COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5: Consistency, Clarity, Simplification, and Continuous Maintenance

All academic libraries across the world use and trust COUNTER usage reports to inform renewal and new purchasing decisions, to inform faculty about the value of the library and its resources, and to understand user behavior and improve the user experience. The COUNTER Code of Practice enables content providers to produce consistent, comparable, and credible usage data for their online content. This allows librarians and other interested parties to compare the usage data they receive, and to understand and demonstrate the value of the electronic resources to which they subscribe. In July 2017, COUNTER published Release 5 of the Code of Practice. This new release has several advantages over the previous releases, providing greater flexibility and clarity

E-Resource Management: Today and for the Future

When online journals were first introduced more than a decade ago, many looked ahead to the promise of the online information environment. If we fast forward to today, we see much of the promise of the past has been realized. However, also realized are a number of other attributes of e-resources that were not included in the initial vision. This is the reality in which many librarians find themselves struggling

COUNTER: Consistency, Clarity, Simplification, and Continuous Maintenance

COUNTER provides a Code of Practice for recording and reporting the usage of electronic resources. The Code of Practice evolves as the information environment develops to meet the needs of the vendors, publishers, and libraries. COUNTER usage reports are an important tool for libraries, recording how often a given resource has been accessed and thus making a vital contribution to collection development and decision making. COUNTER is now developing of its next release of the Code of Practice, with the objective of addressing changing needs and making the Code of Practice less complex, so that providers of content and of usage analysis tools find it easier to use

Competition and bistability of ordered undulations and undulation chaos in inclined layer convection

Experimental and theoretical investigations of undulation patterns in high-pressure, inclined layer gas convection at a Prandtl number near unity are reported. Particular focus is given to the competition between the spatiotemporal chaotic state of undulation chaos and stationary patterns of ordered undulations. In experiments a competition and bistability between the two states is observed, with ordered undulations most prevalent at higher Rayleigh number. The spectral pattern entropy, spatial correlation lengths, and defect statistics are used to characterize the competing states. The experiments are complemented by a theoretical analysis of the Oberbeck-Boussinesq equations. The stability region of the ordered undulation as a function of their wavevectors and the Rayleigh number is obtained with Galerkin techniques. In addition, direct numerical simulations are used to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics. In the simulations both ordered undulations and undulation chaos were observed dependent on initial conditions. Experiment and theory are found to agree well.Comment: Reduced-resolution figure

Cracking the Discovery Code

An alternative perspective of discovery services. What effect are they having on content usage at the publisher site and is it the effect that you would expect? What are the common pitfalls and how can you address them? Publishers, librarians and discovery service providers discuss

ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2017 ResourceSync Framework Specification

This ResourceSync specification describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with a server’s evolving resources. The capabilities may be combined in a modular manner to meet local or community requirements. This specification also describes how a server should advertise the synchronization capabilities it supports and how third-party systems may discover this information. The specification repurposes the document formats defined by the Sitemap protocol and introduces extensions for them

Identification of a BRCA2-Specific modifier locus at 6p24 related to breast cancer risk

Common genetic variants contribute to the observed variation in breast cancer risk for BRCA2 mutation carriers; those known to date have all been found through population-based genome-wide association studies (GWAS). To comprehensively identify breast cancer risk modifying loci for BRCA2 mutation carriers, we conducted a deep replication of an ongoing GWAS discovery study. Using the ranked P-values of the breast cancer associations with the imputed genotype of 1.4 M SNPs, 19,029 SNPs were selected and designed for inclusion on a custom Illumina array that included a total of 211,155 SNPs as part of a multi-consortial project. DNA samples from 3,881 breast cancer affected and 4,330 unaffected BRCA2 mutation carriers from 47 studies belonging to the Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 were genotyped and available for analysis. We replicated previously reported breast cancer susceptibility alleles in these BRCA2 mutation carriers and for several regions (including FGFR2, MAP3K1, CDKN2A/B, and PTHLH) identified SNPs that have stronger evidence of association than those previously published. We also identified a novel susceptibility allele at 6p24 that was inversely associated with risk in BRCA2 mutation carriers (rs9348512; per allele HR = 0.85, 95% CI 0.80-0.90, P = 3.9×10−8). This SNP was not associated with breast cancer risk either in the general population or in BRCA1 mutation carriers. The locus lies within a region containing TFAP2A, which encodes a transcriptional activation protein that interacts with several tumor suppressor genes. This report identifies the first breast cancer risk locus specific to a BRCA2 mutation background. This comprehensive update of novel and previously reported breast cancer susceptibility loci contributes to the establishment of a panel of SNPs that modify breast cancer risk in BRCA2 mutation carriers. This panel may have clinical utility for women with BRCA2 mutations weighing options for medical prevention of breast cancer