Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog

The National Library of Medicine’s Haz-Map has been updated to include 180 new chemical profiles, submitted by the United States Department of Labor. Haz-Map is an occupational health database designed for health and safety professionals and for consumers seeking information about the health effects of exposure to chemicals and biologicals in the work environment. Haz-Map links jobs and hazardous tasks with occupational diseases and their symptoms. It covers 2030 agents, and 225 occupational diseases. Visit NLM’s Haz-Map Fact Sheet for more information.

Stem Cell is a hot research area.  In response, the California Digital Library is licensing content to support our community as they pave the way with their research.  Cell Stem Cell, one of several new Cell Press journals, is available online through the Biomedical Library.  Accessible off campus by the using the Bruin OnLine Proxy Server or VPN, Cell Stem Cell is just one of several journals we have supporting UCLA research.

Do you have a research project and have searched PubMed for the evidence to bolster your arguments and provide a review of the literature, but want to make sure you covered your area completely and haven’t missed anything?

Do you have a systematic review you are thinking about, and need to talk to an information expert for what databases to search and what terms to use for your search strategy?

Do you have some questions about a particular resource, like CINAHL Plus, or need assistance with using it effectively? Want to know more about the services and resources provided by the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library?

If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, schedule some one-on-one time with one of our information experts. Research consultation appointments with a librarian can be scheduled for about an hour and can take place in your office or favorite working space, or you can come in to the Biomedical Library. Consultations are only available for current UCLA students, staff, and faculty.

Ready to schedule? Please visit our online form or email us at biomed-ref@library.ucla.edu.

Whether you’re brand-new to open access (OA) or have been publishing in OA journals for years, October 14th is a day of note. SPARC, Students for Free Culture, and the Public Library of Science have declared today the first-ever Open Access Day.

Open Access is a publishing model for academic journals.  In the currently dominant publishing model, readers pay a fee to access scholarly articles (either individually or by paying for a subscription to a journal) and these fees support the publishing businesses. In an OA model, the authors or their institutions pay fees to support the publishers and the peer review process: after an article is published, any reader anywhere in the world can access the article freely. These different models have different implications for who can access and use the world’s scholarly information. Learn more about Open Access models of publication at SPARC’s Open Access page.

What can you do to support OA? Before you publish your next article, review the Directory of Open Access Journals and consider submitting to a journal that supports OA policies. When writing grant proposals, consider requesting funds to cover the costs of publishing in an OA journal. If you publish in or serve as a peer reviewer for a non-OA journal, talk to the publisher about adopting one of the Open Access models. Support the reliable OA journals in your field by reading and citing them.

Finding information about psychological and health assessment instruments at UCLA requires searching both electronic and print resources via the UCLA Library Catalog. Resources for locating this type of information include HAPI, Mental Measurements Yearbook, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, CINAHL Plus with Full Text, and Oscar & Luella Buros Center for Testing. It is common to find that a copy of a test is only available from the test producer for purchase to licensed professionals. HAPI is a database that consists entirely of references relating to measurement instruments including questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, inventories, and more. Use HAPI to find descriptions and reviews of tests and where to purchase or obtain a copy. To access these resources, go to the UCLA Library Catalog and perform a Title or Keyword Search for HAPI or the full title, Health and Psychosocial Instruments.

Do you know how to locate educational materials to give to your patients– even in Spanish? Would you like to learn about other resources to use to locate educational materials? Attend the Health Literacy Open House!

The Open House will take place on Thursday, October 16 from 2 - 4 p.m. in the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Room B-120. During the Open House, you can practice using online resources and downloading patient education materials, view demonstrations of alternate resources, find out about CE credit opportunities in health literacy and patient education, and ask questions of librarians and members of the UCLA Health System Patient Education Committee.

What does the new NIH Public Access Policy mean for NIH-funded researchers at UCLA? As of April 7, 2008, researchers receiving grant money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must submit copies of their resulting research papers to PubMed Central (PMC) when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. PMC, the NIH’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, will then make the papers freely available to the public no later than twelve months after publication.

The UCLA Library is working with the UCLA Office of Research Administration to assist researchers in following this new mandate. Among the issues that will be discussed at these workshops are how to find out whether a publisher automatically submits papers to PMC, how and when to submit a paper to PMC if the publisher does not automatically do so, and how to locate PubMed Central reference numbers (PMCIDs).

• Monday, October 13, 2008
  10 a.m. - noon at the Biomedical Library

Or

• Tuesday, October 28, 2008
  1 - 3 p.m. at the Science and Engineering Library/Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Collection

Attendance is limited to UCLA faculty; advance registration is required. Admission is free, and refreshments will be provided. Space is limited, and reservations will be accepted in the order they are received. Register online.

For additional information about the workshop, contact Carol Nishijima at cnishiji@library.ucla.edu or 310.794.4019.  For questions specifically about the NIH policy, email nih@library.ucla.edu.