The Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) makes Alexa Internet’s data on Web sites available to researchers and website developers. The various operations offered as a part of AWIS include

o    URL Information,

o    Web Search,

o    Browse Category,

o    Crawl Meta Data.

The Alexa Web Information Service makes Alexa’s vast repository of information about the traffic and structure of the web available to developers.

Service Highlights

• Gather information about web sites, including traffic data, contact information, related links and more.
• Access historical traffic data for web sites to analyze growth and understand the effects of specific events on web site traffic
• Build a web directory into your web site or service using an Alexa enhanced DMOZ-based browse service
• Access the list of sites linking to any given site

Detailed Description

AWIS provides the following operations, or “actions”:

URL Information

·         The URL Information action gives developers direct access to information pertaining to web pages and sites on the web that Alexa Internet has gathered through its extensive web crawl and web usage analysis. Examples of information that can be accessed are site popularity, related sites, detailed usage/traffic stats, supported character-set/locales, and site contact information. This is most of the data that can be found on the Alexa web site and in the Alexa toolbar, plus additional information that is being made available for the first time with this release.

Historical Traffic

·         The Historical Traffic action gives programmatic access to web site traffic rank, reach, and page views going back five years. Use this action to compare a web site’s popularity over time, identify trends, or display graphs of traffic.

Sites Linking In

·         The Sites Linking In action returns the sites linking to a specified web site.

Browse Category

·         The Browse Category action allows developers to access all of the information available at the Open Directory without the need to download or host the directory database on their own systems. This service returns web pages and sub-categories within a specified category. The returned URLs are filtered through the Alexa traffic data and then ordered by popularity.

Crawl Meta Data

·         The Crawl Meta Data action gives developers access to metadata collected in Alexa’s Web Crawl. For example, a developer can get pages size, checksum, total links, link text, images, frames, and any Javascript-embedded URLs for any page in the crawl.

Visit: http://www.alexa.com/

ResearchGATE is a new free of charge Science 2.0 platform designed for the need of researchers. With this new platform we want to change the world of science by providing a global and powerful scientific web-based environment, in which scientists can interact, exchange knowledge and collaborate with researchers of different fields. Sign up and be part of the first scientific network.

• present yourself and your research projects
• enroll, expand, and broaden your science network globally
• exchange know-how and expertise
• initiate collaboration
• discuss your research limitation and get positive feedback
• use our innovative tools and work environments for online collaboration

Visit:https://www.researchgate.net/

The Information Literacy Section of the International Federation of Library Association and Institutions (IFLA) has created this database to record information literacy materials from different parts of the world, on behalf of UNESCO.

Librarians, educators and information professionals are invited to participate to submit the required data.

Link to: http://www.infolitglobal.info/#

The electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS) is a prototype programme geared to facilitate the access to current scientific literature free of cost in the fields of Physics and Mathematics. The goal is to distribute individual scientific articles via e-mail to scientists in institutions in Developing Countries who do not have access to sufficient bandwidth to download material from the Internet in a timely manner and/or cannot afford the connection. Providing scientists with current literature supports their ongoing research.This service is provided by Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).

Accessing to the electronic journals with eJDS is very easy, you just need to:

1. register to the service: you need to apply by sending an application form by fax or mail. You will then be informed by e-mail on how to proceed.
2. use the service: once you successfully registered, you can search scientific articles either using e-mail or using the web.

The eJDS was made possible through agreements with several important scientific publishing companies and societies who provide access to their journals for free in the fields of Physics and Mathematics. These agreements are handled by the ICTP Library.

http://sdu.ictp.it/ep/ejds.html

UK researchers want to be able to copy parts of electronic materials for non-commercial research in the same way that they can with print, according to a new study.

In a recent British Library Intellectual Property survey, 93 per cent of UK researchers agreed that anyone involved in non-commercial research should be allowed to copy parts of electronically-published works such as online articles, news broadcasts, film or sound recordings.

