Category Archives: REF

University survey on open access publishing

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In recent years, open access publishing and the institutional repository have become significant developments for academic staff and researchers. At Loughborough, the Library and the Research Office are jointly undertaking a study exploring University attitudes to open access etc. The findings from this study will be used to further develop appropriate help and support for University academic staff.

It would be very helpful if you could find 5 minutes to complete the online questionnaire https://www.survey.lboro.ac.uk/openaccess/

It will be available between the 23rd May 2011 and the 6th June 2011. The questionnaire allows people to be entered into a draw for two £50 Amazon vouchers. If you have any questions or need further information, please contact Dr Graham Walton (tel: 22 2355 or e-mail; j.g.walton@lboro.ac.uk). This study is part of a nationwide initiative to gauge researchers’ attitudes to open access etc. that is being overseen by the United Kingdom Council for Research Repositories.

 Open Access (storefront) by Gideon Burton

“ open access – storefront” CC licensed photo from Flickr

New database: Scopus

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The growing demand for citation data has been recognised through the purchase a of a subscription to Scopus. Now available at www.scopus.com Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with some 41 million records covering 18,000 titles.   Extensive work has been undertaken to design a user interface which makes it easy to use, to track and to analyse research. It will be a major benefit to students and particularly to researchers. As the website explains:

Using Scopus as a researcher you can:

  • Find out who is citing you, and how many citations an article or an author has received.
  • Analyze citations for a particular journal issue, volume or year.
  • Use this information to complete grant or other applications quickly and easily.
  • Use the refine results overview to quickly see the main journals, disciplines and authors that publish in your area of interest.
  • Uncover important and relevant articles that you may otherwise miss.
  • Check out the work and citations of other authors.
  • Click on the cited by and reference links to track research trends and make connections. You can do this within or across disciplines you are interested in.

The interface is pretty intuitive but there’s a demo available.

Journal Citation Reports for 2009 now available

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by Emdot used under cc licence on Flickr

The Journal Citation Reports for 2009 are now available.  For science, technology and the social sciences JCR sheds some light on  which journals are more prestigious in particular fields by giving a variety of citation data for each journal. Thus you can rank journals in a field by how frequently they are cited or by its impact. There’s various bibliometrics available including:

  •  the impact factor (the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year).
  • the immediacy index (the  average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published).

This year over 1000 new journals are included. So if you want to know which Limnology journal has the highest impact factor (answer: Limnology and Oceanography with an impact factor of 3.545) or which is the most cited polymer science journal (Macromolecules) then JCR is where you’ll find the info.

JCR is provided as an add on to our Web of Science subscription and you’ll gain access via Metalib or here.

Learning to share

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Stata Center, MIT photo by Christopher Chan taken from Flickr and used under cc licence

Stata Center, MIT photo by Christopher Chan taken from Flickr and used under cc licence

At MIT academics recently agreed to a mandate for open access to their research publications and Salford University have just become the 100th university to do the same.  Yesterday the Times Higher Education Supplement  published an interesting article here on open access to research covering both sides of the scholarly publishing debate and the different ways of making research available as open access.

Loughborough’s research is available in our institutional repository and your electronic versions can be submitted using a form. If you are new to this process you’ll need to sign a Repository Licence too.