Free access to springer journals

Free access to highly cited Springer journals through November

Explore Computer Science journals your colleagues read and cite:

• Algorithmica
• Autonomous Robots
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• International Journal of Computer Vision
• Machine Learning
• Software and Systems Modeling
• Statistics and Computing
• The VLDB Journal

AIP FREE ONLINE ACESS

AIP Offers Free Online Access

October 2012 – Nobel Prize Month

 FREE Access Extended through November 2012!

October is always an exciting month for the scientific community as we anticipate the Nobel Prize announcements. In honor of this exciting time, we’ve selected this month to make AIP content freely available. We are proud to count many Nobel Laureates and their colleagues among our authors, editors, reviewers and readers, and we wish to celebrate all of the advancements that drive the physical sciences forward.

We encourage you to take full advantage of free access to these titles:

Journal	Free access range
AIP Conference Proceedings	1999 - current
APL: Organic Electronics and Photonics	2008 - current
Applied Physics Letters	1999 - current
Applied Physics Reviews	1999 - current
Biomicrofluidics	2007 - current
Chaos	1999 - current
JCP: Biochemical Physics	2006 - current
Journal of Applied Physics	1999 - current
The Journal of Chemical Physics	1999 - current
Journal of Mathematical Physics	1999 - current
Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data	1999 - current
Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy	2009 - current
Low Temperature Physics	1999 - current
Physics of Fluids	1999 - current
Physics of Plasmas	1999 - current
Review of Scientific Instruments	1999 - present
Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters	2011 - current
Journal of Laser Applications	1999 - current
AIP Advances (open access)	2011 - current

For informative overviews of the award-winning work of previous Nobel Laureates in Physics go to:

• 2010 Physics Nobel Prize resources
• 2011 Physics Nobel Prize resources

• 2012 Physics Nobel Prize resources: Coming soon!

MOOC the Online Teaching

Colleges and professors have rushed to try a new form of online teaching known as MOOC’s—short for "massive open online courses." The courses raise questions about the future of teaching, the value of a degree, and the effect technology will have on how colleges operate. Struggling to make sense of it all?

What are MOOC's?

MOOC's are classes that are taught online to large numbers of students, with minimal involvement by professors. Typically, students watch short video lectures and complete assignments that are graded either by machines or by other students. That way a lone professor can support a class with hundreds of thousands of participants.

Why all the hype?

Advocates of MOOC's have big ambitions, and that makes some college leaders nervous. They're especially worried about having to compete with free courses from some of the world’s most exclusive universities. Of course, we still don't know how much the courses will change the education landscape, and there are plenty of skeptics.

These are like Open Courseware projects, right?

Sort of. More than a decade ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a much-touted project called OpenCourseWare, to make all of its course materials available free online. But most of those are text-only: lecture notes and the like. Several colleges now offer a few free courses in this way, but they typically haven't offered assignments or any way for people who follow along to prove that they've mastered the concepts. MOOC's attempt to add those elements

Who are the major players?

Several start-up companies are working with universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:

edX

A nonprofit effort run jointly by MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.

Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone can use it to run MOOC’s.

Coursera

A for-profit company founded by two computer-science professors from Stanford.

The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue. More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U. of Virginia, have joined.

Udacity

Another for-profit company founded by a Stanford computer-science professor The company, which works with individual professors rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars. Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its courses on computer science and related fields.

Khan Academy

A non-profit organization founded by MIT and Harvard graduate Salman Khan.

Khan Academy began in 2006 as an online library of short instructional videos that Mr. Khan made for his cousins. The library—which has received financial backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, as well as from individuals—now hosts more than 3,000 videos on YouTube. Khan Academy does not provide content from universities, but it does offer automated practice exercises, and it recently debuted a curriculum of computer science courses. Much of the content is geared toward secondary-education students.

Udemy

A for-profit platform that lets anyone set up a course.

The company encourages its instructors to charge a small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many of the courses.

What’s in the Cloud?

