Searchguide – BTH English

A new search service was launched in late 2009 by the National Library and its drive for LIBRIS, in cooperation with the university libraries in Göteborg, Linköping, Lund and Uppsala. It’s called SwePub and its purpose will be to become a single entry to the Swedish scientific publishing. SwePub offers the opportunity to browse through articles, conference papers, theses, etc., in the form of full-text, abstracts or citations. Currently SwePubs content is located in its own search service, but will eventually be integrated into LIBRIS search service.

The only material included is published publications and the same publication may appear in different versions, e.g. both as conference paper and journal article. When publications has been done in collaboration between universities, they have, if possible, been merged into a common reference, as well as in the case of registration of duplications. Another occurrence to consider is that scientists’ names can be registered in various versions at different times and universities.

SwePub contains publications of the following categories:

• Artistic work – work or report from an artistic research and/or development project.
• Journal article – article published in a scientific or other journal.
• Book – monographic publication in one or more physical parts, intended to form a complete unity.
• Doctoral thesis – approved dissertation for Doctoral degree.
• Research review – review/survey published in a scientific journal.
• Book chapter – independent part of a monographic publication or an editorial collection. A number of independent works published together, possibly selected by editors for a certain theme.
• Conference paper – paper published in editorial proceedings or other conference publication.
• Licentiate thesis – approved dissertation for Licentiate degree.
• Other publication – other type of publication, e.g. poster, event, concert, exhibition, performance or textiles.
• Patent – patent document
• Editorial proceedings - editorship for official proceeding or conference publication.
• Report – publication that e.g. is part of a report series.
• Research review – review/survey published in a scientific journal.
• Review – book review published in a journal or newspaper.
• Editorial collection – editorship for a number of separate works published collectively, often selected for a certain theme.

The publications include the following types:

• Peer-reviewed – article or conference paper reviewed by independent researchers and considered to meet the requirements for a scholar publication.
• Other academic – other publication intended for the scholarly society, e.g. research reports, doctoral and licentiate theses.
• Popular scientific – publication intended to mediate scholar information to a general audience. This can also be articles of e.g. polemic nature.

It is possible to create references of the records in SwePub in several formats; Harvard, RIS, RefWorks, Zotero etc. More about references can be found in Tools in LIBRIS Help.

Availability of the SwePub data

The bibliographic data is freely available via OAI PMH, SRU and Xsearch

OpenURL Referrer

OpenURL Referrer is a web browser extension (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer) for converting bibliographic citations to URLs and available for downloading from OCLCs web site OpenURL Referrer The browser extension requires access to some kind of Link Resolver (e.g. SFX). In SwePub you can find the OpenURL Referrer link at the bottom of the single record view (Overview).

Read more and make use of SwePub at:

http://www.swepub.kb.se/?language=en

Source: http://www.swepub.kb.se/help.jsp

Carolina Moberg

2009-12-21

The overall objective of research is to gain knowledge in order to better understand the world we live in and in order to, if possible, change it for the better.

(God sed i forskningen, SOU 1999:4, my translation)

Where is research conducted?

Research is carried out at the large, long since established universities like for example Uppsala, Lund and Gothenburg, as well as at the new universities who have received university status relatively recently. In addition to this, there are some university colleges who are entitled to conduct research in a particular discipline and some who are not. Among those university colleges who are entitled to conduct research in a particular discipline we find Blekinge Institute of Technology.

Research is also conducted at state as well as private research institutes. At the research institutes research and development is often conducted in close cooperation with trade and industry. They carry out research in a certain line of business, or in a certain field, and constitute an important resource for the transferring of knowledge to small and medium size companies among others.

Basic research / applied research

When we talk about research there is basic research and applied research. A person who does basic research often does not have a preconceived opinion about how the research he is conducting will be used. The search is free. It is rather like heading out for unfamiliar waters to try to seek explanations for different phenomena. Basic research is important for the general knowledge development in our society.

Applied research on the other hand is devoted to finding solutions or explanations for specific problems. Already from the beginning the scientist knows what the research results are going to be used for. A great deal of the applied research is conducted in trade and industry or at research institutes, often in cooperation with scientists at universities and university colleges.