In addition, 87 per cent of respondents said they should be able to use exceptions with digital media. Exceptions to intellectual property rights for print media include archiving and news-reporting rights and education exceptions. Particularly important for many academic researchers is the fair-dealing exception. This allows copies to be made from in-copyright work without permission from, or payment to, the rights holder provided that it is for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review or news reporting.

In the survey, 68 per cent of the respondents said that the fair-dealing laws should be the same whether the material is in paper or in electronic format. This is not the case for electronic media today, according to Ben White, intellectual property manager at the British Library. ‘In the digital world, databases, journals and books aren’t covered by copyright but by contracts,’ he explained. ‘Copyright has been agreed over many years as a careful balance between the needs of the rights holders and those of the users but contracts are really about the rights of the rights holders.’

White and his colleagues at the British Library have analysed many publisher contracts for digital information. They have found that more than 90 per cent of them do not permit users to do as much with the information as they would be allowed to do with print publications under copyright laws.

White believes that it is important to tackle this issue now. ‘By 2020 we estimate that 80 per cent of information will be available digitally and 20 per cent of the information will only be available digitally,’ he pointed out. ‘A lot of money is being spent on e-resources but the contracts are more restrictive.’

What’s more, the details of the contracts differ greatly between publishers. ‘Some are more restrictive and some are less restrictive – we found one contract that doesn’t even allow users to print out material,’ said White. Such a situation makes life very difficult for both libraries and users. ‘The British Library collections grow at 15 km per year and have a lot of digital objects within them. We can’t have different usage conditions on an object-by-object basis otherwise the users of our reading rooms would have to be intellectual property lawyers,’ he pointed out.

This new survey forms part of the British Library’s response to a recent UK Intellectual Property Office consultation. ‘We are arguing that the exceptions shouldn’t be overruled by contract law,’ said White. ‘We are asking for clarity.’

Such provision for digital information use has already been implemented in other European countries such as Ireland, Portugal and Belgium. In addition, the Development Agenda of the World Intellectual Property Organization, being led by Chile and three other Latin American countries, is pushing for minimum exceptions such as for education to become part of international law for intellectual property.

Source:Reserch Information (14th April 2008 )http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=253

 

HighWire Press is the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth.  As of 16/6/08,   assist in the online publication of 1,889,014 free full-text articles and 4,777,674 total articles. There are 12 sites with free trial periods, and 42 completely free sites. 249 sites have free back issues, and 1067 sites have pay per view!

To see the list of journal published download.

To find your related journal link to: http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl.

Drinking Water Engineering and Science is a scientific open access journal for the publication of original research in drinking water treatment. The focus is on fundamental and applied research in water sources, substances, drinking water treatment processes, distribution systems and residual management.

It is an Open Access – Public Peer-Review & Interactive Public Discussion Personalized Copyright under a Creative Commons License. The Editor in Chief are Gary Amy & Hans van Di jk.

Published by:

For more visit: http://www.drink-water-eng-sci.net

This year, a record 7 lakh students sat for the All India Engineering Entrance Examination, competing for over 9,000 seats in engineering colleges across the country. Last year the number was 5.8 lakh, while the year before it was 3.6 lakh. The great rush for engineering continues but for how long and at what cost?

There are over 1,400 engineering colleges in the country offering more than 5 lakh seats, of which, over 85% are private colleges. And, such is the demand that parents are willing to pay lakhs to get admission into the so-called open seats. However, the number of students successfully passing out from these colleges declined from about 70% in 2002 to 57% in 2005.

A few other facts indicate the chaotic situation prevailing in this sector. Despite the mad rush, several thousand seats go vacant in engineering colleges. Thus, in 2006, over 47,000 seats were left vacant in 7 states. Also, every year, thousands of seats are de-recognised by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the top regulatory body for non-IIT engineering education.

