Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Earlier this month, New Mexico State University (NMSU) library announced the cancellation of over 700 journal and database subscriptions, the result of a perfect storm of rising journal prices and a slashed materials budget. It is the latest, but not the largest, in a procession of research libraries to chop, slash and hack their subscription lists in response to significant budget cuts. Now, tensions are rising as scientists speak out against library cuts and how they will affect research. Library at York University Wikimedia "The lifeblood of a university is its library, and cutting library resources is like cutting off oxygen to the brain," said  Robert Buckingham,  a long-time epidemiologist at NMSU and now dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Saskatchewan. "Without this lifeblood, the university will falter and fail." The economic downturn is hitting libraries and hitting them hard. A  2009 global survey of 835 libraries in 61 countri...

If you offer something of value to people for free while someone else charges a hefty sum of money for the same type of product, one would logically assume that most people would choose the free option. According to new research in the February 20 edition of the journal Science , if the product in question is access to scholarly papers and research, that logic might just be wrong. These findings provide new insight into the nature of scholarly discourse and the future of the open source publication movement. To test this theory, James A. Evans, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and Jacob Reimer, a student of neurobiology also at the University of Chicago, analyzed millions of articles available online, including those from open source publications and those that required payment to access. The results were surprising. On average, when a given publication was made available online after being in print for a year, being published in an open source format ...

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a new way to publish original methods in the areas of biological and biomedical science in a video format. The focus is on making demonstration of techniques and experimental approaches clear and easy to follow. Articles published in JoVE are listed in Pubmed and MEDLINE so you can still get your paper cited by other authors. All submissions go through peer review and editorial review and the editorial board consists of 22 distinguished professors from Harvard, Princeton, NIH and other leading institutions in the US, Europe and Japan. Do you want to know more? Be part of XTractor community. XTractor the first of its kind - Literature alert service , provides manually curated & annotated sentences for the Keywords of your choice XTractor maps, extracted entities (genes, processes, drugs, diseases etc) to multiple ontologies Enables customized report generation. With XTractor the sentences are categorized into biologically signi...

Sigma-Aldrich announced that its highly acclaimed chemistry review journal, Aldrichimica Acta, has again been ranked #1 by Impact Factor, out of 56 similar journals in the field of Organic Chemistry. In 2007, the latest year for which such rankings are available, the Acta achieved an Impact Factor of 11.929. The Acta was also ranked #1 in 2006 and 2005. These rankings appear annually in the Science Edition of Journal Citation Reports(R) (JCR), which is published by Thomson ISI(R). JCR, Science Edition, tracks close to 5,900 international science journals annually and offers quantifiable statistical data, which allows the systematic and objective ranking of journals by relative importance within their subject categories. The Aldrichimica Acta publishes in-depth reviews on topics of current interest to chemists. It is published four times a year and distributed at no charge to about 130,000 subscribers worldwide who are members of the scientific community.