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Posts by The University of Iowa Libraries

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arXiv turns 20

A story in today’s Wired Campus  notes the 20th birthday of arXiv. Originally founded as a preprint server for high-energy physics, it is now perhaps the most successful disciplinary repository around–it holds “700,000 full texts, receives 75,000 new texts each year, and serves roughly 1 million full-text downloads to about 400,000 distinct users every week” (Ginsparg in Nature–see reference below).

Paul Ginsparg, its founder and director since its inception, announces his departure and reflects on the implications of arXiv for scholarly communication in a piece in the August 11th issue of  Nature. The Wired Campus item mentions the community support that has helped fund the continuation of arXiv. The University of Iowa Libraries is one of the 85 institutions contributing to that support.

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Development of Open Access from 1993-2009

Scientists from Finland and Germany have taken on the task of researching the history of Open Access journal publishing over the last 17 years.  Their article “The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009” was recently published in PloS One. Looking at the history of Open Access (OA) and evaluating the publishing trends they were able to determine that the greatest growth is from 2000-2009 in the number of OA journals established and thus in the number of OA articles produced. Although the percent overall of articles published each year that are OA is still small, the trend doesn’t look to be slowing down. They estimate that by the end of 2011 one third of all scientific articles will be open access.

Click here to read full text.

Full citation: Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. 2011 The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6):e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

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Faculty of 1000 Posters: Open Poster Repository for Biology and Medicine

F1000 Posters, an open access poster repository, provides a permanent environment for the deposition of posters presented at conferences.  The information presented at poster sessions is universally agreed to be an important resource but, unfortunately, it is almost always completely lost once a conference is over. As a result, posters are only viewed by a handful of people before they disappear, either forever or until the research is later published as a paper. Often important work never gets published, particularly if it focuses on negative results or case studies. The system of removing posters from view after a conference is over represents a vast loss to the scientific community of unique and potentially valuable information.

F1000 Posters began in June of 2010 and includes posters from over 180 international meetings with the top-performing posters receiving 400-850 views per month.

In searching this database, you can browse by faculty, topic or conference.  Posters include links to F1000 Faculty Member evaluations and related research papers from the authors, where appropriate.

– posted by Kelly Thormodson