LISNews: Librarian News

EContent has An Article by Marydee Ojala on The Public Library of Science.

"Research scientists live for just one thing—research. Their L word is laboratory not library. Secondary research, looking for articles in their area of specialization, takes a back seat to the thrill of primary research. Yet, every scientist knows that publishing is intrinsic to the research process. Not only do they want to publish their research findings, they also want to ensure that their research is unique and significant. It's the latter that involves library research. Whether said library is a physical entity or electronic—or, in many cases, a blending of the two—the challenge facing scientists is being able to read the full text of relevant articles without spending their entire research budget in the process."

The PLoS is still getting press, This Time from over at The Scientist.
They say Debate over open access to scientific articles is steadily moving into the mainstream, with the publication this month of an editorial in The New York Times, a recently introduced Congressional bill to promote open access publishing, and a television commercial sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a California-based group that plans to launch an open-access journal in October.
Another one thanks to Gary Price.

Walt writes "The September 2003 issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large is now available.

The 20-page issue (yes, it's still PDF, and likely to stay that way) is chunky this time:

Perspective: DVD Durability Survey
Perspective: Weblogging: A Tool, Not a Medium
Bibs & Blather
Scholarly Article Access (almost half the issue)
Good Stuff Perspective: Weblogging and Libraries

The idiot who puts this thing out has already been made aware that there are two, count them, two obvious errors on the first page ("September 2002" should be "September 2003" in both cases). He probably won't fix them (for reasons explained in one of the essays, oddly enough).

That's what comes of not having an editor: You can look at something six times and see what you wanted to see instead of what's there."

Seeking the Recipe is an article from the Austin Chronicle on two members of UT's English department who took over the editorship of Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism, an academic journal, they were determined to get start-up money the old-fashioned way: Ask the dean.
But the dean turned her down, as did the English department, because "they said the department has enough journals. I mean, they turned down the Chaucer Review," Frost says.