There are a variety of cloud-based services in the library world. The most obvious is cloud-based access to a library’s book and AV collections through the online catalog (OPAC) that is part of the library’s integrated library system (ILS). OPACs can be overlaid with cloud-based front ends or recommender systems to make them more user-friendly. Bibliocommons is an example of a cloud-based front end for public libraries that works in tandem with a variety of ILSs. Bibliocommons and competing offerings from other vendors not only replace the search and discovery functionality of the OPAC but can also replace some patron account-related tasks, such as placing holds, paying fines, and updating user profiles. Some also provide a discovery experience based on community-contributed content, such as user-generated tags and reviews. Discovery layers like Serials Solutions’ Summon, EBSCO’s EDS, Ex Libris’s Primo Central, and others are meant to access all of a library’s data silos, not just resources cataloged in the ILS. Such discovery layers can provide access to special collections in the institutional repository and to products hosted outside of the library. For example, scans of public domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository can be found via the discovery layer of its academic library partners.

If a library wants more than the discovery layer in the cloud, library technology vendors including Innovative Interfaces and OCLC have either implemented or are in the process of launching completely new ILSs in the cloud, and open source providers, such as ByWater Solutions, can deliver cloud-based hosting services for the Koha ILS.

Electronic resources can also be made available through extramural repositories. Google Scholar incorporates metadata from journal indexes, article repositories, and other sources to offer web-scale access to scholarship that can be accessed at a patron’s library of choice. OverDrive, the most popular library ebook vendor, works with public and academic libraries and is making strides to integrate seamlessly with online library systems. 3M’s new ebook service, unveiled last year, permits users to sync their reading on multiple devices but still requires an initial download of the entire ebook file (that is, patrons don’t read a streaming book but a downloaded one).

Citation management software in the cloud can double as a platform for sharing content, forming communities around research topics, and recommending resources. Mendeley, for example, offers citation management through a web browser, though, to be fully functional, users need to download a client to their local computer.

New services may offer innovative approaches to managing scholarly communication electronically. Third Iron will let academic researchers browse and save new journal content through a service called BrowZine, available for the iPad.

MORE USES

Other services and products may also be of interest. Mobile phone apps can add value to cloud-based library data. OCLC’s WorldCat mobile site aims to direct patrons to the closest library owning a certain book by mashing-up data from WorldCat holdings, library locations, and user locations. StackMap shelf-mapping software is a new service that allows libraries to show users a map of the book’s physical location in the library based on a prerecorded call number range. Unlike radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which potentially allow for real-time search of a book via location tracking, this service is less dynamic but nonetheless useful.

Lastly, backups to the cloud can protect all kinds of library data—from repository contents to blog posts—from loss owing to fire, flood, local power blackouts, or other natural or computer-related disasters that could cause data to disappear. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform is a cloud service in the technologist’s sense of the term: it is scalable, metered, dynamic, and completely hosted by the bookselling giant. Libraries with technology staff can
use EC2 to implement virtual servers.

What Is Wrong With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

EFF has been fighting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) intellectual property chapter for several years. This agreement poses a great risk to users’ freedoms and access to information on a global scale. We have created this infographic to capture the most problematic aspects of TPP, and to help users, advocates and innovators from around the world spread the word about how this agreement will impact them and their societies. Right-click and save the image for the PNG file
We thank Lumin Consulting for working with us on this project.

Jumping on the DRM free bandwagon

If you’re a consumer of ebooks, you’ll be pleased to know that some publishers are now ditching DRM (Digital Rights Management) on their books.

The Tor online store proudly displays its intent to go DRM free

Tor/Forge Books in the US and Momentum (an imprint of Australia’s Pan Macmillan), have both recently announced that they no longer intend to restrict the use of their ebooks using DRM.

‘The problem,’ said Joel Naoum, Momentum’s publisher, ‘is that DRM restricts users from legitimate copying – such as between different e-reading devices. We feel strongly that Momentum’s goal is to make books as accessible as possible. Dropping these restrictions is in line with that goal.’

Speaking at Tor/Forge Books announcement, Charles Stross noted that

[restricting a consumer's use of their purchase] “is at the heart of customer resentment against DRM: once you buy a hardback you are free to do whatever you like with it — read it, lend it, or sell it on…but…DRM e-Books don’t work like that.”

