Author: AR News

Evaluating digital information – new librarians group launches

AR News Announcements, Librarians
Image credit: “Information” by Takashi .M, Flickr. CC BY.

Five librarians have united behind one goal: to articulate and showcase the vital role of librarians in evaluating digital information. Why?

“Because Google can bring you 100,000 answers but a librarian can bring you the right one” Source: New York Times

Information literacy is relevant at all stages of a person’s life, from the earliest education to the most advanced phases. Our online world affords access to more information than ever before in history, requiring new focus on how to manage, evaluate and create credible content. Far from making librarians obsolete, the digital age solidifies their role forever.

Image credit: “Twitter” by Esther Vargas, Flickr, CC BY-SA

The group came together because they were all interested in the same stories on social media. It comprises the following people:

  1. Marcus Banks (@marcusabanks) – advocate for transformation of scholarly publishing. Most recently, Head, Blaisdell Medical Library, UC Davis, CA, USA, now freelance journalist and consultant (to Annual Reviews and others).
  2. Shona Kirtley (@EQUATORNetwork) – Knowledge and Information Manager, Senior Research Information Specialist for Equator Network which works to enhance the quality and transparency of health research.
  3. Yvonne Nobis (@yvonnenobis) – Head of Science Information Services at Cambridge University, overseeing the Central Science Library and the Betty and Gordon Moore Library.
  4. Ana Patricia Ayala (@uoftlibraries) – Instruction and Faculty Liaison Librarian at Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto Libraries.
  5. Lindsey Sikora (@uOttawaBiblio) – Acting Head Geographic, Statistical, and Government Info Centre/Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Ottawa,@uOttawaBiblio.

Like all savvy teams, they have a tagline which is “Better Information. Better Decisions” and their first three deliverables are in support of it:

  • An article on trust and authority in academic literature which discusses the different types of research information, how they are created and the part this plays in establishing their importance. Summer 2017.
  • An Early Career Researcher survey on Systematic literature review open to those from all disciplines (not just biomedical fields). Full results will be shared. Fall 2017.
  • A field guide to Systematic literature review with a Webinar to walk researchers through the key steps. Fall 2017.

While they are working on the first item on this list, they’ve also curated a list of existing (mainly open) resources in one spot because they noticed that many excellent information sources on this topic are scattered about the internet.

And, like any group that’s ever tried to make a difference, they need some support which is supplied by nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews (@AnnualReviews).

Finally, since there’s strength in numbers, if any other librarians wish to join the gang and get involved then please contact the project lead, Marcus Banks. You can find the project website here and are welcome to leave your feedback as a comment or simply tweet @marcusabanks.

Annual Review of Cancer Biology – now available online

AR News Journal News, News, Volume Annoucement

We are delighted to announce the launch of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology, the 47th in our collection of highly cited review journals. It seems appropriate to focus on Cancer Research, a field that is deeply linked to the investigation of central themes in the life sciences, during our 85th year of service to the research community. It is also a natural fit for the interdisciplinary coverage of our portfolio of existing journals.

Co-Editors Dr. Tyler Jacks (Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT) and Dr. Charles L. Sawyers (Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering) said:

“Cancer Biology covers a wide range of disciplines that are converging to provide a deep understanding of the cancer cell and the various biological and physiological processes that contribute to tumor initiation and progression. These advances—coupled with the application of an increasing array of powerful technologies—have paved the way for the development of numerous new medicines that are greatly benefiting cancer patients.”

Annual Review of Cancer Biology cover icon

Their introduction to the first volume summarizes the goals of this new publication. The first volume of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology contains more than twenty reviews that address the basic mechanisms of cancer development and the translation to therapeutic strategies today and in the future. The journal scope includes three broad themes to cover a broad spectrum of the rapidly moving cancer biology field: Cancer Cell Biology, Tumorigenesis and Cancer Progression, and Translational Cancer Science.

