Not since the printing press has a media object been as celebrated for its role in the advancement of knowledge as the scientific journal. From open communication to peer review, the scientific journal has long been central both to the identity of academic scientists and to the public legitimacy of scientific knowledge. But that was not always the case. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, academies and societies dominated elite study of the natural world. Journals were a relatively marginal feature of this world, and sometimes even an object of outright suspicion. The Scientific Journal tells the story of how that changed. Alex Csiszar takes readers deep into nineteenth-century London and Paris, where savants struggled to reshape scientific life in the light of rapidly changing political mores and the growing importance of the press in public life. The scientific journal did not arise as a natural solution to the problem of communicating scientific discoveries. Rather, as Csiszar shows, its dominance was a hard-won compromise born of political exigencies, shifting epistemic values, intellectual property debates, and the demands of commerce. Many of the tensions and problems that plague scholarly publishing today are rooted in these tangled beginnings. As we seek to make sense of our own moment of intense experimentation in publishing platforms, peer review, and information curation, Csiszar argues powerfully that a better understanding of the journal’s past will be crucial to imagining future forms for the expression and organization of knowledge.

This book is a collection of the major scientific papers of Sir Rudolf Peierls (1907-95), including the Peierls-Frisch Memoranda of 1940 on the feasibility, and the predicted human effects, of an atomic bomb made of uranium-235. His papers range widely in topic. They include much on the fundamentals of solid state physics, the thermal and electric conductivity of materials as a function of temperature T (especially T→0), the interpretation of the de Haas-van Alphen effect observed for a metal in a magnetic field, and the basics of transport theory. Many are on problems in statistical mechanics, including his constructive paper demonstrating the existence of a phase transition for Ising's model for a two-dimensional ferromagnet. In nuclear physics, they include the first calculations (with Bethe) on the photo-disintegration of the deuteron (made in response to a challenge by Chadwick), the Kapur-Peierls theory of resonance phenomena in nuclear reactions, the Bohr-Peierls-Placzek continuum model for complex nuclei (which first explained the narrow resonances observed for low energy neutrons incident on very heavy nuclei), and the Peierls-Thouless variational approach to collective phenomena in nuclei. Several of Peierls's wartime papers, now declassified, are here published for the first time.Brief commentaries on most of the papers in this book were added by Peierls, to indicate subsequent developments and their relationship with other work, or to correct errors found later on. A complete bibliography of his writings is given as an appendix.

Academic Search Engines intends to run through the current panorama of the academic search engines through a quantitative approach that analyses the reliability and consistence of these services. The objective is to describe the main characteristics of these engines, to highlight their advantages and drawbacks, and to discuss the implications of these new products in the future of scientific communication and their impact on the research measurement and evaluation. In short, Academic Search Engines presents a summary view of the new challenges that the Web set to the scientific activity through the most novel and innovative searching services available on the Web. - This is the first approach to analyze search engines exclusively addressed to the research community in an integrative handbook. The novelty, expectation and usefulness of many of these services justify their analysis - This book is not merely a description of the web functionalities of these services; it is a scientific review of the most outstanding characteristics of each platform, discussing their significance to the scholarly communication and research evaluation - This book introduces an original methodology based on a quantitative analysis of the covered data through the extensive use of crawlers and harvesters which allow going in depth into how these engines are working. Beside of this, a detailed descriptive review of their functionalities and a critical discussion about their use for scientific community is displayed

Published since 1953, Advances in Virus Research covers a diverse range of in-depth reviews providing a valuable overview of the current field of virology. In 2004, the Institute for Scientific Information released figures showing that the series has an Impact Factor of 2.576, with a half-life of 7.1 years, placing it 11th in the highly competitive category of Virology.

Chemical physics is presently a very active field, where theoretical computation and accurate experimentation have led to a host of exciting new results. Among these are the possibility of state-to-state reactive scattering, the insights in non-adiabatic chemistry, and, from the computational perspective, the use of explicitly correlated functions in quantum chemistry. Many of these present-day developments use ideas, derivations and results that were obtained in the very early days of quantum theory, in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of this material is hard to study for readers not familiar with German. This volume presents English translations of some of the most important papers. The choice of material is made with the relevance to present-day researchers in mind. Included are seminal papers by M. Born and J.R. Oppenheimer, J. von Neurmann and E. Wigner, E.A. Hylleraas, F. London, F. Hund, H.A. Kramers, R. de L. Kronig and F. Huckel, among others.

This work provides a comprehensive examination of the life and professional career of E.J Josey within the broader historical and political landscape of the civil rights movement. In the era of Jim Crow, Josey rose to prominence in the library profession by challenging the American Library Association (ALA) to live up to its creed of equality for all. This was not easy during the 1950s and 1960s, during segregation. Using interviews with Josey and his contemporaries, as well as several archival sources, library educator Renate Chancellor analyzes Josey’s leadership, particularly within modern day racial currents. During his professional career, spanning over fifty years (1952-2002), Josey worked as a librarian (1953-1966), an administrator of library services (1966-1986), and as a professor of library science (1986-1995). He also served as President of the American Library Association and perhaps his most notable achievement, he successfully drafted a resolution that prevented state library associations from discriminating against African American librarians. This essentially ended segregation in the ALA. Josey’s transformative leadership provides a model to tackle today’s civil rights challenges both in and outside the library profession. This authoritative work copublished by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) documents for the historical record a significant period of history that is underexplored in the scholarly literature. The target audience for this book are researchers, historians, LIS educators and students interested in understanding the complex struggle for civil and human rights in professional organizations.

Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science, Volume 159, provides the most topical, informative and exciting monographs available on a wide variety of research topics related to prions, viruses, bacteria and eukaryotes. The series includes in-depth knowledge on molecular biological aspects of organismal physiology, along with insights on how this knowledge may be applied to understand and ameliorate human disease. New chapters in this release discuss timely topics, such as Targeting recently deorphanized GPR83 for the treatment of infection, stress, and drug addiction, Arrestin Structure-Function, Arrestins in the Cardiovascular System, Analysis of biased agonism, and more. - Includes comprehensive coverage of molecular biology - Presents ample use of tables, diagrams, schemata, and color figures to enhance the reader's ability to rapidly grasp the information provided - Contains contributions from renowned experts in the field