Dissemination of research results

The purpose of research is to increase our knowledge in different fields and thus it is important that research results are accessible. There are a number of different ways to present research results. They can be presented in journal articles, research reports, books or dissertations. It is also common for research results to be presented orally at conferences and to be published in so called conference proceedings. At conferences and seminars, posters can also be one alternative for disseminating results. Another way to quickly shed light on your research can be so called preprints, i.e. scientific articles published electronically on the Internet. Dissemination of results also happens between colleagues at seminars and through more informal communication in discussion lists and news groups on the Internet.

Anne-Marie Pettersson
2010-02-04

Thanks to the fact that many databases are now offering automatic literature coverage it is easier to keep up-to-date with the latest research findings in a subject.

Selective dissemination of information (SDI)

A standing SDI will give you an overview of news in your area of interest. You create a search profile that is run regularly in the database, and if a new document matches your search query you will get a reference to the new document by e-mail. E-mail alerts are often free of charge, but you must find the full text of the article yourself.

Table of contents (TOC)

Many publishers, with both electronic and printed publications, offer the possibility of a subscription for the table of contents pages from recently published journal issues. In addition to the table of contents you often get short summaries of the published articles. All you need to do is register your e-mail address and what subjects / journals you are interested in.

The ultimate search profile

Take into account the fact that it often takes some time to find a good search profile / search query. At first it is easy to make too wide searches and your inbox will quickly fill with material that is not quite interesting, and which you do not have the time to go through. To avoid this you might create a very narrow search that never gives any results. It is advisable to spend some extra time to find the right search profile.

In the long run it pays off to have effective subject coverage. Unfortunately you cannot count on using the same search query in all databases. Neither the search language, nor indexing or thesauri are standardized.

Accept the fact that it takes some time to find an effective search profile. Check what special features the databases you are interested in have (read about search technique in the database help pages), reflect over the search results. Are you satisfied with the result or do you want to make some adjustments in the search query?

Eva Norling
2005-06-21

Reference management is about keeping track of references for books, articles and other material you want to refer to. It is also about presenting the references correctly, both in the text and in the bibliography. Reference management software can help you manage your references during the whole writing process, from information gathering to publishing.

When you are in the process of writing a scientific text you discover how difficult it can be to keep track of the references for the material you want to refer to. Another problem will usually surface when you are about to publish your text; there is an enormous amount of different styles for writing references in the text as well as in the bibliography and it is time consuming work to achieve a correct result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Keep three things in mind:
Be critical, build networks and list good scientific resources

If you are looking for free scientific resources on the web you should keep at least three things in mind:

1. Be critical and try to evaluate critically the resources you seek out.
2. Try to build some sort of knowledge or information network from which you can gather information about the dynamic and ever changing web, where possibilities and resources come and go. Try to keep up-to-date through books, articles and well-informed colleagues and friends, and last but not least – use news letters and e-mail lists.
3. Not everything on the web is accessed by clicking one button on search tools such as Google and AltaVista etc. Many resources are invisible for those search tools for many reasons. A great part of the information on the web is found in dynamic databases invisible to ordinary search tools. The information can be stored in formats search tools have difficulty to interpret, such as PDF or PostScript files, or the information is simply protected by passwords. We are focusing on free scientific resources, so the last mentioned problem does not concern us in this context, but there is consequently no harm in making a list of good free scientific resources and then to expand from there.

A great part of the free scientific information on the web is examined and objective but that does not prevent you from critically evaluating the resources you find. One of the most important criterions for a critical attitude is to check who the author is. Who is the authority behind the information? Is he a well-known person in the subject field? Check if the author has written other articles or texts. What is the author’s position, what organization does he/she belong to? The minimum criterion for trusting the author is that his address and phone number plus e-mail address is available. If you find a publisher’s name that you recognize it can be a valuable sign that the information is reliable. The same rule applies if the document is on a server belonging to a well-known organization. If the document is stored on a personal Internet account – be careful! Always ask yourself if the document has a scientific structure. Is there a reference list? Is the method and approach described scientifically? In order to find and keep track of existing resources, and resources in the making, there are several good news letters. Below you will find an annotated list of a couple of such news letters.

