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This year’s theme for Open Access Week, which we are celebrating from October 22nd – 28th, 2018, is “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge.”  It’s a mouthful, so let’s work through what this means and more importantly, what it means for us here in the Tufts community.

As Nick Shockey, founding Director of the Right to Research Coalition, among other things, noted in his blog post about it, “This year’s theme reflects a scholarly system in transition.”  There is great opportunity and already great evidence of this transition incorporating open access as the default, not the outlier, in publishing.  Nevertheless, we can further leverage the opportunities of transition to intentionally design new systems that are more equitable, more inclusive, and with less bias.

So perhaps you’re thinking that you are not in a position to be designing new scholarly systems.  What’s your role?  If you are someone who creates scholarly literature, be critical of where you publish your manuscripts.  Consider whether you are supporting systems that promote access beyond just to the privileged, affiliated with well-endowed institutions, but also scholars and practitioners, many of whom live internationally, that could benefit from your work, provide diverse perspectives, and innovate in ways beyond your initial scope.  You, as the creator of content, can take control of how well that content is disseminated and utilized, and ultimately how impactful it can be.

There are traditional measures that are often used to evaluate journals and guide someone in deciding where to publish.  Some are quantitative like Journal Impact Factors, or other research impact metrics.  Some are more qualitative, such as recommendations from peers or venerated colleagues.  I challenge you to also assess a journal’s value, prestige, and appropriateness based on its equity as a system.  Whose voices are prioritized?  Who is excluded?  How are some scholarship decisions the journal makes perpetuating bias?

Do these questions spark some questions for yourself?  Ask Us!  And, Happy Open Access Week!

 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz

 

Springer Nature Experiments is a new platform that searches four protocol and method resources simultaneously: Springer Protocols, Nature Protocols, Nature Methods, and Protocol Exchange, providing easy access to more than 50,000 protocols and methods.

Unique indexing means that you can quickly find protocols and methods for a particular organism, common and emerging techniques, or videos.

The summary page for each protocol and method provides an abstract, version history, figures and videos from the article, and the number of citations the article has received.  This information helps you choose the best protocol or method for your work without scanning multiple articles on different sites.  When you find one that works, then you can click through to the full text, available through Tufts Libraries.

 

Post contributed by Laura Pavlech

Looking for additional EBD learning opportunities to help you with your PICO assignment or your BaSiCSsss presentation? Want to brush up on your techniques? Have we got the Research Guide for you!

This past summer, our Dental Librarian put a team together to enrich the Evidence-Based Dentistry Research Guide. The Guide, which includes tutorials  you can watch, provides an outline of the process and includes a brand new Evidence Pyramid!

 

Evidence Pyramid” by Tufts University can be reused under the CC BY-NC-SA license

Still have questions? Ask us! Use one of the methods below to contact a librarian, schedule a consultation or stop by the desk.

For those working on BaSiCSsss presentations, don’t forget to reach out to your group librarian.

As June (finally) brings us some summer weather, the Library would like to shine some light on a new development that’s been in the works behind-the-scenes.

While you’ve been taking exams and writing theses and starting your clerkship rotations, we’ve been getting ready to launch a new Integrated Library System and Discovery Platform! Which means that the way you search for items to check out, and the way we manage those items behind the desk is about to change.

On June 21, join us as we launch a new iteration of JumboSearch, a brand new way to search for books, articles, and other materials the library provides (including electronics, peripherals, and online books and journals).

You may notice some differences as you search, log in to your account, and access materials from off-campus, but everything you’re accustomed to will still be available. The only major difference is that if you were using Reading History in our current system, that information won’t migrate (so contact us for help!).

Watch this space for more information!

Questions? Contact us @ hhsl@tufts.edu.

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snowflakeorchid

You are a unique snowflake, or one might say, ORCID.  No, I did not just misspell orchid.  An ORCID® iD, is a unique number assigned to a researcher in order to differentiate that person from others who may have similar names and/or identity researchers whose name change.  It helps link a researcher’s work and make it easier to recognize.  It is a persistent and public identifier, not proprietary or private, therefore it can be used across systems and does not change (even if your own name does). Tufts Office of Research Administration thinks it’s a good idea too.