Kindle for PC

When you hear the word Kindle, what's the first thing that comes to mind? For most people, this would be Amazon's smash hit e-book device, with its svelte looks and crisp e-ink display. But even if you don't want to shell out for a separate device, you can still enjoy many of the Kindle's benefits for no charge, thanks to Kindle for PC.
With its range of powerful, dedicated hardware devices, Amazon could almost be expected to neglect its Windows application. Instead, it has continued developing it, added compelling features, and made it into one of the best e-book reader applications available for Windows today.
When you first launch Kindle for PC, it prompts you to log on to your Amazon account. Once you do, your books are displayed with beautiful cover images. Double-click a book, and it instantly downloads to your computer.
Once on your computer, double-click the book again to start reading. If it is a book you bought on Amazon and started reading on another device, Kindle for PC will ask if you want to go to the last page you've read. It will also show any notes and highlights you've made in the book, even when reading it on another device, making for a seamless cross-device reading experience. Much like with Kindle devices, you can opt to ready our book in one of several fonts and font sizes. You can also control the color scheme (black, white, or sepia background), and its brightness. This is a very helpful feature when reading in the dark--and combined with the application's full screen mode, it goes a long way towards reducing eyestrain from monitor glare.
Modern computer monitors tend to be wide, and lines can stretch on and on. While you can increase the margin size (much like with a physical Kindle), Kindle for PC also lets you reflow the text into two columns. This makes for a beautiful layout, almost reminiscent of a physical book spread out for reading.
Kindle for PC uses Shelfari to provide instant facts about the book you are currently reading. There is another feature Kindle for PC provides, which is something I can't do with my "real" Kindle 3 device. This is something called Shelfari Extras, and it provides instant context for the book you are currently reading. Shelfari is a community website owned by Amazon since August 2008. It is essentially a large catalog of books, where users are invited to tell the world about what they've read and fill in particular bits of information about every book, such as key characters, places, and even define special words used in the book.
With Kindle for PC, you can simply click the name of a character in the book, select More, and click Shelfari Extras. If it's a well-known book, a definition for that particular character will pop up ("John's brother, separated at birth"). This worked for the book I was testing Kindle for PC with, and frankly, it blew me away. It is a brilliant use of crowd-sourced information: The more people read the book and talk about it, the better the database gets.
When all is said and done, Kindle for PC still runs on a PC. It can be a small notebook computer, but it's no physical Kindle. That is not necessarily bad, but it certainly makes for a different reading experience.

Google Drive

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog)

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist. Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

• Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
• Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
• Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB. Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future. This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come. Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start—and keep looking for Nessie... Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

Library Applications for iPad

Top 25 Library Apps for the iPad

When's the last time you thought, "Gee, I really miss scrolling around with a nice microfiche?" Between those and the Dewey decimal system, who's got the time to mess with libraries anymore? Well, who else but college kids, that is. The college library will always be an indispensible feature of higher education, providing the study materials students need and the place to peruse them. But the future is digital, and iPads are a great way to bridge the gap between traditional libraries and the developing world of e-reading. Here are the 25 best library apps to invest in.

1. My Library For $4, your iPad becomes the memory center for your personal book, CD, and movie libraries. Catalog your books by scanning the ISBN with your iPad camera, track who you loaned books to, and get access to free eBooks.
   
   
   
2. Book Crawler Book Crawler takes book cataloging to new heights with cool features like reviews and local library availability when you scan the barcode, Dropbox support for backing up your info, and location awareness to see what others around you are reading and strike up online (or real-world) discussions.
   
   
   
3. Library Books If you're forgetful, this $3 app will pay for itself pretty quickly. It can track multiple library cards and let you know when you've got a book coming due. (Check to make sure your library is covered before purchasing.)
   
   
   
4. OverDrive Media Console This free app gives you access to more than 18,000 libraries worldwide and lets you "check out" audiobooks and eBooks with a valid card. The titles expire on their own, so you don't have to sweat late fees.
   
   
   
5. GoodReader for iPad Mashable called this the "Swiss army knife of awesome." It's got quick, smooth handling of huge PDF and text files and even lets you make notes on PDFs. You can also wirelessly sync between folders and devices and annotate with a slew of editing tools.
   
   
   
6. MeeGenius! Kid's Books Bring a children's library to you with this free app featuring more than 300 titles. Turn your kids into little geniuses with the read-along technology that highlights and narrates words to help them learn.
   