The Scout Report

In the web site it says “Since 1994, the Internet Scout Project has focused on research and development projects providing better tools for finding, filtering and presenting information and meta data online.
The scout server is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and it is published every Friday, on the web or by e-mail. It is an accessible way to keep informed of valuable Internet resources and the service is provided by librarians and information scientists which is a guarantee for high quality. Check out subscription options at: http://scout.wisc.edu/

Librarians´ index to the Internet

The Librarians’ Index to the Internet is a well organized starting point for those who seek a reliable and well organized index for selected Internet resources. The service is a searchable annotated subject index of more that 12 000 Internet resources selected by librarians at public libraries. But, although the service is directed to public library users there is a large selection of good scientific resources as well. The service is very similar to Yahoo in its structure. You can subscribe to newsletters which notify you when new resources are added to the service. http://lii.org/

Free Pint

Free Pint is a newsletter which is based on a network of nearly 70 000 information specialists around the world. The newsletter is free and consists of a number of sections that deal with different subject fields. Free Pint is valuable because it counterbalances the dominance of American resources by favoring European and other sources. Another good thing about Free Pint is the “bar” where you can ask tricky questions about the web or have a discussion with or help other bar guests with their problems http://www.freepint.co.uk/

SPARC Open Access News Letter

If you are looking for news on what is happening in the Open Access movement the Sparc Open Access News Letter (SOAN) by Peter Suber is a must. SOAN has existed since 2003. Subscription for the newsletter and access to the discussion forum is free of charge.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html

BioMedCentral

If you are interested in following biomedical research and finding free resources in this field you should register for free continuous information through Biomed Central which is one of the oldest and most widely used resources in biomedicine in the world.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Open Archives Initiative

Open Archives Initiative offers two mailing lists. One is a channel for discussing non technical problems and the other works as a forum for technical discussions on different OAI protocols among other things.
http://www.openarchives.org/community/index.html

OAIster

Is a search tool developed at the University of Michigan and run by OCLC which provides access to about 1000 free scientific archives around the world. Together they hold more that 25 million records.
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

Peter Linde
2010-09-06

Authors of scientific documents should store their reviewed articles in open archives, with open access for everyone. This original idea was formalized at the end of the 1990s through the organization Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

http://www.openarchives.org

Authors of scientific documents should store their reviewed articles in open archives, with open access for everyone. This original idea was formalized at the end of the 1990s through the organization Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The basic idea was to decrease the dependence on commercial publishers who were really only needed to carry out quality control and certification by reviewing and editing, which in turn could be paid by the author’s institution/organization with a smaller sum from the annual savings they would make by canceling subscriptions for scientific journals. Since then the idea has spread around the world, and today about 1.300 scientific archives exist, with millions of documents which are based on the OAI principles of free access.

Common standards

But self-archiving is not enough. In order to disseminate the information and make texts searchable and compatible with other systems there must be common standards. For this reason, OAI has developed and marketed interoperability standards, which enable effective dissemination of electronic documents.

OAI-PMH

OAI has its roots in the vision that all research should be publicly accessible, and the organizations’ main contribution to this is the development of The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The protocol forms the base for joint searches of information which contains meta data. There are two types of participants in the protocol: Data providers who administrate digital archives with data that supports OAI-PMH and service providers who use meta data harvested through OAI-PMH in different kinds of meta search tools.

Software

Another important function that OAI has supported is the development of free software which supports the building of open digital archives. E-print is one such software which can be downloaded for free and be locally adapted to build institutional archives. Dspace is another such tool which has been developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inspired by E-print and other similar software.

Users

In OAI there is a big community of users within which you share information of both technical and general nature. The Internet world is dynamic. Software, protocols and standards come and go. Because of this a non-profit organization built by users like the OAI is of great importance in order to keep together the global work that the construction of free scientific resources on the Internet means.

Peter Linde
2010-09-06

University colleges and universities are to a great extent affected by copyright regulations. The individual researcher’s right as originator to decide about his own work is one of the corner pillars of the legislation. At the same time, these rights should be balanced against the public’s wish to take part of the research results. Here we will go through existing rights and restrictions.

