to be able to showcase our university's academic output in our repositories and it can be extremely frustrating when there are so many variations on what we can or cannot do with the final published version. I am sure that if publishers could lighten up a little about the permissions they give us regarding their version of an article, we could satisfy our mutual needs and the added visibility of having links via university repositories could bring benefits to both of us. Perhaps this problem will diminish once we have a greater volume of paid OA publications.
We are very much looking forward to your presentation on Big Deals at the UKSG Conference this year. Can you share any of your thoughts with us?
I don't want to give too much away at this point—not least because my session this year is a workshop, so I am hoping to get a lot of input from the audience! I will be looking to see if the concerns that librarians voiced in my survey, and also in subsequent major surveys such as the CIBER one, have been translated into actions which impact on Big Deals spending. I will also be looking at how publishers have responded to the concerns that were expressed. And of course I hope we will have a lot of debate about the impact of the major budget cuts to UK HE announced by Lord Mandelson. I gather we've got 90 people booked for each session so I hope they are going to be very lively and thought provoking!
TWO AIP JOURNALS REACH SIGNIFICANT MILESTONES
JRSE and JMP celebrate first and fiftieth anniversaries respectively
It seems like yesterday we were writing to people and welcoming them to the inaugural issue of Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. Now that we've marked the end of a successful first year of publication, we can look back at the rich archive we've compiled and realize that it was indeed a fast-paced and exciting start for this timely journal.
We're proud to have published some of the key work in the field and to contribute to this important, global topic. We've published peer-reviewed work on a wide range of subjects, as well as pertinent news, political updates, opinion pieces, blogs, podcasts, and reports from various energy-related meetings.
This past January, Journal of Mathematical Physics (JMP) celebrated a half century of publication. Though the very first issue contained only eight articles, it became readily apparent that JMP had come along at the right time and was contemporaneous with many powerful new currents in mathematical physics. It was, in fact, one of the first mathematical physics journals on the scene and quickly established itself as a leading publication in the field.
In 2010, we can see that the range of topics covered in JMP has broadened significantly since 1960, and it allows us to take stock of the evolution of the Journal, and indeed the entire field of mathematical physics. We can see that the advances have been great and that questions that were not even asked 50 years ago have now been answered.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the editors of JMP selected some of the most highly cited and important work published in the journal. These papers, which are categorized using the current topical sections, are freely available.
AIP TAPS TOP PUBLISHING TALENT
Respected publishing experts hired to advance innovation at AIP
AIP has just hired two individuals who will be charged with creating new products for our subscribers and advancing AIP's position as a leading innovator in STM publishing. Evan Owens will be our new Chief Information Officer, Publishing. He will be responsible for the vision and overall strategy required to build and maintain AIP as a leading technology-driven publishing house. Mr. Owens is one of the leading experts in the world of electronic publishing and was most recently the vice president of content management at ITHAKA in Princeton, NJ. Prior to that, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Portico, where he was responsible for the complete technology design and implementation of a pioneering longterm preservation archive for electronic journals. Before that, Mr. Owens spent nearly two decades in a variety of positions at the University of Chicago Press, including IT Manager and Electronic Publishing Manager of the Journals Division.
Lisa McLaughlin is AIP's new Director, Informatics and Production and she will help to create and develop new products and services designed to enhance the reader experience. Ms. McLaughlin joins AIP after serving as Director, Journal Publishing Services at the company Aptara. Prior to Aptara, she served as Vice President of Production at Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley-Blackwell) for ten years, during which time she managed the U.S.-based journals production program. Prior to Blackwell, she worked at Heinle & Heinle, now a Cengage company, producing educational content for the college market.
These two new professionals will become part of a core leadership team that will help advance our innovative efforts and play key roles in creating the next wave of scientific publishing at AIP.
SEE US AT THESE UPCOMING EVENTS
| 2010 CONFERENCE | LOCATION | DATES |
|---|---|---|
| SLA Annual Conference | New Orleans | 13 - 16 Jun |
| ACS National Exposition | Boston | 22 - 26 Aug |
| Frankfurt Book Fair | Frankfurt | 6 - 10 Oct |
| AVS Annual Symposium | Alburquerque | 17 - 22 Oct |
| Charleston Conference | Charleston | 3 - 6 Nov |
| MRS Fall Meeting | Boston | 29 Nov - 3 Dec |
| Online Information 2010 | London | 30 Nov - 2 Dec |
STAY CURRENT WITH WHAT'S HAPPENING AT AIP
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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.