   
   
7. BookBuddy Lite This app lets you share your book library over social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can also create custom categories for organizing your titles. And best of all, it's free.
   
   
   
8. iBooks You knew there'd be an iBooks. This one lets you bookmark and take notes, find free samples of any book in the iBookstore before buying, and sync your books and PDFs to your other iOS devices.
   
   
   
9. Kindle Some people actually prefer using Amazon's Kindle app for reading eBooks to Apple readers. It's a simple way to access the more than 1 million titles the online retailer has for sale, plus more than 400 magazines and newspapers. Change your background color, font, font size, and more to customize your reading experience.
   
   
   
10. Stanza This long-time favorite of iPhone users is now on the iPad. It's a free app that lets you peruse 50,000 titles from partner stores and 50,000 more free classics available thanks to Project Gutenberg, then store and categorize them once you've got them.
    
    
    
11. ICDL- Free Books For Children Give your kids a taste of literature from around the world with the International Children's Digital Library app. There are free books from 60-plus countries with beautiful illustrations and English story summaries and titles from as far back as the 1800s.
    
    
    
12. iResearch For the next best thing to researching in the library, try this no-cost app from the American Institute of Physics. You'll get access to scholarly journals like Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters, whose articles you can then download with a personal subscription or a school access subscription, if your school has one.
    
    
13. Kobo Kobo is a free app that's packed with fun features, like the ability to share passages with friends and see what books they recommend. Kobo also lets you add books, both pay and free, to your library from email, Dropbox, or the web, and the reading experience is highly customizable.
    
    
    
14. NYPL Biblion: World's Fair This is the first app in a series that will be released by the New York Public Library to bring their famous research collections to a wide audience. You'll find amazing documents, pictures, audio, and videos from the 1939-1940 World's Fair.
    
    
    
15. arXiv Study like a Cornell student with the help of this reference app. The school's database hosts more than 500,000 PDFs of texts in the fields of math, science, physics, biology, and others that you can search by category. It's like Microfiche 2.0.
    
    
    
16. iSSRN From the Social Sciences Research Network, this is a great reference tool for social sciences and humanities students. More than 260,000 research papers are at your fingertips for viewing or emailing with this free app.
    
    
    
17. Mobile Abstracts PubMed is a database operated by the National Library of Medicine and hosts more than 20 million medical journal abstracts. With this $.99 app you can search and view abstracts as PDFs for research. It'll save your searches for you and let you bookmark articles you want to keep.
    
    
    
18. Free Books The name's a bit misleading, as the app costs $1.99. But once you fork that over you've got exactly 23,469 free books waiting to be downloaded to your iPad. There are no limits and no download caps.
    
    
    
19. Local Books Book lovers from librarything.com love this app that's like Urban Spoon for books. It guides you to nearby libraries, bookstores, and upcoming literary events, but the fun part is socializing with other bibliophiles.
    
    
    
20. ACS Mobile The American Chemical Society was nice enough to create this free app so that any interested students can have up-to-the-minute updates on scholarly articles published across a range of industry journals. Currently the database is at 850,000 articles and counting.
    
    
21. British Library 19th Century Collection Similar to the NYPL collections app, this program delivers fascinating looks at books, engraved illustrations and maps, and other historic pieces from the 1800s. The app is free, and for a small monthly subscription you'll have access to more than 60,000 titles.
    
    
22. WorldCat Mobile MapQuest meets iBooks with this app that will let you search local libraries for a particular title and then map you out the fastest route to the library with that book in stock.
    
    
    
23. DCPL This is the library app that started it all. The District of Columbia Public Library system made the source code for their app available to other libraries to make their own apps. If you live in the area of a library using this type of app, you can find nearby libraries, make and modify orders, and find reviews and recommendations for popular books.
    
    
24. IOPscience Express This gratis app from IOP Publishing (Institute of Physics) allows you to download up to 20 recently-published scholarly papers each month. Easily search by author name, journal name, or topic and find the data you need to make your report perfect.
    
    
    
    
25. AccessMyLibrary For those occasions you need a library but it's after hours, try this app. AML uses your location to find libraries nearby and then allows you access to those libraries' online resources.
    

How will MOOCs impact the future of college education?

Massive Open Online Courses are leveraging today’s technology to provide (typically) free access to world class education.