Background

Copyright can be traced back to the 15th century. Johann Gutenberg’s invention made it possible to multiply documents. Consequentially, several states issued particular printing privileges. Not mainly in order to protect the originator, but more to censor and control printed material. During the 17th and 18th centuries this system could not be maintained and in 1710 came what was to be considered the first copyright regulation in the shape of the British Act of Anne. This act gave the originator the right to decide about his work, but it was only valid in Britain. The 1886 Bern Convention regulated this by protecting literary and artistic works in those European countries that adhered to the convention. Sweden became a member in 1904. More than 147 countries are members today and the Bern Convention is therefore the most important international convention on copyright.

The current law in Sweden is the law (1960:729) about copyright for literary and artistic work. The copyright law is also included in the Swedish constitution, 2nd chapter, §19. The Instrument of Government. During the last years Swedish legislation has been adapted to a number of directives from the EU. Through the EU directive 2001:29 it became necessary to revise Swedish copyright law more thoroughly. An investigation titled Ds 2003:35 Upphovsrätten i informationssamhället was completed and the Riksdag, the parliament, came to a decision that the new regulations should be valid from July 1st 2005.

How is a work protected?

A work is protected automatically as soon as it is created. The point of origin is thus the moment of creation, which normally should be easy to establish. Instead the problem is defining what a work is and the law does not define any criteria for this. Nevertheless it is stated in §1 of the copyright law which categories of works may exist. Examples of such categories are spoken and written language, numbers, stenography and the Morse, digital signs in the shape of CD-ROM, databases, web pages, computer programs, films, photographs, etc. For certain types of works copyright is not valid though. Examples of such are statutes, authority resolutions, statements from Swedish authorities etc. The originator is the person or persons who created the work and thus does not belong to one or several physical persons. Copyright therefore does not apply to institutions or companies but only the person who created the work. A protected work should be the result of an individual intellectual creative process, have “verkshöjd” which means it has a certain intellectual quality, and have a special design. For example an idea can be copyright protected, or short news items which really only convey facts.”Verkshöjd” means the originality of the work. As an example of this it is usually pointed out that a work could not have been created by two people independent of each other. The copyright period of protection is valid from the day the work was created until 70 years after the death of the originator and for 50 years for photographs without “verkshöjd”.

The meaning of the protection – economic and non-profit rights

In the law, two main types of rights are treated, economic and non-profit. According to economic rights the originator has the right to dispose of her work. She has exclusive right to produce copies of the work (right of duplication) and make it publicly accessible. She can also transfer economic rights to someone else at a charge. The economic compensation is determined based on what is agreed between the parties. A work is considered to be made publicly accessible when the work is transferred to the public. It can be transferred with or without technical aids. A common case is when a document is published on the Internet, i.e. when a work is made accessible at a distance from a user who can decide when and where she is to take part of it. The other form concerns the public performance of a work. It can for example be a play which is performed in front of an audience or a film which is broadcasted on TV etc., thus with or without the use of technology. The third form addresses the case when examples of the work are shown in public. It is made accessible without technical aids and in a place where the public can take part of the work, e.g. an art exhibition.

The fourth and last form speaks of the case when examples of the work are offered for sale, renting or lending or otherwise spread to the public. It is often associated with the sale of books or other printed works. For example it is not applicable for digital documents spread over the Internet. Non-profit-making right gives the originator the right to be named at the use of his work and this is called “namngivelserätten” (which translates to the right to be mentioned by name.) Even if this does not necessarily have any economical consequences the originator’s name should always be stated. People often fail to do this, e.g. when they use photographs. A work may also not be altered so that the originator’s literary or artistic reputation is violated or in any way made accessible for the public in such a way that the originator is violated, which is called “respekträtten” (an approximate translation is the right to be respected).

Unlike economical rights, non-profit-making rights can not be transferred, other than concerning to nature and extent limited use of the work. Non-profit-making rights are based on the copyright law §3. Legal cases such as NJA 1974, p. 94 and NJA 1975, p. 679 illustrate this. An interesting current case about the violation of “respekträtten” is the civil case between Claes Eriksson/Vilgot Sjöman and TV 4. In the district court sentence it was pointed out that this had been violated when TV4 interrupted their movies with commercials.

