New resources help engineers

Over the past year a range of developments have been made that can help researchers discover more about the latest research in their fi eld. As usual, many of the developments involved new journal titles. Popular subject areas for these launches included biomedical engineering, computer science, power and renewable energy research, telecommunications and nanotechnology.

Some of the new engineering titles are published as open access (OA) and this publishing model is defi nitely taking off in engineering after a relatively slow start compared to some disciplines. Several publishers have introduced a hybrid model, where authors can opt to pay to make their papers OA in a primarily subscription-based journal, while others have expanded their lists of journals that are now covered by this sort of model. The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology is proposing to mandate all its funded researchers to make resultant publications openly accessible through a repository within six months of publication.

Another interesting development is the recent tie-up between Sage and Hindawi to jointly develop OA journals. The digitisation of backfi les has continued. For example, Emerald has announced the Emerald Backfi les project, John Wiley has the Communications Technology, Electrical & Systems Engineering Backfi les Collection, the Royal Society of Chemistry has created the RSC Journals Archive and there’s an Elsevier Backfi le on ScienceDirect.

But the developments in engineering information are not just about making it more available. There has also been plenty of effort put into helping researchers fi nd the information that they need. One way that this is happening is through the growth in the use of RSS.

Examples of new RSS developments include a tutorial called ‘Enhance your current awareness services with RSS’ from Elsevier and IMechE’s new list of more than 20 feeds, covering events and news in engineering subjects. In addition, a new project called ticTOCs is aiming to transform journal current awareness by making it easy to do various things with journal Table of Content RSS feeds. The UK’s JISC is the primary funder of ticTOCs and a number of publishers are partners in the project.

Some federated search tools have also emerged, or in some cases been improved. A new version of Scitopia.org, which was announced in April 2007, has been released. This searches three million items, including journal content and conference proceedings from 19 professional societies. These societies are mainly based in the USA and include ASCE, ASME, IEEE, SAE and SPIE. In June 2007 WorldWideScience.org was also launched. This is a global science gateway from the US DOE and the British Library, which searches across 15 national portals. Meanwhile, Scirus, from Elsevier, seems to have improved considerably. Other federated search tools include Scitation,which searches documents from scientifi c societies and technical publishers, and TechXtra, which searches four million items from 31 top sources.

There have been a few Web 2.0 developments such as experiments with Second Life (for example, the IEEE Island), social networking and tagging. But there has been nothing mindblowing with respect to engineering. However, I expect that in the coming year these sorts of things will take off much more.