Only the proverbial ostrich (you know, the one with it’s head in the sand) could look at the growing popularity of MOOCs and not acknowledge that technology has the potential to radically transform how education is delivered and the way that we learn. While change is not always a good thing, courses that are convenient and accessible across the world, and are often free, surely have a lot of good things going for them.

“MOOC” stands for Massive Open Online Course, and the number of institutions offering MOOCs is growing quickly. Thanks to increasing media attention and expanding offerings, interest in MOOCs has taken a significant leap forward in the last year (further attested to in this Google Search Insights graph).

Wikipedia’s entry for MOOCs explains that, “MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning. Typically, participation in a MOOC is free; however, some MOOCs may charge a fee in the form of tuition if the participant seeks some form of accreditation.”

According to Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs”, the first MOOC is widely thought to be a course titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which was co-taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, delivered to 25 tuition-paying students but offered at the same time to around 2,300 students from the general public who took the online class at no cost.
A sampling of the current state of the MOOC
Today’s MOOC offerings are expanding rapidly in terms of academic subjects covered, numbers of institutions offering them, and students partaking in them. To provide a sense of the widely varied approaches that are being taken with the creation and delivery of MOOCs, here’s a sampling of start-ups, major players, and a few popular individual courses:

• Udemy: Making no bones about it, the ‘About’ blurb on the home page of the Udemy site states, “Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts.” They have hundreds of thousands of students taking courses from their selection of hundred of classes courses covering a vast array of subjects. They have both paid and free courses, and these include courses from many different universities.
  
• Coursera: This growing powerhouse in the world of MOOCs, Coursera currently hosts courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania. They offer dozens of courses, covering subjects from “A History of the World” to “Vaccines”. These courses are non-credit, but many colleges are starting to consider the possibility of offering credit for satisfactory completion of MOOC courses.
• Udacity: As of the writing of this article, recent start-up Udacity is offering only a handful of course, all in the computer sciences field. Founded by three roboticists who believed that much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online, over 160,000 students enrolled in their first offering, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Pretty impressive.
• Creativity & Multicultural Communication from SUNY Empire State College: This course was offered as both a MOOC and a for-credit course at the same time. The course was a ‘connectivist’ course that mixed a variety of activities to facilitate learning and encouraged the use of selections from a wide variety of web-based tools for making a record of learning activities as students consume, remix and repurpose content (learn more on this ‘how it works‘ page).
• Change.mooc.ca: This course is just wrapping up, and has leveraged a mix of over 30 innovative thinkers, researchers, and scholars from the field of instructional technology, from 11 different countries. Each week, one of these professors or researchers introduces his or her central contribution to the field.

What does the future hold?
It’s going to be interesting to see how the MOOC movement, along with open course initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, evolve in the coming years, and how these developments relate to traditional higher education. If even a small number of universities and colleges start offering or accepting credits for these types of courses, it could easily grow into a larger trend, and  lower the overall cost of completing a degree. Could this reshape how students earn college credit? Is this ultimately a harbinger of free higher education, or will it evolve into something else entirely? What do you think?

Google starts ranking journals

 

In a blog posted on April Fool's Day, Google announced a new feature to its Scholar service. This was no prank. It was the genuine debut of a new tool called Google Scholar Metrics. The service follows the same principle that has made Google's web search engine so successful - when you are unsure what a user is looking for, give them a list of options ranked by a metric of popularity. In this instance, the users are academics ready to submit their next breakthrough but are uncertain which journal to choose. The solution Scholar Metrics offers is a database summarizing the sway of the distributors of scholarship "to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research".
Here's how it works. Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publication's h-index, which is the largest number "h" such that each of the set of "h" articles were cited "h" or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median. In the example, the h-median is 14.5.
You might think the "h" of the h-measures was for Helder Suzuki, the Google software engineer who made the blog post unveiling Scholar Metrics. Actually, the "h" refers to Professor Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Hirsch originally proposed the h-index in 2005 as a means for individual scientists - theoretical physicists, say - to gauge the quality of their work. Hirsch thought total publications, the standard evaluation measure at the time, was a flawed yardstick of a scientist's contributions. In his view, one had to also consider the distribution of citations resulting from a researcher's papers to really know whether that scientist's output was influencing his or her field. And now Scholar Metrics is applying the same idea to the scientific journal.
Scholar Metrics isn't the first tool for evaluating the influence of scholarly publications. In January 2009 Thomas Reuters introduced the impact factor. It is calculated by taking the total number of citations a journal has received in the past year and dividing by the total number of articles it has published in the previous two years. Impact factors are released as part of the annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Unlike Scholar Metrics, the JCR is a proprietary service.
So which is the better measure of a publication's influence, h-index or impact factor? If we look at the top ten distributors by each measure, we find Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science, the major players we would expect to be at the top of the list, taking the 1, 2, and 3 positions by h-index (Figure below). Not so for 5-year impact factor, which doesn't even include Science in its top 10 or PNAS in its top 100. In their place are a number of publications specializing in reviews, which makes the impact factor seem peculiarly out of touch. Review articles, although much read and frequently cited, are not the papers that shape their fields, and these specialty journals wouldn't even be considered by authors debating where to report their next breakthrough.