Copyright restrictions

The legislators’ ambition with copyright is that the originator’s rights should be balanced against the public’s interest in gaining access to copyright protected work. The law describes those cases when use of a work is permitted without the consent of the originator. As is described above the protection of a work ceases to apply 70 years after the originator’s death. There are some restrictions though through the so called “classic’s protection”. According to this works can not be rendered in a manner that violates the interest of intellectual property. Copyright restrictions are regulated in the second chapter of the law.

Copying

According to §12 of the law, each person has the right to produce one or a few copies for private use of works that have been made public. How many copies you can make is not established exactly. But considerably fewer than what was allowed before the new law was taken, when single copies could mean up to ten copies.

Now the limit is one or a few copies, but it is not a definite limit. It can be fewer depending on what kind of work it concerns, for example an illustrated work. Where the line should be drawn has to be determined in legal usage. Also, the production of copies must only be of limited parts of a work. Copying whole books is thus forbidden today. Only parts of a work may be copied. Copies from e.g. course literature can thus only comprise limited parts of a book, for example a chapter or some other limitation. The same rule applies regardless of whether it is a printed book or the corresponding digital edition. It does not matter how the copying is done, i.e. whether it is done with an ordinary copy-machine, a scanner, to a CD-ROM etc. If however you print a document e.g. from the Internet the original should be permissible, i.e. the original should be published with the originator’s consent. Of course it may be difficult to know whether it is permissible or not, but if you did not know or should have known that the original was permissible, no penalty or damages are sentenced. One should be careful about documents from the Internet though, because a great deal of material there has been published without the originator’s consent. Copying must not be done for a commercial purpose. It continues to be allowed to share copies with your family and a circle of friends though. It is also permitted to share with other members in a closed society, or to colleagues when it is reasonable to do so in a specific professional situation, e.g. sheets of music for musician colleagues. But it is no longer permitted to copy documents and then share with colleagues in a workplace. It is only allowed for personal professional practise to make copies for your own use. To sum up, this means that the amount of copies that may be made has been restricted, and making copies for colleagues at a workplace is forbidden. In an educational context copies may be made of published works unless there is a license agreement between the parts in the agreement. If the originator at either part announces that usage is prohibited this is valid. Overall, the new legislation aims at limiting illegal copying, mainly of music and film, which through file sharing systems can be downloaded to the individual user. The right to copy does not comprise computer programs. These must only be copied to the hard disk in order to make it possible to use the program, i.e. if the program was acquired legally. Copies of computer programs are thus never allowed.

Copying with the BONUS-agreement

The law approves of the making of copies for private use in one or a few copies. This does not exclude different kinds of acquisition and to a greater extent than what is required for personal use. Copying for educational purposes and special sets for a class may be done through a license agreement. From 1990 the state and other institutions pay to a joint administrative organisation – BONUS. Its task is to distribute incoming funds to organisations concerned. The agreement makes it possible to produce and sell compendiums at cost price. According to §12 from “General terms of contract for copying in the university college field”, i.e. BONUS standard agreement, teachers have the right to copy 15% or at the most 15 pages from a work. If a whole chapter from a book is needed the teacher can copy the whole section unless it is more than a few pages more than what is allowed. Teachers thus have the right to copy and spread printed material. The copying agreement must be followed though, and it means for example that a teacher must not give a book to the students and say – please copy this.

Regarding digital material there is an absolute prohibition against the above mentioned and it is not included in the BONUS-agreement. A teacher can for instance not pass on an article in digital form to her students. If an author does not want her work to be used for copying she can inform Bonus Presskopia about this and they are obliged to communicate this. A teacher is thus not obliged to find out for himself if copying is prohibited or not.

Quoting

The right to quote is based on The copyright law, §22. Quoting is based on those rules that apply to non-profit rights, i.e. quoting should render the original text exactly and state the source. It should be clear from the text what has been quoted. According to the law anyone can quote from texts that have been made public according to custom to an extent that is justified by the circumstances. This does not mean that you can take a whole text and present it as your own composition. Exactly where the line is drawn can not be defined from the law, but this has to be settled in each separate case from what is suitable in relation to the author’s own text. Quoting should be seen as a part in a greater context, used in your own text for example in order to verify or falsify a thesis. The main principle of §22 is that quotes may be made from all works, though this does not apply to photographs or images. Works of art can, according to §23, be depicted in connection with the text in a scientific production with is not created for a profitable purpose.

