The UC Libraries have purchased nearly every Springer ebook published in English and German from 2005 to 2009.
The nearly 20,000 books fall into the following broad subject areas: architecture and design; behavioral science; biomedical and life sciences; business and economics; chemistry and materials science; computer science; earth and environmental science; engineering; humanities, social sciences, and law; mathematics and statistics; medicine; physics and astronomy; and professional and applied computing.
Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management, which means that they can be used as electronic course reserves, on course Web sites, in course management systems, and for many other educational purposes. The files can be downloaded, printed, and transferred to a PDA or Kindle. The titles are being added to the UCLA Library Catalog and Melvyl; in the meantime, users can search or browse them from the publisher's Web site.
The titles have been purchased in electronic format, not licensed, so users will have long-term access to them, and their acquisition will help the UC Libraries study the viability and usage patterns of ebooks. Users will be invited to offer feedback on the advantages and disadvantages of the electronic format for their specific disciplines and formats.
A few Springer ebooks are excluded from the purchase because they have been jointly published with another publisher. The acquisition builds on existing access to Springer book series, including Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lecture Notes in Physics, and Topics in Current Chemistry, to greatly expand ebook collections.
If you have questions or feedback about the ebooks in your discipline, contact your subject specialist; a list is available.
All researchers who have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must comply with its new public access policy. As of April 7, 2008, NIH grant-funded researchers must submit copies of their resulting research papers to PubMed Central (PMC) when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. PMC, the NIH's free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, will then make the papers freely available to the public no later than twelve months after publication.
The UCLA Library is working with the UCLA Office of Research Policy and Compliance to help researchers follow this new policy. An information session will be held on Tuesday, April 28, at noon in the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library.
Among the issues that will be discussed are how to find out whether a publisher automatically submits papers to PMC, how and when to submit a paper to PMC if the publisher does not automatically do so, and what else authors can to broaden access to their manuscripts.
Registration is limited to UCLA faculty and administrators; admission is free, but advance registration is required. Lunch will be provided. To register, go to the Web page.