TABLE OF CONTENTS

· New Open Access Journal, AIP Advances, Publishes First Papers

· AIP and Edanz Work to Support Authors in China and Japan

· New AIP Labs Website Showcases the Latest in Publishing Technology

· AIP Journal Subscribers now have Free Access to Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters

· From the Stacks: Sarah Pearson

· Announcing the Winner of AIP's Drawing of an Amazon Kindle

· AIP Sponsors Student Travel Grants to attend the ER&L Conference

AIP JOURNAL SUBSCRIBERS NOW HAVE FREE ACCESS TO THEORETICAL AND APPLIED MECHANICS LETTERS

Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters (TAML) is a new journal hosted on AIP's Scitation platform. Published on behalf of the Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, TAML (ISSN 2095-0349) features short, original articles in all areas of mechanics, as well as in interdisciplinary fields including aerospace and aeronautical engineering, coastal and ocean engineering, environment and energy engineering, material and structure engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical and transportation engineering, and civil and hydraulic engineering.

We're confident that TAML will provide your patrons with an essential source of groundbreaking research from scientists worldwide, and to kick start the new journal we're providing free online access for the rest of 2011 to every institution that subscribes to an AIP journal. TAML has been added to the Scitation institutional single- and multi-site user licenses, so existing license agreements are in force for the new journal. In addition, access to TAML is through the IP addresses established for existing online accounts.

If you're an AIP journal subscriber, we encourage you to make TAML discoverable at your institution by adding it to your catalog, so that researchers at your institution can benefit from this important new journal. To access TAML, please visit http://taml.aip.org.

If you're not an AIP journal subscriber, we'd like to offer you a free trial subscription to TAML. You can request a free trial simply by contacting us. Call 800-344-6902, 516-576-2270, or email subs@aip.org.

There has been an explosion in the amount of high-quality research being published by Chinese scientists today, and we hope that by forming co-publishing agreements such as this, we can bring our STM publishing experience to bear in service of this research.

Beijing Office Provides Grass Roots Support
for Authors

From the Stacks: Sarah Pearson

Sarah Pearson has been the E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham since 2005. She is also co-chair of the KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools) Working Group, a joint initiative of UKSG and NISO. She is a current member of the UKSG Committee and a member of the JISC Electronic Information Resources Working Group. Before taking on her current role at the University of Birmingham, Sarah was a Business Analyst at the Talis Group Ltd. We wanted to speak with Sarah about the future of KBART, making e-resources more discoverable, and about the challenges she faces.

AIP is happy to have endorsed KBART for the 27 publishers hosted on Scitation, and we understand that your work is not yet done. Can you tell us about Phase II of the KBART initiative?

Absolutely. This is a really exciting time for the KBART initiative. KBART is a joint UKSG and NISO initiative to implement best practice for e-content metadata transfer to link resolver knowledge bases. Phase I was released in January 2010 and since I took over from Charlie Rapple of TBI Communications as co-chair, we have really been working on delivering an endorsement framework to enable publishers and content providers to implement and sign up to the phase I Recommended Practices. We have a number of content providers currently working on KBART endorsement and AIP and Scitation have of course recently endorsed the recommendations. For Phase II we are really focusing on two problem areas for e-content metadata–open access holdings and consortial metadata, and we are consulting with the supply chain on the requirements in this area. We are also refining some of the metadata requirements relating to e-books and conference proceedings to improve the description of such holdings in link resolver knowledge bases. So, lots planned!

What are some of the things that you do to make your e-resources more discoverable? How do you make your patrons aware of new or little-used content?

At University of Birmingham, we do put a lot of emphasis on using the library tools we have to make different types of electronic content more discoverable. After all, we are paying a lot of money for this material and want to make sure that our users can effectively discover content and that we know we have made the right collection development decisions. By maximizing discoverability, we can be more certain that low usage is attributed to lack of need for a particular resource rather than lack of ability to find it. Of course, with the traditional silos between e-journals, e-books, and databases, discoverability using library software has not been straightforward. I think happily we are seeing that situation start to change. We obviously rely on our link resolver, SFX, to ensure that our paid-for content is visible and linkable within our eLibrary service. However, it doesn't end there. We embed our link resolver holdings into all sorts of external sites such as Google Scholar and A&I services so that we can provide efficient linking to full text for users who are not starting at the eLibrary homepage. We also embed our eLibrary applet into other services such as the Institutional Portal which is a very popular starting point for our users and allows them to search e-books, e-journals and e-resources alongside the print collection. Authentication is also an important element. It is the library's role to really balance ease of discoverability with appropriate authentication to restrict use to university members. We aim to provide a single sign on experience for our users and use a mixture of Shibboleth and EZProxy combined with our eLibrary login to achieve this. Of course we also employ the old fashioned methods of just advising our users about new content although we are starting to use news feeds and RSS to do this. It's a really exciting area of activity at the moment.

What are some of the greatest challenges you face today in managing your institution's e-resources? And how can publishers help to make your job easier?

I think the main issue we face is quite a general one–communication. Of course if this was an ideal world and everyone could sit round a table and discuss issues face to face and come to a general consensus of how to operate, life would be easy wouldn't it?! For instance, we spend a lot of time informing intermediaries like link resolver vendors on platform, title, package and publisher changes so that our users can link to content effectively. This is especially a problem at the start of the calendar year. It would be much more efficient and involve far less effort to do this once at source by the content provider rather than by every single library. I guess that's where KBART comes in and is the main reason that I became involved with the KBART project. Another aspect is lack of understanding of the academic market and their licensing and access requirements. For instance, academic users don't want proprietary authentication methods. It needs to be IP or Shibboleth so that it is scaleable in order for a whole campus to be able to open access to their users. The license can also be completely inappropriate for academic use and there is often much negotiation with those providers who don't operate their core business in the academic market in order to make provisions for the type of use we need to make of content. That sounds like a long list of challenges but really I think opening up industry wide communication channels to discuss this type of issue is integral.

We are looking forward to your presentation at the 2011 UKSG Annual Conference, "Driving usage – what are publishers and librarians doing to evaluate and promote usage?" Can you tell us a little about what you will discuss?

Yes, the UKSG Conference is just round the corner and it is a really good program as always. The breakout session that I am doing is a shared session looking at the library and publisher approach to evaluating usage and user behavior. How do we know that our licensed content is as discoverable as it needs to be? What is usage data really telling us and what are we doing with it? How are we analyzing the performance of our discovery tools in routing users to content? There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion too and sharing of ideas from attendees on what they are doing! Looking forward to seeing you there…