One example where the right to quote was trespassed can be found in NJA 1996 p. 712. Aftonbladet reproduced three quotes from an interview in Dagens Nyheter. The quotes comprised about one fifth of the article. The Supreme Court found that this use was not motivated by the right to quote and that it was not in agreement with good practice.

Linking

A common way of referring to documents on the Internet is by linking them to each other. We speak mainly of hypertext links and deep links. In the first case the link points to another web page and not directly to the document, which is the case with deep linking. You could claim that a person who creates such links is providing access to copyright protected material. If linking were to be considered as copyright violation this would have serious consequences for a global network like the Internet, which is based on this function.

The Supreme Court in Sweden has acquitted a case about deep linking of a musical recording in MP3-format though, and has stated that it should be considered as making it accessible as a public appearance. According to §47 of the Copyright law, sound recordings may be used at public appearances without the originator’s permission.

Teacher exception

In Swedish legislation there are no direct rules for who has the right to dispose of work or inventions which were created during a contract of employment. This can be regulated either by an agreement between employers and employees or by collective agreement. According to the law (1949:345) about the right to employees’ inventions, the employer has the right to dispose of an invention which was created as a step in the employee’s tasks at the workplace and if the invention falls within the sphere of activities of the employer.

According §1 of the law teachers at universities and university colleges should not be considered as employees though. This is what is normally characterized as the teacher exception. Teachers have the right to exploit inventions they make at work without any impediments from their employer. Lately there has been a debate in Sweden about the removal of this exception. LO, Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and The Federation of Private Enterprises want to abolish it, while the united community of higher education want to keep it (autumn 2004). The Minister for Industry and Trade, Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, Tomas Östros, also supports the abolition. The teacher exception thus regulates the teacher’s right to patentable inventions. This should not be confused with literary and artistic work which is regulated in the copyright law. As can be seen above this is regulated in agreements.

Sources:
Broms, Susanna (1995). Biblioteken och juridiken. Lund : Studentlitteratur. ISBN 91-44-03016-9
Legala handboken (2004-09-15). http://www.legalahandboken.netuniversity.se/index.html (2005-10-26)

Kent Pettersson
2005-11-01

Conditions for scientific communication have truly changed through past centuries, but still the most basic form of communication – the personal contact (e.g. via e-mail) – is the most valuable. But also meetings and conferences are appreciated forms of communication that have lasted through centuries.

The date of the first scientific publication can not be established exactly, but we know that there was such publication a thousand years ago in Persia and China. Most often though, you might think about the classical Greek philosophers and scholars like Plato and Aristotle among others, who 300 B.C. gathered disciples and masters in the Academy to converse and spread knowledge about the nature of things.

During the Middle Ages learned men focused on collecting and passing on ancient knowledge and traditions, among which the classical Greek belonged. During the Middle Ages translations from Arabic and Greek to Hebrew and Latin became so common that new professions were formed to distribute and in other ways handle these documents – printers, book sellers, publishers and librarians – the last mentioned worked at the medieval universities, systemizing and organizing all the manuscripts that poured in from writer’s of encyclopedias and translators.

With the Renaissance you could say that modern science as we know it emerged. The scientific revolution of the renaissance meant so much more than copying down and gathering existing knowledge. The renaissance scholar broke all scholastic chains and was a jack of all trades, and an experimenting man who produced great amounts of knowledge which did not fit into the existing system. Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon are two well-known names from this time.

Scientific societies

The approach of looking forward rather that backwards demanded new quicker methods for communication, and at the beginning of the 17th century the first scientific society was formed in Italy. Accademia dei Lincei was founded in Rome and the society’s research results and experiments were related in the publication “Gesta Lyceorum”. The most famous scientific society in the world “The Royal Society” of London was formed in the middle of the 17th century when scholars met spontaneously to discuss their research. The society was finally formalized when Charles II issued a charter in 1662.

Philosophical Transactions

Today the journal of the Royal Society “Philosophical Transactions” is the oldest scientific journal still published. During the second part of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, private libraries became more common and with that books also became an accepted form of communication for scientists.

Specialized societies

During the 18th century specialized societies began to emerge and several museums of natural history were founded. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739, in 1753 The British museum was founded, as well as The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and in 1786 The Swedish Academy.

