University Libraries

All of Hardin’s regular workshops are also available as personalized sessions by appointment.

See our complete list and request a personal session here:  http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/classesform/

Here are two featured workshops:

How to Determine Your Scholarly Impact
Learn how to use tools such as Ulrich’s, Journal Citation Reports, Web of Sciences, and Scopus to determine the impact that journals, articles, and authors have had on a particular field. Impact factors, Eigenfactors, and H-indices can also be covered.

I hope you did and are doing well with finals and enjoyed the hot coffee, cocoa and cider served at the Engineering Library to help you keep awake during these grueling sessions.  In between exams I saw some of you putting together the LEGO blocks and it looked like you were having fun!  The LEGO blocks were for you from Kari Kozak head of the Library,

here are some of your LEGO creations.

Did you enjoy the LEGO exhibit in our exhibit case while taking a break from exams?

Now for some facts about holidays which I took from Wikipedia;

For constitutional reasons, the United States does not have national holidays in the sense that most other nations do, i.e. days on which all businesses are closed by law and employees have a day off.^[1] Pursuant to the Tenth Amendment, theU.S. federal government only has constitutional jurisdiction to establish holidays for itself, for certain federally chartered and regulated businesses (such as federal banks), and for the District of Columbia; and pursuant to the First Amendment, neither federal, state nor local government can require any business (other than those mentioned) or individual to observe any holiday. Otherwise, constitutional authority to create public holidays is a power reserved to the states. Most states also allow local jurisdictions (cities, villages, etc.) to establish their own local holidays.

As of 2012, there are eleven federal holidays in the United States, ten annual holidays and one quadrennial holiday (Inauguration Day).^[2] Pursuant to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 (effective 1971), official holidays are observed on a Monday, except for New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.^[ 

If you’re interested in more information about holidays? you will find it at this site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holidays_of_the_United_States.  But if you’d rather not be too serious about anything being on the verge of finishing exams here something more fun to read:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-artslife-holiday-trivia,0,5910159.triviaquiz#ixzz2nw86F4Nh

Be the first to find the large stuffed reindeer and bring it to the 3rd floor desk, then chose your prize!

The reindeer will be hidden in a different spot each day through Friday, December 20.

Randy Schekman, a co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, participated in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Reddit this weekend. Schekman, a Cell Biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in understanding the transport mechanisms involved in the export of proteins from cells. Last week, he authored an editorial in the Guardian that accused the practices of journals like Cell, Nature, and Science of distorting science and has been the subject of both criticism and praise in the scholarly publishing world.

In his editorial, Schekman specifically calls out Cell, Nature, and Science (C/N/S) who are among the most prestigious journals in the biological and medical sciences.

“These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept.” [Source]

From the Reddit AMA, the focus of Schekman’s criticism of C/N/S is the artificial restriction of publishing only the papers that fit in the print run of these journals. “Why should we have such a limitation in the 21st century?” he asks. Schekman marks this practice as a distinguishing characteristic of a “luxury” journal as well as the use of a professional editorial staff rather than working scientists in the field. This combination of management priorities, Schekman argues, distorts scientific discourse by emphasizing fashionable topics at the expense of good science.

Schekman is a supporter of the open access movement and is the Editor-in-Chief of eLife, an open access journal of life sciences papers. His boycott of C/N/S has drawn criticism for his eLife affiliation and his previous 46 publications in these journals.  [Read the AMA here]

The University of Iowa Libraries has signed up to support Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative to make scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences available open access. Knowledge Unlatched uses a model that brings library funds together to a set of books that academic publishers have agreed to make open access with a Creative Commons license.

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. -Peter Suber [source]

The first collection of books in this pilot collection cover History, Political Science, Literary Studies, Anthropology and Communications  [The full title list is here]. This project is the first of its kind and is expected to pave the way for more scholarly books to be freely available online without the usual licensing restrictions of eBooks. If 200 libraries sign up by January 31^st, these books will be “unlatched” and future collections will be expected to emerge in 2014.