Further details read source webpage:-http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/1788885/Google-starts-ranking-journals.html

Library Quality Criteria for NBA Accreditation

The National Board of Accreditation as an autonomous body of All India Council for Technical Education New Delhi (AICTE), has been entrusted with the responsibility of Accreditation of Technical Institutions in India.

The Prime agenda of NBA is to assess and accredit Technical Institutions with the objective of enable them to work continuously to improve the quality of education by maximizing their resources opportunities and capabilities.

The Objectives of NBA 

1.  To encourage the institutions to continually strive towards the attainment of excellence. 
2. To identify the strength and weakness of their programmes
3. To assist the institutions in improving the quality and effectiveness of their programmes.

Why Accreditation Required

If the institution and its programmes are accredited by NBA then Institution will be able to identify its programmes with

1.      Excellence in technical education. 

2.      Bench marks of global requirements 

3.      A national platform to attract better student intake. 

4.      Appraise yourself of your own facilities

5.      Vendor of human capital to world-class employers

Eight Quality Criteria /Weightage for NBA Accreditation.

1. Organization and governance [80]
2. Financial resources, allocation &utilization [70]
3. Physical resources (central facilities) [50]
4. Human resources (faculty & staff) [200]
5. Human resources (students) [100]                 
6. Teaching-learning processes [350]                 
7. Supplementary processes [50]            
8. R&D and interaction efforts [100]

                                                TOTAL = 1000

In Teaching –Learning Processes Library having 20 Marks

How to score maximum Marks in library facility

1 

1. Library Budget Allocation and Utilization of funds. (Latest 3 years data)
2. Library space, Reading area, Seating capacity and Good Infrastructure (Follow the AICTE Norms).
3. Number of Users (Maintain Gate Registers/Thumb impressions /Barcode scanning to record users.(Maintain Statistics)
4. Library Timings (Working days, Weekends and Sundays, Late hours for hostelers.)
5. Number of Library staff, Their Qualifications, Designations and Experience.
6. Library automation with standard software, web OPAC, Bar-code facility and reports generation.
7. Library services through Internet and Intra net, blogs, social networks and web sites, email alerts SMS alerts
8. INDEST or Other similar bodies Memberships
9. Archival of rare materials books and publications
10. Latest Titles and Volumes available in the library according to syllabus (Follow the AICTE Norms for Number of titles and volumes)
11. National and International Journals Subscriptions (Follow AICTE Norms)
12. Back volumes of journals, Project Reports, Question Banks, Syllabus sets
13. Digital library exclusive Space, Server, number ofMulti media systems, Internet bandwidth and speed, Access to online databases. (Usage of Digital library maintain a  record)  
14. NPTEL and other Video lectures, Audio Video Rooms
15. Good collection development for Soft skills, Personality Development  Higher Education and Placements
16. Reprography and Scanners facility
17. Library Classification and Cataloging in standard Classification format.
18. Open Access of arrangement of print and non book materials.
19. Library bay guides to locate the materials easily.
20. Stock verification reports
21. Library Advisory committee meetings minutes implementations
22. Well Maintain Library Registers and Files
23. Display of New Arrivals
24. Display boards of library data and services
25. Library Orientation Programs. seminars
26. Power back up (UPS)
27. Drinking water  facility
28. Book exhibitions
29. Organizing book talks
30. Question papers Syllabus
31. News Papers clippings.
32. Fire safety measures

The Net is your college lab

Under the Virtual Labs project of the HRD Ministry, students can conduct experiments at the click of a mouse

It seems like everything is going online, even education. If the plans chalked out by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development are to go by, in the near future, students could conduct their intricate engineering and science experiments at the click of a mouse.

