The American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy recently created a slide-rule to help determine if a particular work is copyright protected. Pointing the red arrow to the date of first publication of the work provides information on the copyright status of the work.

Canada’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) recently enacted a new policy, Policy on Access to Research Outputs, effective as of January 2008 that requires all research papers generated from CIHR funded projects to be freely accessible through publishers’ websites or an online repository within six months of publication. At this time there is no central repository model similar to PubMed Central but CIHR and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) are planning development of a PubMed Central International (PMCI) Canada repository site.

Are you considering publication in a journal but not sure which one? Check out our new guide: Preparing for Publication: Factors to Consider in Selecting a Journal for Publication. The guide contains a listing of factors such as indexing status, scope & aim, acceptance/rejection rate, length of review process, ranking/impact, funding agency policies along with resources to help locate information on each factor.

Interesting and thought provoking publication by Edward Lee on user-generated content/Web 2.0 tools and implications for copyright. As noted in the abstract:

“The most significant copyright development of the twenty first century has not arisen through any law enacted by Congress or opinion rendered by the Supreme Court. Instead, it has come from the unorganized, informal practices of various, unrelated users of copyrighted works, many of whom probably know next to nothing about copyright law. In order to comprehend this paradox, one must look at what is popularly known as “Web 2.0,” and the growth of user-generated content in blogs, wikis, podcasts, “mashup” videos, and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Although users often create new works of their own, sometimes the works are “remixed” with copyrighted content of others.”

To read the entire abstract and the publication:  Warming Up to User-Generated Content.

A thank you to Matthew Cockerill for noting that there are 17, not 12, BMC journals with an impact factor above 3.0.  Please see Matthew’s full comment under the 26 June 2008 posting.

Based on the 2007 Journal Citation Reports a number of open access journals published by BioMed Central have shown an increase in the impact factor ranking with eight journals above 4.0 and 12 with a ranking greater than 3.0.  For the full report: BioMed Central Blog, June 19, 2008.

The impact factor is defined by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year. An impact factor of 1.0 means that on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited one time. An impact factor of 2.5 means that on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited two and a half times. Citing articles may be from the same journal; most citing articles are from different journals.  For more information on JCR: Thomson Reuters JCR.

For a journal to have an impact factor ranking in JCR it must be tracked by Thomson Reuters for three years. Many of the BMC journals are new to the field and do not yet have impact factor rankings. For more information on the BMC journals and their status on Impact Factor ranking: BMC list.

JCR just announced that the 2007 data for the Sciences and Social Sciences editions is now available. JCR is a tool that examines the impact factor of a journal using citation data from over 9,000 journals, and published meeting proceedings from more than 3,300 publishers in 60 countries.

JCR  (access available to subscribed users or affiliates)

JCR Recorded Training Session

JCR FAQS

Other tools for assessing the impact of journals

The International Mathematical Union just released a Citation Statistics Report that outlines the use of citations in assessing research quality.

Among the report’s key findings:

1.  Statistics are not more accurate when they are improperly used; statistics can mislead when they are misused or misunderstood.

2. The objectivity of citations is illusory because the meaning of citations is not well-understood. A citation’s meaning can be very far from “impact.”

3. While having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow under-standing of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.

If you are a FY2008 NIH-funded author and submitted a publication to PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy, don’t forget to note the PMC reference number (PMCID) if you cite the work in any NIH progress reports, applications or proposals.

Not sure about where to find or how to cite the PMCID? Check out our guidance document, How to Locate and Cite the PMCID.

The World Intellectual Property Organization recently issued a guide titled “Understanding Copyright and Related Rights.” The guide is intended to “provide an introduction for non-specialists or newcomers to the subject of copyright and related rights.”