Weekly News Digest

Ovid Technologies (http://www.ovid.com), a provider of electronic medical, scientific, and social sciences information solutions, announced that Petroleum Abstracts' TULSA database is now available through the Ovid Web Gateway. Ovid is an operating company of Wolters Kluwer Health, a division of Wolters Kluwer, the multinational publishers and information services company.

Petroleum Abstracts (PA) is a service of The University of Tulsa. Its TULSA database contains more than 800,000 records dating back to 1965. The references are derived from more than 300 journals published worldwide, proceedings from 250 annual petroleum conferences, patent gazettes, books, dissertations, government reports, and other sources. Approximately 500 new entries are added weekly; more than 25,000 are added annually. The TULSA database is indexed by petroleum engineers and geoscientists using PA's controlled vocabulary of index terms from the Petroleum Abstracts Exploration & Production Thesaurus and Geographic Thesaurus. Each entry also includes a PA accession number, which can be used to order a full-text copy of any available document from the Petroleum Abstracts Document Delivery Service (PADDS).

[Editor's Note: TULSA is also available on the Dialog and Questel•Orbit online services.]

Source: Ovid Technologies, Inc.

Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press (OUP), has announced its latest open access (OA) project, Oxford Open (http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/oxfordopen). Beginning in July 2005, it will offer an optional author-pays model for a range of Oxford Journals titles. Oxford Journals has also amended its post-prints policy to be compliant with the latest National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. Details about the Oxford Journals Author Self-Archiving Policy can be found at http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/selfarchivingpolicy.

Oxford Open will give published authors in participating Oxford Journals titles the option to pay for research articles to be freely available online immediately on publication. The open access charge for each article will be £1,500 or $2,800, with authors being given the option to pay once their manuscript has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. Discounted author charges of £800 or $1,500 will be available to authors from institutions that maintain a current online subscription. Authors from developing countries will also be eligible for discounted rates. The online subscription prices of participating journals will be adjusted for 2007 and subsequent years, according to how much content was paid for by authors and thus was freely available online during the previous year.

Source: Oxford Journals

Dialog, a business of The Thomson Corp., said that it has partnered with InfoChem GmbH to provide users of the Dialog service with chemical structure searching of more than 10 million chemical compounds in these databases: Beilstein Facts (File 390), Derwent Chemistry Resource (File 355), Prous Drug Data Report (File 452), and Pharmaprojects (Files 128, 928).

The new chemical structure searching feature is powered by the InfoChem Cartridge, a tool developed by InfoChem to integrate chemical structure and reaction retrieval in relational database management systems. The application uses the InfoChem Fast Search Engine (ICFSE) to handle and search within millions of structures and reactions.

Through its alliance with InfoChem, Dialog also is offering substructure highlighting, which will allow users to easily analyze and refine their search results. (An example of substructure highlighting is available at http://www.dialog.com/pressroom/2005/css_images.shtml.)

The chemical structure search functionality was released earlier this year as part of the new and enhanced features available through DialogLink 5 (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=16252). Researchers using DialogLink 5 can search by chemical structure in multiple databases simultaneously.

Source: Dialog