This is a quick reminder that the Call for Grants has been announced with a deadline of 27 May 2013.

IAMSLIC members who are thinking of a small project that would improve library’s services or have submitted a proposal for a paper or poster for our next conference in Dania Beach, FL, USA  are now encouraged to apply for funding help.

 For proposal details and format please see our website at: http://www.iamslic.org/activities/grants

 Proposals should be sent to IAMSLIC President at: maria.kalentsits@fao.org

 Best regards,

 Maria Kalentsits

The program committee is now accepting a second round of proposals until May 31, 2013.

The following themes are of particular interest.

• Graphical information – data visualization, geo-referencing, information graphics, mash-ups, presenting statistics or survey results
• Changes in collection management – demand driven acquisitions, ebooks, shared print repositories
• Changes in publishing – mergers, Open Access, Open Data
• Embedded librarianship – e.g. member of research team, library skills integrated into curricula
• Mobile environments/technologies

Please review the conference home page and the Call for Proposals and then send your proposal to sally.taylor@ubc.ca

Message from the Oregon Library Association:
To: Oregon State University Libraries
From: Oregon Library Association Honors, Awards and Scholarship Committee
Re: Press Release regarding Oregon Librarian of the Year Award
Date: April 29, 2013

OLA Distinguished Service Award
The Oregon Library Association has awarded Janet Webster, Hatfield Marine Science Center Head Librarian, the 2013 OLA Distinguished Service Award. This award is given to an Oregon librarian or library staff member for exceptional service over many years. Webster is being recognized for her decades of outstanding leadership in a wide array of community and library organizations. She has been a particularly effective advocate for federal, state and local policy and legislation which allows libraries to better serve their communities. The OLA awards are announced each year at the association’s annual conference (held this year as a joint conference with the Washington Library Association). OLA is the state association of library professionals comprised of 1200 members pursuing a mission to promote and to advance library service through public and professional education and cooperation.

Congratulations, Janet!

Barb Butler

This is a call for Conference Travel Support proposals and Project-related Grant proposals. Please kindly note that Project-related Grant proposals will be accepted from members not affiliated with a regional group.

The total funding available for Guin Travel Grants this year is US$ 5,000.
The total funding available for 2013 Project Grants is US$ 1,000 only.

Since the IAMSLIC would like to support several participants, we encourage you to apply for partial (up to US$ 1,500) rather than full support. Please make sure that you check with your Regional Representative (http://www.iamslic.org/people/regional-groups) first regarding the availability of regional grants.

For proposal details and format please see our website at: http://www.iamslic.org/activities/grants
The deadline for submitting your proposal is 27th of May 2013.

Best regards,

Maria Kalentsits
IAMSLIC President 2012-2013

The program committee has received some excellent proposals but we need more! As it’s a joint conference, we would like especially to have participation from members in the SAIL region.

Please review the conference home page and the Call for Proposals and submit your proposal to sally.taylor@ubc.ca

Thank you!

This year’s theme Visualizing a Bright Future offers limitless possibilities for presentation topics, including:

• New roles for libraries and librarians (e.g. data curation, digital preservation, digitization, scholarly communications)
• Communicating the value of service to the organization
• Consolidation of physical libraries to respond to fiscal realities – can this scenario present new opportunities?
• Importance of partnerships and collaboration
• Embedded librarianship
• Graphical information – data visualization, geo-referencing, information graphics, mash-ups, presenting statistics or survey results
• Changes in collection management – demand driven acquisitions, ebooks, shared print repositories
• Changes in publishing – mergers, Open Access, Open Data
• Re-purposing library space
• Mobile environments/technologies
• Other innovations and new initiatives

Don’t delay! Review the conference home page and the Call for Proposals and then send your proposal to sally.taylor@ubc.ca

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Guillermina Cosulich, INIDEP Library, Argentina

—– Original Message ———————————————————————-
Digital Access to the Publications (1944-2008) of Professor Enrique Balech

Available at http://goo.gl/PyZQg

This initiative led by Dr. Rut Akselman and supported by IOC UNESCO, provides public access to most of the planktological studies published by the late Professor Enrique Balech. Some of them are little known and others are hard to find, even in specialized libraries. The great advantage is their availability in digital format and to have all of them in the same place. Our intention is to incorporate more papers in successive stages.

While E. Balech is mainly known for his taxonomic studies of dinoflagellates, especially those related to the genus Alexandrium, a producer of paralytic shellfish toxins, many of his publications (more than a hundred) focused on floristic studies of plankton communities, which he applied to improve biogeographical and hydrodynamic knowledge. Planktonic communities were thoroughly characterized in Balechs studies, because he could identify most of the species of the taxonomic groups present in each sample, from diatoms, dinoflagellates and tintinnids, to coccolithophorids, radiolarians or heliozoans, when present, thus taking into account both the phytoplankton and zooplankton .

We hope this initiative will be of value to the scientific community.

Henrik Enevoldsen
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO
Head, IOC Science and Communication Centre on Harmful Algae
University of Copenhagen- Marine Biological Section- Denmark
E-mail: h.enevoldsen@unesco.org Skype: henrik.oksfeldt.enevoldsen
********************************************************************

The Conference Planning committee and local hosts are working hard to  ensure that our upcoming conference in Dania Beach, Florida  is an exciting event which brings together many participants from different regions. The Call for Proposals is now open and are due April 19. We hope to see many of you in Florida in October 2013. The Call for Travel Grant Proposals as well as for Project Proposals will soon be out.

