The Department of Energy is the first federal agency to release a final policy implementing the 2022 OSTP "Nelson" Memorandum, mandating that research published under DOE funding is to be made public at time of publication, without an embargo, as of October 1, 2025. Underlying data is also to be made publicly available at time of publication. Other major funding agencies are expected to release their own policies during 2025 with a deadline for implementation by January 2026. Read the DOE policy here.
[11/15/24]
The Chemistry Library's Boggs and Skinner endowment funds, along with special enhancement funding from the University Libraries, have enabled us to purchase access to the Inorganic Chemistry journal archive from Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform. Historical content of a number of important journals up through 1995 is now available to UT Austin users. The titles include:
[10/8/24]
The Libraries have purchased perpetual access to the e-book versions of the 4th edition of Houben-Weyl Methoden der organischen Chemie, a major German review series in over 150 volumes, published by Thieme between 1952 and 2003. This complements our access to the subsequent, but smaller, successor edition known as Science of Synthesis. For details and links see our Science of Synthesis page on this guide. We have also purchased e-books for the Thieme titles: RÖMPP Encyclopedia of Natural Products and Spectroscopic Methods in Organic Chemistry.
[6/12/24]
A longstanding journal published by a Japanese research institute has vanished from the web in its entirety, a perplexing but not unpredictable result of the shift of long-term archiving responsibility from libraries to publishers in the digital age. The Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry launched Heterocycles in 1973, and abruptly ceased publication in December 2023 with little explanation. At the same time, the digital archive of the journal disappeared from the official web site, leaving past and current subscribers with no access. (The UT Libraries subscribed to the journal in print until 2017, but never bought the electronic version, due to unacceptable license terms.) It's unclear if the archive will be restored in future, and under what terms. When some publishers, often institutional organizations rather than businesses, don't understand the implications of permanent archiving, other journals may be at risk. Read more in Chemistry World.
[4/20/24]
People have long claimed that posting about scientific papers on social media raises the papers' ultimate citation counts. But a new controlled study reported in PLoS ONE seems to debunk that assumption. The experiment, conducted before Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X, involved 11 researchers with more than 230,000 combined followers on Twitter. They would systematically tweet about randomly selected papers, which were later compared to a control set of papers from the same journal issues that were not tweeted about. The results showed no significant difference in citation rates between the two groups. Using social media may raise awareness of some publications, but it does not appear to lead to more citations. Read more in Nature.
[3/27/24]
We've heard about authorships for sale, fake paper mills and mass retractions -- and now we can add bribing editors. Science magazine reports on shady businesses offering cash payments to journal editors in return for accepting fraudulent papers. And apparently finding a willing market there. The scholarly publishing enterprise has been very slow to accept the fact that their industry is rapidly being co-opted by criminal enterprises around the world, who see big profits in exploiting would-be authors needing publications on their CVs and willing to pay for them. Paper mills and authorship brokers are springing up to take advantage of the lax controls in journal editorships and peer review. Legitimate publishers large and small are becoming overwhelmed by the scale of the fraud and seem unwilling or unable to do much about it. The bottom line for researchers: take careful note of the authors on that paper you're reading, and where they come from!
[1/19/24]
The UT Libraries now have a Read & Publish license for Royal Society of Chemistry journals that allows UT Austin-affiliated corresponding authors to publish their articles open access without paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). This is an opt-out model, meaning that authors will be offered open access as the default at the time their article is accepted, unless they choose to decline.
[rev. 12/19/23]
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