Engineering Resources Off-the-Beaten-Path

“Conference Proceedings at Risk”
• Tracy Gabridge, MIT
• Refworks account of faculty conference publications
• Vulnerable = less collected expensive proceedings, degrading CD-Roms, ephemeral online proceedings, annually changing procedures/policies
• [ideally, faculty would deposit to IR upon acceptance]
• Some publishers deposit in 3rd party archives
• Some small conferences have published directly through libraries
• At risk: 31% of 1,037 conference proceedings in their study
• Variation among disciplines
• # conferences (high to low): EE, Aero, ME, CS, Mat, CEE, NE
• Per faculty (high to low): Aero, EE, CEE, ME, ChemE, Mat, NE, CS
• At risk (high to low): Chem E (52%), Nuclear (50), Mat (45), CEE (44)…
• Can advocate for better publishing practices – create guides for organizers
• Can cooperate to create endangered list
• Can educate our own faculty
• Can support policy development for institutional repositories
• Promote successful models of preservation or open access
• Monitor trends
• Comment: some conferences are conduits to journal publication (knowledge is preserved)
• Comment: British Library good in cproceedings

“Tracking Patents and Applications”
• Charlotte
• Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) - USPTO made available within past 5 years
• $200 to get file wrapper to see entire document
• “Patent Assignments” database tracks ownership changes
• Patent filed in 1999 was just recently issued (7370713)
• Questions about whether a patent’s term has expired, and what influences that event
• Independent inventors are the only ones who file their own patents – not recommended
• Very detailed transaction histories available – received, verified, forwarded, rejected, etc.
• If you don’t pay maintenance fees on time, your patent expires before 20 years – announced in Patent Gazette

“Google Scholar vs. Compendex”
• John Meier, Penn State
• Available on Slideshare and ELD site
• What GS searches is nebulous – can’t be measured, no list (although some in news releases)
• Some just citations, others abstracts or full text links
• Databases cost thousands, tens of thousands of dollars – every year
• Some other disciplines/databases have been compared to GS
• 1950-2007, keywords in 8 subject areas [problematic]
• Percentage discoverable in GS increased over time in all subjects, approaching 90% in last two decades
• Best = Aero, NE, CS, EE
• Weaker in early decades = Eviro, Civil, ME, Industrial
• It’s about where GS gets data from – open access
• Aero: CSA, NASA tech report server, stormingmedia site, STINET, NASA ADS, ci.nii.ac.jp, NASA Langley server, e-data-center.com
• Civil: STINET, publisher sites, ci.nii.ac.jp, scholr.ilib.cn…
• Computer Engineering: Publisher sites, ACM, IEEE, link.aip.org, CSA, domino.watson.ibm.com, adsabs.harvard.edu, eric.edu.gov, OSTI, cat.inist.fr, SPIE, ieice.org, elecdesign.com
• EE: IEEEXplore, CSA, link.aip.org, NASA ADS, publisher sites, cat.inist.fr, freepatentsonline, OSTI, search…
• Environ: CSA, Springer, pubs.asce.org, awwa.org, ncbinlm.nih.gov, OSTI, baes.bireme.br, cheric.org, desline.com, nlm.nih.gov, nrel.gov, scholar.ilib.cn
• Industrial: ci.nii.ac.jp, publisher sites, CSA, SAE, STINET, IEEE, PubMed, cat.inist.fr, scientificcommons.org, Google patents, personal websites
• ME: deepblue.umich.edu, publisher sites, Google patents, CSA, NASA ADS, cat.inistfr, ci.nii.ac.jp, link.aip.org, Google books, …
• NE: publisher sites, OSTI, IEEE, adsabs.harvard.edu, link.aip.org, aps, CSA, cat.inist.fr, arxiv.org
• All decades: publisher sites, heavily government information
• International bibliographies contribute to all but Enviro
• Pre-prints and repositories – expected more
• Strongest = publishers and societies, including Elsevier