 News from the Executive Board

As proposed by the Membership Committee and approved by the Executive Board last year, membership fee can now be renewed for three years at a time. If renewing for three-year period, the rates remain the same while for one year renewal  the rates have slightly increased. Membership rates can be consulted here. We encourage those of you who haven’t renewed a membership subscription yet  to do it now. If you are not a member yet, please consider membership and join the Association!

 Our New Treasurer Lenora Oftedahl has taken over from Sandra Abbott-Stout in November 2012. Special thanks goes to Sandra for serving four years as a Treasurer. The Final Treasurer’s report is available from Annual Reports section.

Draft minutes of two Executive Board meetings and two Business meetings held during the 38th IAMSLIC Conference are now available from the website (Meeting Minutes section).

Regarding conference sites, it has been decided at the Executive Board meeting that IAMSLIC should not have conferences in the same region in consecutive years and to avoid consecutive meetings in North America when possible. Also, the conference sites should be planned 3 years in advance. Relevant wording change has been made to the conference site selection procedure.

 Sally Taylor and I attended 12 Session of the IODE Group of Experts on Marine Information Management to discuss the Joint IODE/IAMSLIC GE-MIM. Through establishment of the Joint GE-MIM, IAMSLIC and IODE hope to reach a new level of cooperation in areas of professional advice, expertise, and training. The Terms of Reference (ToRs) for the Group have been discussed and agreed at the meeting. ToRs are included in the Recommendation MIM-XII-1 on establishment of the Joint IODE/IAMSLIC Group of Experts on Marine Information Management (IODE/IAMSLIC GE-MIM) which is annexed to the Session Report (available for download from the IODE website). This Recommendation will be submitted, together with other recommendations and the session report, to the June 2013 Session of the IOC Assembly for approval. The IAMSLIC Executive Board will soon seek interest from the membership in order to identify 4 members to serve on the Joint GE-MIM.

 Best regards,

 Maria Kalentsits

IAMSLIC President  2012-2013

Natalie Wiest
Texas A&M University at Galveston USA

February 22, 2013 202-538-1065

sparcmedia@arl.org

SPARC APPLAUDS WHITE HOUSE FOR LANDMARK DIRECTIVE

OPENING UP ACCESS TO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Ensures that Taxpayer-Funded Research Available to Public

Washington, D.C. – The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) today applauded President Obama for issuing a landmark Directive to ensure that the results of taxpayer-funded research – both articles and data – are made available to the general public to freely access and fully use.

The action today comes about after a ten-year campaign by the “Open Access” movement – scientists, universities, libraries, technology leaders, patient advocates, entrepreneurs, students, and every-day Americans – aimed at making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible and fully reusable in a digital environment.

“ This is a watershed moment. The Administration’s action marks a major step forward towards open access to scientific research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, which works to broaden public access to scholarly research . “The Directive will accelerate scientific discovery, improve education, and empower entrepreneurs to translate research into commercial ventures and jobs. It’s good for our nation, our economy, and our future.”

“Knowledge is power. It’s the power to innovate, to advance scientific discovery, to promote economic growth, and to create jobs. In 2013, we should be taking full advantage of the digital environment to disseminate the results of publicly funded research, not keep this knowledge locked away.”

Every year, the federal government uses taxpayer dollars to fund tens of billions of dollars of scientific research that results in thousands upon thousands of articles published in scientific journals. The government funds this research with the understanding that it will advance science, spur the economy, accelerate innovation, and improve the lives of our citizens. Yet most taxpayers – including academics, students, and patients – are shut out of accessing and using the results of the research that their tax dollars fund, because it is only available through expensive and often hard-to-access scientific journals.

The potential economic benefits of opening up access to this research are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In instances where this kind of open access has already been enabled, remarkable examples demonstrate how powerful open access can be. Placing the Human Genome Project in the public domain, for example, enabled scientists everywhere to access the data. The $3.8 billion investment in the project has had an estimated economic impact of almost $800 billion.

Details of the White House Directive

The White House Directive affirms the principle that the public has a right to access the results of taxpayer-funded research and calls on all federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to provide free and timely online access to the results of that research. Articles reporting on the results of publicly funded scientific research must be made available after a 12 month embargo period.

The Directive builds on the progress made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first federal agency to require public access to taxpayer-funded research. Since its implementation, the NIH policy enabled more than 90,000 new biomedical manuscripts to be made publicly available each year, resulting in millions of Americans having access to vital health care information. Demand for this information is extremely high, with more than 700,000 unique users accessing material from this repository each weekday.

The Directive comes as the bipartisan Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), is making is way through the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

“The Directive is a major achievement for both open access and open government. We should now take the next step and make open access the law of the land. We commend Senators Cornyn and Wyden and Representatives Doyle, Lofgren, and Yoder for introducing FASTR and call on Congress to pass it without delay,” said Joseph.

To follow the conversation on Twitter use the hashtags #openaccess or #OA. Media questions can be directed to @SPARC_NA or sparcmedia@arl.org .

Joe Wible

Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University