New local environmental film.

Rediscovering the Country is a new film about landscape restoration in Victoria inspired by the work carried out in Sri Lanka.

Is pre-print peer reviewing on its way out?

Read about the alternatives and developments in peer reviewing.

Altmetrics growing in popularity

Examples of the increased use of altmetrics in subscription products and other universities make interesting reading for the current research and scholarly communication landscape.

An alternative model for measuring research output and impact.

A US medical library provides a model of measuring research impact.

Elsevier offers authors new pre-print sharing

Elsevier is replacing its existing 'e-offprint' arrangement with Share Link which will allow authors to share a link to their articles. Read more . . . 

New Fracking video available.

 Fractured Country: An Unconventional Invasion, an online  video on the impact of fracking is now available via the library catalogue.

VU hosts the 19th International Association of Packaging Research Institutes

The Engineered Packaging and Distribution Research Group, VU is organising the 19th IAPI conference 15-18 June, 2014.  See the website for more information and program details.

Have you thought about recording a video abstract for your paper?

Wiley's marketing team analysed articles with video abstracts and found that those with video abstracts had substantially more downloads.  Read more  . . .

How to increase media coverage of your research outputs

Publicist, Ben Norman provides 10 tips for increasing news worthiness of your publications in a recent Wiley blog.  Read more . . .

New director for arXiv

A timely reminder of the value of arXiv.  Cornell University Library has announced the appointment of Dr. Chris Myers as interim scientific director of arXiv. arXiv repository was one of the world's first university repository offering open access to all of the papers deposited in it. arXiv was started in 1991 with 71 papers submitted. In 2014 it receives between seven and over eight thousand submissions per month. arXiv covers mathematics, computer science, nonlinear science, quantitative biology and statistics.

Crowdfunding for research

In the latest blog from Wiley Exchanges, Denny Luan is interviewed about the creation of Experiment a platform for facilitating funding for science research.  Read more . . . 

Need a refresher in using SciFinder?

Victoria University Library is holding a training session for chemistry database SciFinder at Footscray Park Library on Wednesday 28 May.

A representative for SciFinder, the database from the Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society, will conduct the training session. SciFinder provides access to a collection of chemistry and related science information and includes a search for substances, reactions, and patent and journal references.

If you would like to attend, please contact Gail James on 9919 2665.

When: Wednesday 28 May at 4pm

Where: Footscray Park Library, room P307 (training room on 3^rd level)

Session details:

Reference search

•                 Research topics example

Substance search

•                 Chemical name example 

•                 Exact structure and substructure example

Reaction search

•                 Drawing reaction tool

•                 Reaction example

Brief overview of new SciFinder Features/Enhancements

Engineering Tools aid search for missing flight.

Source: https://www.asme.org
The American Society for Mechanical Engineering looks at the engineering behind the search for missing Malaysian Airways flight 370. Read more . . . . . .

Watch out for 'Wobblers' on the library shelves!

If you can’t find a book on our shelves, you can access our e-books by scanning the QR code installed on the Library book shelves. Download QR reader apps from iTunes or Google Play.

Related links:

Library training: Accessing e-books

Short information session on how to find, borrow and use e-books.

E-books

Information about how to find and use the e-books available through the library’s online resources.

New Library resources

New books, e-books, audiovisual material and databases added to the library collection within the last 30 days.

Forthcoming 2014 science books from Elsevier

Elsevier announces its  ScienceDirect book series titles for 2014. To see the highlights . . .

9 challenges facing early career researchers

Grace Pold, graduate student writing for Wiley's Exchanges blog lists: staying on top of the literature; utilizing effective time-management and getting the data/publication balance right amongst her 9 challenges. Read more

New Code of Practice for article level metrics.

COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources0) is an organsitation that endeavours to establish standards for counting usage across platforms and publishers.  More and more publishers are becoming COUNTER compliant.  COUNTER has just published its Code of Practice for counting article level usage.

Dr. Peter Shepherd, Director in an email to Librarians writes: "COUNTER Articles provides a standard that enables any organization hosting journal articles to report in a credible, consistent and compatible way the usage of these articles to authors, their institutions and their funding organizations. It also enables vendors to consolidate usage of articles on different platforms into a global usage total."

Browzine: Read and browse scholarly journals anywhere on your iPad.

Browzine a new app provided by the library allows you to read your favourite journals on your iPad.

To access Browzine just follow these simple steps: 

From your iPad, download Browzine from the App Store and install it. When opening BrowZine for the first time, a list of libraries will appear, please select "Victoria University (AUS)"; then, enter your Student/Staff ID Number and Library PIN. Select your favourite subject areas and browse the bookshelves or create your own bookshelf of favourite journals from the A-Z list or VU's titles.

Peer review under review.

An editorial in Wiley's journal Angewandte Chemie calls for a review of the way the peer review process is currently conducted. Well worth reading.