Virtual Labs, a project initiated by the Ministry under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), was released earlier this year with the objective of using the Internet to make up for the inadequate laboratory infrastructure in colleges in the State, with particular focus on rural colleges.

The 91 lab experiments, covering nine broad areas, have been developed by 12 institutes from across the country. Apart from seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Roorkee and Guwahati), International Institute for Information Technology-Hyderabad, Amrita University, Dayalbagh University, National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), and College of Engineering, Pune, developed the experiments that were subsequently uploaded on the website:

SIMPLIFICATION

The method involved involves simplifying learning of the experiment procedure by reducing textual information into packets of interactive graphics and diagrams – an attempt to translate the audio-visual experience of the lab into the virtual world.

For example, take the experiment to find the moment of inertia of a connecting rod, which was developed by College of Engineering, Pune. While the online experiment lists of background information and mathematical theory – in the form of text and schematic diagrams, as one would find in a textbook – it also contains a simulator, where the student, through the appropriate clicks of the mouse, can perform the experiment.

“The project would be useful for rural colleges, where there are no quality lab facilities available,” said Gangadharan K.V., a professor at NITK who coordinated the development of the “solve” labs in the institute.

The success of the project, however, depends entirely on the real-world problem of poor Internet connectivity in the rural parts of the State. To meet this problem, the Ministry plans to provide connectivity to over 1,800 institutes in the country, said Mr. Gangadharan.

HANDS-ON VS. ONLINE

However, can the clicking of the mouse substitute the hands-on experience of physical readings in a laboratory? The NMEICT mission statement ambiguously skirts the issue of whether ‘Virtual Labs' would actually replace practicals in colleges following the system. The statement says that for the ‘touch and feel' part, students “can possibly” visit an actual laboratory.

“It's like learning to play cricket by watching it on television,” said S. Parthan, a retired aeronautical professor from IIT-Kharagpur. Calling the lack of emphasis on practicals as one of the big problems afflicting the education system in the country, he said: “It is one thing to look at the computer or TV screen and it is another to work an actual model.”

While agreeing that the system cannot entirely replace an actual laboratory experimentation, Mr. Gangadharan said that the objective of ‘Virtual Labs' was to encourage scientific curiosity among students, and to optimise resource allocation.

Costly equipment and resources could be shared between colleges by optimising the time the student spends to conduct an experiment. “By learning about the experiment on ‘Virtual Labs,' the student has enough knowledge to take on the machine from the moment he or she steps into the laboratory. Hence, in the working hours of the lab, more students can conduct experiments,” he said.

The system would also help tackle one of the most pressing issues of the education system in the country – the lack of teachers. Fewer teachers would be required to coach a group of students, when a bulk of the theory could be grasped interactively through ‘Virtual Labs,' he said.

ENCOURAGING RESPONSE

Though the lab started public operations only on February 23, Mr. Gangadharan said the response was encouraging. The labs developed by NITK have received over 2,000 unique views, with people from over 20 countries visiting the site. A user spent an average of around seven minutes in the website, he said. “From next month onwards, we'll approach different colleges in the State to adopt the method.”

‘Virtual Labs' is a small step in the larger scheme of things. According to the NMEICT mission document, it would be a part of the ‘Learning Management System' where students can utilise the various tools for learning, including additional web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations and self-evaluation.

“All these resources would constitute a virtual university, which would aid students grasp concepts and venture beyond their syllabus,” said Mr. Gangadharan.

A more ambitious step is remotely conducting experiments. According to Mr. Gangadharan, students can, in the near future, conduct an experiment in an actual lab by controlling triggers and through a computer interface in their college.

“This would entail carrying out the actual lab experiment remotely,” states the mission statement.

Link Code:

www.vlab.co.in

Robotics Automation

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