Declining pass-out rates and periodic de-recognition are a direct result of the unregulated growth of colleges. At the top of the heap are the 9 IITs. Then come the 19 National Institutes of Technology, formerly known as the Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs). These top two layers are government run. Then we have the rest of the colleges, mostly private.

According to Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), a top professional body, the mushrooming of private colleges without any regulation in quality has led to a deterioration of standards and skill levels. In most colleges, fresh BTech graduates are working as lecturers. AICTE estimates that there are only 7,000 PhDs and 20,000 MTechs working as teachers, while BTechs number nearly 1 lakh.

Vacancies in college seats are a result of a combination of factors. Colleges with a not-so-good faculty and infrastructure are not preferred. Courses like IT are preferred more over, say, agricultural engineering. In addition, seats reserved for SC/ST often go vacant. Derecognition occurs because colleges initially meet the minimum conditions required for getting AICTE approval but later fall back.

These conditions include faculty strength, qualification, infrastructure, among others. Actually, AICTE only provides the minimum standard for approval. The real test is accreditation by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), which looks at quality of education too. Only about 8% of the engineering colleges are accredited by the NBA.

Over 60% of the engineering colleges are located in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Since most industries are located in these states, absorption rates are better.

There may be a similar concentration within a state, for instance, most of the 236 UP engineering colleges are located in the industrial districts of Ghaziabad and Noida. According to Arun Arya, a second year student in Ghaziabad, “I have come from Lucknow to study here because placement possibilities are better.”

However, employment may not at all be commensurate with qualification — several engineers can be found doing data entry jobs or working in call centres. This is because there is a wide mismatch between jobs requiring engineering skills and the numbers being churned out.

In fact, top policy makers are worried that post graduate studies in engineering are abysmally low. Only about 5% of the engineering graduates continue to complete MTech — and, of these only 3% go on to do a doctorate. And, it is not as if the situation is any different in emerging disciplines. Only 4500 of the 1.8 lakh computer engineering BTechs went on to do MTech. This not only causes a severe shortage of qualified faculty, it also blunts the edge in research and innovation.

So, what should be done? INAE prescribes an overhaul of the administration and management structure of technical institutions, boosting faculty strengths, rationalising admission policy and increased interaction with industry. Without these, and a strict watch on quality of education, India could well end up with too many engineers out in the cold.

Source:Times of India 26 May 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/File_Engineers_Quantity_over_quality/articleshow/2075176.cms

The latest project from Dave Pell, creator of Rollyo (http://rollyo.com), and designer Bryan Bell is Addict-o-matic (http://addictomatic.com). This search engine pulls from the “best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images.” Some of these live sites include major blogging houses (WordPress, Bloglines, and Twitter) and blog search engines, video and vlogging sites (YouTube and Truveo), and all the likely suspects for major folksonomic searching (Digg, Technorati, and even Flickr, plus 15 other sites and engines).

Addict-o-matic is similar to such services as Sphere and Newser in that it pulls in stories from a wide variety of sources (though less strictly news-oriented than Newser’s sources) and provides Ajax-powered pop-up content boxes for previewing each item. When asked about Addict-o-matic’s similarities to Sphere, Pell said “Addict-o-matic is actually quite different from Sphere. … Addict-o-matic is a more of a metasearch engine that provides results for a particular search term across many types of popular search engines, including blogs, videos, news, images and user participation news aggregators. Sphere could ultimately be a source that is featured on Addict-o-matic.”

-Woody Evans

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=49078

OpenPipeline is new open source software for crawling, parsing, analyzing and routing documents. It ties together otherwise incomplete solutions for enterprise search and document processing. OpenPipeline provides a common architecture for connectors to data sources, file filters, text analyzers and modules to distribute documents across a network. It includes a job scheduler and a full UI with a point-and-click interface.

It comes fully functional with prebuilt components, but also integrates third-party modules. Plugins for crawling content management systems, parsing special file formats, and performing text analytics are available.

http://openpipeline.org/