The Astronomy Roundtable convened on Tuesday, June 10, noon-2:00pm, at the 88th Annual SLA Conference in Seattle, with Pete Banholzer as moderator. Approximately 50 librarians, publisher representatives and guests attended.
LISA III
The LISA III conference was discussed.
Electronic Journal Use
Jane Holmquist
Astrophysical Data System
Joyce Watson gave an update on "What's New with the ADS Abstract Service", including additional mirror sites, the new ADS/LANL Preprint Server, the purchase of citations and references back to 1981 from ISI, problems with the continued scanning of core journals back to Volume 1 due to scanning company going out of business. A list of back issues they still need is on the What's New page.
Journal Citation Issues
IOP and AIP will soon have links from cited references to the INSPEC reference and IOP's will be able to go forward to who has cited the reference.
Liz Bryson discussed research she's been doing which revealed errors in a research paper resulting at least partially from errors or inconsistencies in Science Citation Index. A paper by Virginia Trimble on publications from data collected at large American optical telescopes in PASP 107:977-980, 1995, turned out to be very misleading for researchers at her institution, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation. Although the number of publications listed implied the degree of "productivity" for
the researchers, data were based only on North American publications, and since many of CFHT researchers publish in non-North American publications, a significant number of the institution's publications were not included. In response to this study, Liz reports that CHFT has now fully established a database of their refereed publications for the years 1990-1996; this will be available on their Web site in the near future. Other problems came from the errors or inconsistencies in Science Citation Index, which was used for some of the author's data. Problems with the treatment of compound names (such as Ana I. Gomez de Castro, who is at CFHT) meant that many other citations were missed. This has implications for funding for observatories and institutions, which is often based on productivity. The comment was made that although ISI claims they have quality control, they do NOT correct errors on the DIALOG version of Science Citation Index
because the only "fixes" are with re-loads.
Bert Tepaske-King, from Mathematical Reviews, said that they check all the citations and correct them as much as possible. Bert said that a large percentage of the articles have errors in the references, and that the majority of these are from authors citing their own articles incorrectly.
A comment was made that this points out the difficulty of doing automatic (computer) linkage from the references at the end of full text documents to the actual document, due to the errors in the citations.
Urania
Chris Biemesderfer discussed AAS' Urania project (http://www.aas.org/Urania), which is intended to involve archival integrity, integrated linkage, and interoperability (universal access to all links from any interface & simultaneous searching of multiple indexes). It involves AAS, ADS + ADS/LANL Preprints, NED, and NCSA. Current work is focusing on standards and definition of the system.
Archiving Project
Brenda Corbin and Donna Coletti announced that their institutions had received a major grant towards microfilming their unique observatory publications. When asked why they chose microfilming rather than scanning electronically, they replied that preservationists still say microfilming is the only accepted standard for archives. They will be able to digitize from the microfilm later.
Astronomical observatory libraries are concerned about Academic Press' "IDEAL" (electronic journals) program, which requires subscriptions to many titles that observatories often don't want to pay for. Academic is not presently willing to enter into contracts for individual titles such as ICARUS, as observatories would prefer. This issue has been brought to the attention of the Icarus editor. We need to keep putting pressure on Academic Press to change this policy.
Elsevier, in contrast, through their Contents Direct program, is flexible, and will allow pay-per-use and/or subscriptions or various combinations.
Astrophysical Journal has moved to the University of Chicago Press and the ApJ Electronic Edition to the Univ of Chicago Web site http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific will be picking up the IAU series formerly published by Kluwer, including the IAU Symposia.
Although Les Editions de Physique publisher representative was not in attendance, reference was made to their e-mail announcement that Journal de Physique I & II (& III?) would be merging with Zeitschrift fur Physique B & D to form a new journal entitled European Physics Review.
The 1997 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics has been re-issued due to "muddled" figures and captions in the original volume. Contact AR to obtain a replacement.
Ellen Bouton and Sarah Stevens-Rayborn are coinvestigators with Bob Hanisch of STScI to develop a distributed database system for the indexing and distribution of preprints and technical documents in astronomy, many of which are now posted on the Web, but in many different sites.
The Astrophysical Data System also recently announced that approximately 17,000 bibliographic records (without abstracts) from the QB classification were recently retrieved from the Library of Congress online catalog and have been added to the ADS service.
Thanks to everyone who attended the Roundtable this year. Special thanks are due to Pam Yorks, who took notes and wrote the draft of this news, and to Ellen Bouton for helpful editorial comments.
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Created by: Laurel Kristick, August 1, 1997More Comments/News
Modified by: Laurel Kristick, August 6, 1997