Research Online

Update: Stephen Flynn, founding co-director of Northeastern’s George J. Costas Research Institute for Homeland Security, testified before Congress on Tuesday this week about cyber security concerns.

Policy making isn’t always an “inside the beltway phenomenon” or the exclusive preserve of Washington insiders. Northeastern faculty and staff are frequent visitors to Congressional hearing rooms, providing expert testimony on topics as diverse as hate crimes, tobacco regulation, airline mergers, autism, the economic downturn, and human trafficking.

In 2008, President Joseph Aoun welcomed Senator Ted Kennedy, invited witnesses, and members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to NU for a hearing on access to higher education. Ensuring Access to College in a Turbulent Economy provides a verbatim record of these proceedings.

Other recent hearings with a local connection include:

Mitchell Report: Illegal Use of Steroids in Major League Baseball – Includes testimony of former Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens and his colleague, New York Yankees player Andy Pettitte.

Digging Up the Facts: Inspecting the Big Dig – More on the project Bostonians love to hate: water leaks, shoddy building materials, and cost overruns.

Learning from the States: Individual State Experiences with Healthcare Reform Coverage Initiatives – The Commonwealth’s flagship program for universal healthcare coverage, now much in the spotlight in the 2012 Presidential election.

Ten Years after 9/11: Assessing Airport Security and Preventing a Future Terrorist Attack – This hearing was held in Boston since two of the affected flights originated at Logan International Airport.

The NU Library provides access to historic and contemporary U.S. Government documents in online and print formats. Key collections include:

• Proquest Digital Hearings: Congressional hearings from 1824 to present
• FDsys: The government site for authenticated, permanent access to important document series, including the Congressional Record (1994 to present), Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register, Compilation of Presidential Documents, federal budget, Statutes at Large, United States Code, etc.
• HeinOnline: Historical and contemporary government documents, including Foreign Relations of the United States, treaties, Presidential Papers, and the Congressional Record and its predecessors.
• U.S. Congressional Serial Set and American State Papers: Rich collection of primary source materials from Congress and other government agencies.  The set includes an historical map collection.

Consult the Federal Government Subject Guide for information about additional government publications.

The award winning American National Biography Online and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (for British history) are now available through NU Libraries. Within these resources, you are able to search by person, subject, date, or location. For example, you can find major artists who lived in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Results include lengthy biographical entries and links to related people and themes. The American National Biography Online includes the Oxford Companion to United States History so that you can quickly link from a noted figure to article on topics related to that figure.

For more on the Library’s resources in History, please see the Subject Guide.

Work by NU Professors Jing Xu and Mansoor Aniji on JoVE

Have you ever slogged through an experimental protocol, trying to understand exactly what the authors did in the lab?  Have you ever tried to learn about research methods in other disciplines, just to get bogged down in terminology?  Now there’s a more visual alternative.

The library is pleased to offer access to JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments.  JoVE publishes professionally produced and edited, peer-reviewed video demonstrations of experiments filmed in research laboratories. This revolutionary resource allows students and researchers to watch experts perform techniques before attempting experiments themselves.  Just getting started in the lab?  JoVE has a Basic Protocols section where you can learn everything from microscope care to Western blotting.

JoVE also features video articles from NEU scientists in the departments of Bioengineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

We invite you to check out JoVE, and let us know what you think!

Encyclopedias and handbooks provide excellent ways to get an overview and start your research project. (Think of how you use this encyclopedia, probably every day.) To help give context to large research questions, the Library has just purchased a collection of encyclopedias and handbooks from SAGE Reference. You’ll find answers to questions like:

• What is the history of European Film Scholarship and how does Film Studies interact with other disciplines like Mass Media, Anthropology, and Ethnography?
• from The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies

• How does performance address social issues through Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty?
• from The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies

• What are the Four Types of Visual Culture?
• from the Handbook of Material Culture

• What is the interplay between Social Movement and Modern Dance?
• from the Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media

You can search or browse the SAGE Reference collection, and find more resources through our Arts and Humanities subject guides. If you have any comments, let us know here or via email.

Mega-publisher Elsevier has been garnering some negative publicity of late. Last month it was revealed that its political action group funded the re-election campaigns of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), one of the authors of the controversial Research Works Act (H.R. 3699) that would prohibit open access to articles resulting from government-funded research.

[Update: On 2/27/2012, Elsevier announced it no longer backed the Research Works Act, and the sponsoring legislators subsequently announced they will not pursue the bill further.]

Now, thousands of scholars are signing an agreement to boycott Elsevier in protest of its high subscription prices, its practice of bundling journals (so libraries are forced to subscribe to titles they don’t want), and its support of restrictive legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act. Although members of the library community have protested such practices by Elsevier and other large publishers for years, this marks the first occasion that members of the research community–the people who write the articles and serve as peer reviewers or editors–have taken a large-scale stand.

Timothy Gowers, a prominent mathematician, wrote a blog post on January 21, 2012, in which he discussed the issues outlined above and asked, “Why can’t we just tell Elsevier that we no longer wish to publish with them?” A reader took up the challenge and created a website where scholars could register their dissatisfaction and refusal to provide free labor for Elsevier in the form of research, peer review, and editorial duties. Within its first ten days of existence, the website has collected the signatures of over 2,700 scholars worldwide.

The boycott has received a lot of media attention, perhaps especially because it has grown so exponentially in such a short period of time. And many writers are asking: because scholars are both producers and consumers of research journals, do they have the ability to disrupt the scholarly publishing system and effect lasting change?

Further reading:

• Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access – Richard Poynder’s “Open and Shut?” blog, 2/8/2012
• “Thousands of Scientists Vow to Boycott Elsevier to Protest Journal Prices” - Science, 2/1/2012
• “As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices” – Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/31/2012
• “Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire” – Wired.com, 1/30/2012
• “Elsevier’s Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke” – Forbes.com, 1/28/2012