Levy Library

Archives of the Oldest Scientific Journal Posted Online

Where did Ben Franklin publish information about his kite flying experiments with electricity?  In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of course.  Yesterday the Society announced that all issues from 1665-1945 - including Ben's letter - are now available free online. (You can get access to the newer issues from the Library's E-Journals page.)  The Royal Society is committed to open access and providing information to a broad audience and this is part of their strategy. The Transactions is the oldest scientific journal in the world and was the first peer-reviewed journal. In 1886, science had evolved to such an extent that it became necessary to divide the journal in two. Philosophical Transactions A covers the physical sciences and Transactions B deals with the life sciences. Some of the familiar names you can find here are Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and William Osler. With a nod to Halloween in a few days, a search of the word 'Monster' returns 55 articles.  Enjoy!

New BioMed Central Membership

 
Mount Sinai is now a BioMed Central Supporter Member!  This gives Mount Sinai authors a 15% discount on the article processing charge when publishing in any of BioMed Central's 212 journals, including, for example, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Medicine, BMC Systems Biology, Critical Care and Molecular Neurodegeneration.

BioMed Central is a pioneer of the open access publishing model, believing that immediate, world-wide, barrier-free, open access to the full text of research articles is in the best interests of the scientific community. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. Authors publishing with BioMed Central retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License. 

Because it does not have subscription fees for its research content, BioMed Central defrays those costs with article-processing charges--processing charges that are now reduced for Mount Sinai authors. And Mount Sinai authors do publish in BioMed Central journals: click here to see the list of work published by researchers here and at NYU just in the last year.  A few examples of recent, highly accessed articles with Mount Sinai authors include:

• De Gasperi R, Sosa MA, Dracheva S, Elder GA. Presenilin-1 regulates induction of hypoxia inducible factor-1α: altered activation by a mutation associated with familial Alzheimer's disease. Molecular Neurodegeneration. 2010 Sep 23;5:38. PubMed PMID:20863403; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2955646. Link to Full Text. 
• Xu H, Lemischka IR, Ma'ayan A. SVM classifier to predict genes important for self-renewal and pluripotency of mouse embryonic stem cells. BMC Systems Biology. 2010 Dec 21;4:173. PubMed PMID: 21176149; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3019180. Link to Full Text. 
• Aslakson RA, Wyskiel R, Shaeffer D, Zyra M, Ahuja N, Nelson JE, Pronovost PJ. Surgical intensive care unit clinician estimates of the adequacy of communication regarding patient prognosis. Critical Care. 2010 Nov 29;14(6):R218. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 21114837. Link to Full Text.
• Blum AB, Raiszadeh F, Shea S, Mermin D, Lurie P, Landrigan CP, Czeisler CA. US public opinion regarding proposed limits on resident physician work hours. BMC Medicine. 2010 Jun 1;8:33. PubMed PMID: 20515479; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2901227. Link to Full Text.

If you have any questions about our BioMed Central membership, please contact us via our Ask a Librarian services.

Copyright and the New Year

The beginning of each year heralds a little known but fascinating event:  a new set of works that have been covered by copyright for many years enter the public domain.  This means that on January 1, 2011 the works of authors who died in 1940 - including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanial West, Emma Goldman and Leon Trotsky - will become free of copyright protection and will now be owned by everyone.  They can be shared online or in courses without restriction or they can be used as a base to create a whole new work.  To learn more about Public Domain Day, as it is known, go to this website:  http://publicdomainday.org/2011.

The most basic purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create new works by allowing them certain rights so that they may exclusively benefit from their efforts.  (The same applies to patents and trademark coverage.)  Copyright in this country started in 1790 and at first it lasted for a term of 28 years.  With the Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, authors' rights now last for 70 years after their deaths.  This change was urged in part due to the impending loss of copyright to some famous corporate icons, including Mickey Mouse and Pooh. 

Copyright is vested in all expression at the point of its being put into a fixed medium, e.g. on paper, in a sound file, on a canvas or in a digital document. Facts and titles cannot be copyrighted, only an individual's version of the idea.  This allows many people to write a book about the same topic or paint the same scene.  Each one of us is a copyright owner, as are corporations and governments, except for the federal government, which puts most of its work into the public domain from the beginning.  (Which is a nice perk for us.)  Sometimes a condition of publication is to cede your copyright interest in an article to the journal that will review and publish it.  This locking up and selling of copyrighted material has led to the creation of the Creative Commons license and other efforts to keep information unrestricted.

Clearly, copyright is a very complex issue. One thing that we know for sure is it does, in fact, end.  So for now, celebrate January 1st with something that is newly in the public domain.  As you read it, smile and think, 'Hey, I own this!'

For those who want a handy reference guide to copyright ownership, look here:  http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm#Footnote_1

For general information of copyright, try Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Public_domain.  For a discussion of how copyright has grown, check out the Wikipedia entry on the Copyright Term Extension Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act.