The first volume also contains a review by Dr. Harold Varmus (Weill Cornell Medical College) entitled How Tumor Virology Evolved into Cancer Biology and Transformed Oncology (published Open Access). Dr. Sawyers expanded, “Cancer research has become deeply linked to investigation of the central themes in the life sciences. Dr. Varmus’s work has been important to the evolution of our interdisciplinary science.”

Tyler Jacks, MIT.

Dr. Jacks is also involved in the Cancer Moonshot, where he serves as the Scientific Panel Co-Chair. Former US Vice-President Joe Biden updated attendees of SXSW on March 12th with progress of the Moonshot. To learn more about Dr. Jacks’ dedication to cancer research, check out his presentation at TEDxCambridge: Tyler Jacks (Life lessons from 34 years of fighting cancer.)

Charles L. Sawyers, MSKCC.

Dr. Sawyers is involved in Stand up to Cancer, a groundbreaking initiative created to accelerate innovative cancer research and quickly provide patients with access to new therapies in the hope of saving lives. He is the co-leader of the Scientific Research Dream Team on Precision Therapy for Advanced Prostate Cancer.

This journal is now available online (March 6th, 2017). If you are a journalist, writer, or blogger who wants access to this and/or other Annual Reviews journals, please email us. The official Press Release is available in our Press Center.

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.

 

Eugene Garfield – 1925-2017 – a life of impact

AR News Company, News, Research Communication
Eugene Garfield. May 9th, 2007.

By Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-In-Chief of Annual Reviews. 

It is with great sadness that I write to share the news that Dr. Eugene Garfield, one of the longest serving members of the Annual Reviews Board of Directors, passed away yesterday (26th February 2017) at the age of 91. Throughout his tenure Gene provided invaluable and enthusiastic support to us.

That Gene’s life created an impact is undisputed.

He first mentioned the idea of an impact factor in science in 1955 and an article in JAMA tells the story of how he and Irving H. Sher created it. In research that he conducted in the late 1950s, he developed the concept of citation analysis, which provided researchers with a powerful network to identify, connect and retrieve information, decades before the internet.

Although he was an information scientist at heart, Gene’s entrepreneurial flair is revealed in a catalogue of highly successful business ventures. The products that he developed from this research, including Current Contents and the Science Citation Index, are still in use today. Gene founded a very successful business, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), to produce these products and they were for many years part of Thomson Reuters until their IP and Science business was bought out in 2016 (now Clarivate Analytics). 

His influence extended well beyond scientific information.  Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin acknowledged Gene in their academic work on PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company’s search engine, leading Gene to be described as “the grandfather of Google.”

My relationship with Gene and his wife Meher goes back prior to my arrival at Annual Reviews in May 2015. I was privileged to work with him between 2002 and 2010 as Editor and Publisher at The Scientist, a professional magazine for life scientists that Gene founded in 1986. He had boldly envisaged it as a daily newspaper for scientists distributed at campuses across the country, and we brought his vision to reality with The Scientist Daily, launched a decade ago. Ellis Rubinsten, an early employee of The Scientist who became Editor of Science, says that Gene’s encouragement of great science journalism ended up transforming both Science and Nature’s research coverage.

Gene was also a pioneering employer. The ISI office had a state-of-the-art childcare facility attached, maximizing convenience for the staff. And he trained and supported many of the female leaders in the publishing industry today. The awards that he inspired also give an indication of his interests, including The Eugene Garfield Residency in Science Librarianship and the ALISE Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition. He also supported and was a Board Member of Research!America.

News of a memorial service will be forthcoming and we will share it here. All of us at Annual Reviews offer our sincere condolences to his family. We are grateful for his life. He will be greatly missed. 

Image credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation to Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA.

Ken Arrow and the Annual Review of Economics

AR News Journal News

From Sam Gubins, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Annual Reviews

Kenneth Arrow.

It is achingly sad to report the passing of Kenneth Arrow. As described by Michael Weinstein in Monday’s New York Times, Ken Arrow was a brilliant economist, the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. He was also the founding Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Economics.