Specialized journals

During the 1770s several specialized journals were created in medicine, chemistry, botany and mathematics. The exchange of abstracts became an appreciated way of managing scientific communication, but was also seen as a sign of a fundamental problem in science that had now appeared. Toward the end of the 18th century there were complaints about the enormous growth of scientific literature, of the difficulty of determining the contents of a book or article only through the title, poor scientific quality and the difficulty of finding source material. Complaints which have lasted over the years!

Applied science and engineering and modern industrial development dominate during the 19th century which was also the golden decade of patents. Abstracts and indexing become well established.

20th century –

Among the events and trends which have affected scientific communication the most during the 20th century are the establishment of multinational companies, the appearance of Government research institutes and institutions: Big Science with their teams and collaboration between institutions, increased specializations, increasing processing-speed and storage capacity of computers for filing, analyzing or searching and presenting data. English is established as the dominating scientific language, International organizations increase international cooperation and there are fifty times more publications in science and technology than during all previous centuries together.

Personal contact

Conditions for scientific communication have truly changed through past centuries, but still the most basic form of communication – the personal contact (e.g. via e-mail) – is the most valuable. But also meetings and conferences are appreciated forms of communication that have lasted through centuries. Secondary literature continues to be an important source of information since primary literature is published at such a breakneck speed that no scientist can absorb the news in his subject field fully, which, as we have seen, has been a fact since the 18th century.

Free access

An increasing number of scientific documents are freely available on the web today. The reason for this is above all the traditional scientific publishing model which is based on Government financed scientists providing commercial publishers with free material. These publishers then hire reviewers and editors from the scientific community to filter the article material which is published in journals which Government financed libraries purchase and whose readers are the same circle of people as the authors, reviewers and editors of the article in this example. This system has worked during the last two centuries mainly for two reasons: qualification and news circulation.

Protest against unreasonable price increase

Toward the end of the last century an unreasonable price increase for scientific journals began to lead to loud protests from both libraries and scientists. Examples of price increases of up to 4 times of consumer price index were not uncommon. These conditions made both scientists and libraries react; libraries by canceling subscriptions and starting to build their own database-archives for scientific material, and scientists by publishing articles in these archives, plus starting their own scientific journals which made articles freely accessible on the Internet. The development of the Internet and the WWW has accelerated the paradigmatic shift in scientific publishing.

Today many voices can be heard demanding open access to scientific articles. Early 2010 the swedish Research Council proclaimed that they in the future will only finance researcher who publish the funded results oopen access. Earlier on the European research council have recommended open access and even on a national government level you can today hear discussions about mandating open access for scientific research financed by the state.

Peter Linde
2010-09-06

One of the main purposes of the BTH Electronic research archive is to dissiminate and make BTH’s research available in full text. We therefore actively support initiatives which promotes such free access.

Intensive research

Research at BTH comprises a number of subject fields, from technology to the humanities, from business administration to health sciences and today it is organized in five schools.  Research is most intensive in Signal processing and Computer science.

Free access to research

One of the main purposes of BTH’s Electronic research archive is to try to make the research of BTH available in full text. According to guidelines from the government and the National Agency for Higher Education we support the idea that scientific information should be free to access to as high extent as possible and therefore actively support initiatives which promote such free access (Open Archives Initiative, Berlin Declaration etc.) by implementing Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH) in our databases. This means that the material in BTH’s Electronic Research Archive is also searchable and accessible from scientific web tools such as OAIster, Google, Google Scholar etc.

http://www.bth.se/fou/

Peter Linde
2010-09-06

Important research results are often published at national or international conferences. Conferences are often advertised long beforehand with programs and calls for papers. Papers are often printed before the conference (preprints) and are sent to participants or distributed at the conference. Papers are also often printed afterwards.

You can search for conferences in a database called ISI. There you can search for subject, author, title etc.

Conference papers are generally also covered in other types of databases. In the reference database Inspec you can for example search only among conference papers by choosing conference proceedings under Limit before you start searching.

Other common forms of scientific communication are so called electronic conferences, which were one of the earliest phenomena on the Internet. They include discussion lists, Usenet usegroups, mailing lists etc.

Kent Pettersson
2006-02-06