Don’t get lost in the crowd, register for your ORCID iD today for free and assert your uniqueness! Want to learn more? Check out our exhibit in the display case on Sackler 4!


orcid

“ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.”                         – http://orcid.org/content/initiative


 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz

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Open Access Week is October 19-25th this year, which is a great opportunity to focus on how you can broaden your reach.  Open access (OA) is about making research literature freely available on the Internet, with few copyright or license restrictions.  Publishing in conventional journals is one step to disseminating your work – open access takes it to the next level.  An important advantage of OA is that it helps scholars and practitioners who may not be affiliated with resource-rich institutions utilize and benefit from your research.

Two ways to make your literature open:

  1. Publish in an OA journal, e.g. PLOS. These journals may charge authors article processing fees.
  2. Ensure that the conventional journal you publish in allows you to deposit a copy of your manuscript in an OA repository, such as the Tufts Digital Library. This option is free of charge for both author and reader.  The process would look something like this:

Tufts Digital Library

 

Have questions about how this works and/or what else you can do?  Join us for an open workshop, Disseminating your Research: Getting your work out to the widest audience, on Thursday, October 22, 2015, noon-1pm in Sackler 510.  Come find out more!

 

Post contributed by Judy Rabinowitz 

In our continued celebration of International Open Access Week, I would like to direct your attention to some of my favorite scholarly resources that just so happen to also be Open Access or promote Open Access.

In case you need a refresher, in his book Open Access, Peter Suber writes:  “The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” In a nutshell, OA materials are free to access, and you can download, copy, distribute, transmit, harvest, use web crawlers, etc. for free as well. Just give attribution to authors and creators and you’ll all set.

So, can it be any good if it’s free? You bet! OA publishers have banded together to police the landscape, ensuring adherence standards regarding peer review, licensing, and research integrity, and more.

Stay tuned all week as we give you more information about OA publishing, self-archiving, other free learning materials online, and more! But for now, enjoy some of our favorite scholarly resources in the OA community.

SPARC full

 

http://www.sparc.arl.org/

Affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries, the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. Includes excellent information about Article-Level Metrics, a new approach to quantifying the reach and impact of published research.

logo_cropped

http://doaj.org/

Established in 2002, the Directory of Open Access Journals works to collect and provide access to scholarly OA journals across international borders and disciplines.

plos

http://www.plos.org/

With a publishing arm over ten years old, the Public Library of Science publishes seven peer-reviewed, OA journals. A paper published in a PLOS journal has recently received international attention when used as supporting material in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing about the spread of the Ebola virus.

biomedcentral

http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Based in the UK, BioMed Central published 269 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, including a wide array of specialty titles in medicine.

BHL-Combined

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/

Finally, I have to mention the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries working to digitize biodiversity literature and make it available for open access. BHL is not a publisher, but works with libraries and publishers to make important historical and current scientific literature available free to anyone with an internet connection. Besides serving some of the rarest and most remarkable literature you will ever see online, my interest in the OA world stems directly from the 6 years I spent working with BHL.

This is just a small selection of resources in an ever-expanding OA world; feel free to comment if there are others you would like to share!

 

Hirsh has revamped their learning guides and put them in a new system. Need help finding databases to search, looking for tips on how to find reserve items, or need the PBL Toolbelts? We’ve got all this and more in the Hirsh Health Sciences Library Research Guides.

On the main page, you will see that guides created based on academic subjects are arranged in collapsible menus based on category. Expand the category of interest to see all the individual guides.

libguidesHome

The “Other” tab contains guides related to general library resources, services and miscellaneous tutorials. It will be a great resource, so be sure to check them out as you visit to see the new guides as they are added!

OtherGuides

All of the guides in the new system have similar coloring and layout, so you can easily identify if you are in a HHSL Research Guide. We’ve even already migrated over the PBL Toolbelts.

PBLtoolbelts

What do you think? Let us know at the desk, or by dropping us an email or phone call. Is there any topic you’d like covered in a guide?

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