News

Yesterday, swissuniversities announced the outcome of the Open Access negotiations with publishing powerhouses Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature (see press release). With Elsevier and Wiley, they extended the current subscription contracts and signed «memoranda of understanding» for «read and publish» deals. With Springer Nature, no agreement of any kind was reached.

The Lib4RI team wishes everyone a snowy Christmas, cool holidays and a sunny start into the new year!

In January 2020, the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries will switch to the new Swiss Library Service Platform SLSP. SLSP will bring together online the scientific information stored in libraries across Switzerland and make it fully searchable and easily findable. Currently, the SLSP system is still under development.

Lib4RI has become a member of the Swiss Library Network for Education and Research (SLiNER). SLiNER is a new expert committee on scientific information. It represents all academic and scientific libraries in Switzerland. The committee promotes networking and cooperation between scientific information experts and libraries, bundles international cooperation and tackles specific issues (e.g. Open Access). The former Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries will transfer to SLiNER in early 2020. For more information visit Swissuniversities.

… we offer personal consulting and group trainings? These services are on demand and tailored to your needs. Our fields of expertise include literature search, literature management, technical standards and guidelines, Open Access, the institutional repository, copyright and creative commons licenses, identifiers, scientific writing, the publication process, bibliometrics and much more. We’re happy to visit you, your group or your department to discuss your topics of interest.

All our licensed e-books (some 400’000 titles) are now listed in the NEBIS catalogue. A new technical implementation allowed the integration of the corresponding metadata via an SFX-pipe. Open Access titles are also included and indicated in NEBIS accordingly. We thank the NEBIS network and the ETH Library for making this possible.

Bye-bye printed Lib4RI-Update! After 16 issues of the printed version, you will get all future Updates by e-mail. An electronic newsletter allows us to reach a wider audience and helps to save paper.

Once again we would like to express our sincere gratitude for your steady participation in our training series with currently more than 220 registrations just this autumn. Your continuing interest in our courses is our best motivation. There are actually a couple of seats left for some of the modules offered this autumn, so if you haven’t already done so, take your chance and register.

Islandora is the key software framework behind the institutional repository DORA and is built on top of Drupal, Solr and Fedora Commons. By extending and customizing the functionality of DORA, Lib4RI has acquired some expertise on how to work with and contribute to such open-source projects. This expertise is increasingly considered a valuable contribution to the open-source community.

Empa is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In the context of the recent directive MHB-4.2.9 ‘Open Access Policy and funding’ (intranet only) Empa now actively supports the green and golden ways of open access. As a publicly funded institution, Empa accentuates its responsibility to inform the public about research activities and results.

Eawag has been supporting researchers at Eawag since 2009 in the payment of article processing charges (APCs) for publications in pure Open Access journals. In the context of the recent directive 19-08 ‘Open Access publishing at Eawag’ (intranet only) the eligibility criteria for funding have been revised. One of the main changes to the eligibility criteria for funding is that the submitting/corresponding author must have a demonstrable relationship with Eawag (not the first author).

DORA is the bibliography and institutional repository at the four research institutes Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL, provided by Lib4RI. Launched as recently as 2016 there were still more than 60.000 items added since, of which over 16.000 are Open Access. The software framework making all of that possible is based on the Open Source projects Drupal, Islandora, and Fedora.

DORA PSI was recently introduced as the bibliography, archive and Open Access repository for all scientific publications of PSI. At this event, we presented the exciting new features DORA offers to enhance the visibility and impact of research output at PSI.

Lib4RI users can now access the media archive Swissdox. The database includes approximately 290 sources with articles from 1911 onwards and provides evidence of the history and wide range of the Swiss media landscape. A user-friendly interface and a high-performing search engine with various filter options can accommodate users to find daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and journals, press agencies, online media as well as newspapers that are no longer published.

Our Newsletter «Lib4RI-Update #16» is now available! Get a print copy at the library or read the online version below.

As from today, DORA PSI – the digital repository and bibliography for all research articles and other publications affiliated with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) – is online! We came a long way in the last year in preparing for DORA PSI, where several new features were implemented to stand up to the previous publication database of the PSI Digital User Office (DUO). Not only did we develop new features specific for DORA PSI (e.g., submission workflow), but also provided new features from which all four research institutes benefit (e.g., publication metrics).

After some distinct adaptations with new resources but also with cancellations in the last years we saw only minor changes in our portfolio in this year.

Spring will be here soon and it is again time for our biannual introductory course «Searching & Managing Scientific Information» for PhD students and other affiliates of the 4 federal research institutes. Between March and June 2019, we offer six individually bookable modules.

We are happy to announce the arrival of our new A3 colour book scanners!

DORA, our institutional repository, is based on the Islandora open-source framework. Therefore, we are happy to announce that we will be hosting the 2019 Islandora Camp this year here at Eawag, Dübendorf. The event takes place on 17-19 June 2019 and will cover a variety of topics surrounding the Islandora framework, including an administration and a development track. This is a great opportunity to exchange ideas, developments, learn and discuss with other Islandora specialists from all over the world.