Enterprise Abstraction

NRC Publications Archive (NPArC) Launched

CISTI has launched the NRC Publications Archive (NPArC) providing access to a large portion of the research output of the National Research Council.  Already there is a significant set of documents available.  From the notice:

"NPArC (pronounced N-Park) houses research papers for refereed journals, peer-reviewed conferences and technical reports that NRC researchers produce each year. It also guarantees long-term access to this research — serving as a valuable resource for NRC researchers, collaborators and the public. NPArC currently includes 35,000 publication records from 17 NRC institutes, along with 5,000 full-text publications from four of these institutes. And, over the course of this year, CISTI will be translating all new abstracts into both official languages."

To support the initiative, NRC has established a policy effective January 2009 making it mandatory to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed, NRC-authored publications and technical reports in NPARC.  The NRC License to Publish (Crown Copyright) form has been updated to support this requirement.

The NPArC web interface supports searching by a wide variety of criteria, and also supports browsing by subject, author or NRC Institute.

For those interested, NPArC metadata is also harvestable via OAI-PMH at:  https://accs.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/oai/ctrl?verb=Identify

NPArC is based upon CISTI's Trusted Digital Repository infrastructure that I've mentioned previously.

Map of Science

An interesting graphic of science resource usage produced by LANL:

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico have produced what they call the world's first "Map of Science" — a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind whenever they retrieve information from online services.

The research, led by Johan Bollen of LANL, and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, collected usage-log data gathered from a variety of publishers, aggregators, and universities from 2006 to 2008. Their collection totaled nearly 1 billion requests for online information. Because scientists usually read articles in online form well before they can be cited in print, usage data reveal scientific activity nearly in real-time, the map's creators say.

Via ISGTW and Bill St. Arnaud

ICSTI 2009 Conference Ottawa

CISTI is sponsoring the ICSTI 2009 Conference June 9-10 in Ottawa. 

"Sharing research data is essential for effective collaboration. Few scientists, however, have the time or resources to ensure sustainable access to data for joint projects, domain-specific applications or re-use.

The ICSTI 2009 conference will examine how researchers, librarians and publishers can work together to create structures for managing and communicating scientific data."

For more information checkout http://www.icsti2009.org/.

Survey on software for scientists

The University of Toronto, Simula Research Laboratory, and the National Research Council are collaborating on an international survey to find out more about how scientists develop and use software in their research. Results will be published in American Scientist magazine in 2009. If you have 20 minutes to take part, please go to:

http://softwareresearch.ca/seg/SCS/scientific-computing-survey.html

National Science Advisor position to be phased out

CBC is reporting that upon the retirement of the current (as well as first and only) National Science Adviser, Arthur Carty, the position will not be re-filled and will be phased out.  Dr. Carty was formerly the President of the National Research Council.

Ig Nobel 2007

The video of the Ig Nobel 2007 Ceremony is now available.  The Ig Nobel's are awarded yearly for research that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think.  The Ig Nobel's are sponsored by the journal Annals of Improbable Research.