Update: due published in August 2019 – The Economics of Kenneth J. Arrow: A Selective Review.

At a lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club in April, 2007, I invited Ken to launch an Annual Review in economics. Although Annual Reviews had been publishing journals in the social sciences for several decades, none were in economics. While this publishing house is well known in many disciplines, it was largely unknown among economists. For this reason I was concerned that Ken would be unconvinced of the need for extended reviews written by leading economists, and additionally, that leading economists would not easily be persuaded to write them. Ken quickly dispelled both concerns. He said that he was a regular reader of articles in many Annual Reviews series and understood how valuable they were in synthesizing developments in fields. He had been introduced to them by the sociologist Robert K. Merton and the psychologist Gardner Lindzey. In addition to the social science journals, Ken read articles in several Annual Reviews, including Public Health, Neuroscience, Environment, Ecology, and others. So to my request that he take on the task of serving as inaugural editor, he agreed enthusiastically, inviting Timothy Bresnahan to serve as a Co-Editor.

Most of those he invited to join him on the inaugural editorial committee were unfamiliar with Annual Reviews, yet all agreed to serve.  And most of those invited to write reviews accepted and delivered a manuscript.  Ken was so beloved and revered that the community was eager to join any endeavor of which he was a part.

His colleagues persuaded Ken to write an essay for Volume 1, Some Developments in Economic Theory Since 1940: An Eyewitness Account, which is a personal reflection on his relationship to the development of economic theory over 70 years.

Tim Bresnahan captured the essence of Ken when he wrote, “he was a great man, a great colleague, and a great economist.” We were privileged to have known him.

Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reengineered website – site video guides

Video AR News Redesign

The new Annual Reviews website was recently reengineered with the unique needs of researchers, librarians and agents, and authors in mind. Recognizing that change usually requires some readjustment, our IT project coordinator Andrea Burtness has developed a series of short videos to quickly walk end-users through our enhancements. Each video has closed captioning available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Simple Chinese, and Korean.

Feel free to ask questions by responding to this post and we will address them in a timely manner.

Annual Reviews participates in OA Cooperative Study

AR News Announcements, Open Access, Partnerships
Image credit: Coaker’s Press, By Robert Hiscock, CC-BY-NC-ND.

Annual Reviews, a non-profit research publisher, is partnering with The Public Knowledge Project, Stanford University and SPARC in the OA Cooperative study.

This short update was written by Kamran Naim, Strategic Development Manager here at Annual Reviews and on the study project team with President and Editor-In-Chief, Richard Gallagher. 

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, this 2-year study seeks to examine alternatives to the predominant Article Processing Charge (APC) model in Open Access, which although proven to be effective in the sciences – particularly the biomedical sciences – is not workable for all disciplines, nor for monographs or secondary research publications such as ours. 

The study aims to examine and explore viable financial models for transitioning from subscription to open access models for these literature types. Although many research libraries are as willing to support open access as they are to pay for subscriptions, the best transition path between the two models is in need of further testing and analysis. Global subscription revenues in excess of ten billion dollars annually worldwide suggest that there is more than enough money being spent on scholarly publishing to fund universal Open Access.

Examples are emerging within the research library community that are leveraging a spirit of cooperation towards advancing Open Access. An example includes Knowledge Unlatched, where a few hundred research libraries have banded together to underwrite the cost of open access monographs from major scholarly publishers, again without charge to authors or readers. Other organizations doing interesting work in this regard include Open Library of Humanities and OAPEN. It’s great that a number of leaders of these organizations are also participating in the OA Cooperative study with Annual Reviews. 

This growing sense of cooperation signals that the time is right for systematic data-gathering, analysis, and trials of a cooperative publishing model. Accordingly, the research question of the OA Cooperative study considers whether cooperatives can offer economically responsible and sustainable open access to rigorously reviewed and professionally published research? Working in partnership with the project team, Annual Reviews is providing data to support the project in assessing the feasibility, as well as the structure, organization, and governance of such co-ops. 

Watch this space for further updates on the Study.