Trial access to an AI-powered research platform Scite

Scite is an AI-powered research platform that analyzes and provides citation context for scientific papers, helping researchers evaluate the credibility and impact of scholarly articles.

Scite tool Assistant lets ask questions and gives an answer with insight and control into its thought process. It is a chat experience like ChatGPT, but with real, up to date references. It is possible to select filters for the Assistant task (Assistant Settings), including: letting Assistant decide whether references are needed, or override its behavior; specifying year ranges, topics, publication types, or journal names as filters when searching for papers; controlling the length of Assistant responses.

The video about Scite Assistant

Scite short videos

The access for the University community is valid to 21 November, 2024.

Registration is required for access: click “Sign up” in the top-right corner and register using Vytautas Magnus University e-mail address. This will automatically enroll you in a temporary access license.

Trial access to Inspec with Full Text database in the field of Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science

Inspec with Full Text offers access to the world’s scientific and technical literature in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, computing, and more. The database includes more than 1,500 active full-text journals and provides significant coverage in subjects such as astronomy and astrophysics, computing and control, electrical engineering and electronics, information technology, mechanical and production engineering and physics.

Inspec with Full Text database can be accessed during the trial access on EBSCOhost platform at in the internal network of Vytautas Magnus University and remotely from home computers and mobile devices.

The access for the University community is valid to 21 December, 2024.

Open Access Week 2024

From 21-27 October, the events of World Open Access Week will take place. They aim to promote the open access movement, which focuses on ensuring free, unrestricted and open access to scholarly output online. Open access makes it easier to access research, increases scientific transparency (scientific data is easily accessible to other scientific communities), speeds up the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and enhances the impact of scientific work (open access scientific output receives more attention and is more frequently cited).

Vytautas Magnus University is an active participant in the open access movement. The University’s research management system VDU CRIS is based on an open source software, and provides open access to more than 43,000 scientific publications (including almost 600 e-books), data and other outputs (~ 82% of all full-text documents in the research management system). The University currently publishes 22 Open Access journals, of which 15 are Diamond Open Access (no Article Processing Charges are collected). More than 40 million open access resources are available in the VMU Virtual Library.

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week remains the same as last year – “Community over Commercialization”. This year, the aim is to continue to encourage and prioritize open science activities that best serve the interests of the general public and academia. Open Access Week 2024 will continue to focus on issues such as: the integration of artificial intelligence into commercial academic systems; the consequences of a few corporations rather than scientists controlling the production of knowledge; when the opaque collection and use of personal data on commercial platforms begins to undermine academic freedom; and what community-run infrastructures are already in place that are better suited to serve the interests of the research community and the public.

Vytautas Magnus University Library invites you to actively participate in the Open Access Week events:

21 October 2024, 13:00. Webinar Unlocking Knowledge: Perspectives on Open Science English Language: English. Organized by Kaunas University of Technology Library. Registration

At the event you will learn how open science ensures visibility and accessibility of scientific knowledge, why it is important for young researchers, how research data management affects the quality of science, how a data manager can help in the management and opening of research data, the role of the library in the opening of scientific knowledge: the support and services the library offers to researchers.

22 October 2024, 12:00 Webinar Project Management Literacy: Base of Librarians’ achievements . Organized by the Latvia University Library and the University of Warsaw. Language: English. Registration

The webinar will give you the opportunity to learn more about the current challenges and skills required by library staff in the field of project management.

23 October 2024, 16:00. Workshop What’s fair in copyright? Fair use, fair dealing and fair practice. Organized by EIFL. Language: English. Registration

A webinar on three legal concepts commonly found in copyright law; this will be the last in a series of four webinars on copyright and libraries.

25 October 2024 19:30. Workshop Beyond OER: Open Education practices and equity for all . Organized by Deakin University Library. Language: English. Registration

This workshop will explore the concept of open education practices and their implications for equality between students and the community in education.

New AI tool in Virtual Library

Research Assistant. The University’s Virtual Library (accessed via University email log in) has implemented the “Research Assistant”, a tool based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) that uses large-scale language models (LLM). It allows you explore academic content by asking questions in natural language. The tool uses most of the content found in your library to identify five documents that can help answer your question. It then extracts the most relevant information from the description/abstracts of each source to write the answer. Below the answer, you’ll see the sources used to generate it along with in-line citations that let you clearly see which source was used to generate each part in the answer. Use these sources to delve deeper into the topic and to fact check the responses from the tool.

The Research Assistant is not a replacement for human expertise but uses artificial intelligence to automate otherwise time-consuming tasks. We’ve designed the Research Assistant make it easier to understand topics, their context, and resources published about it. Use the “view more results in your library search” button to find more documents relevant to your question. Click the AI-generated “related research questions” to explore topics similar to your question.

How are responses generated? Your question is converted into a query that the search engine understands with the help of a Large Language Model (currently GPT 3.5). The search engine then identifies the most relevant documents in the index. It ranks them according to how well they can answer the question and, again a with the help of the Large Language Model, creates an answer from the top 5 sources. Due to the nature of Large Language Models, answers to the same question are not always the same. There may be more than one possible answer and different resources that are relevant. If you are not satisfied with your answers, use the “Try again” button.

How to formulate a good question? To make the most of the Research Assistant, it’s essential to ask clear and detailed questions about academic or scientific topics. Be as specific as possible and phrase your query in the form of a question. Example queries can be found on the starting screen.

Supported questions/instructions. The Research Assistant supports local language searches. Most material in our index is in English. If you ask a question in another language than English, the Assistant will search in both, your local language and English, and write the answer in the language of your question. Note that there is a dependency on the Large Language Model and language support may vary. We are currently using GPT 3.5 for language processing and translation. You can add language-specific instructions to your question just as you can in ChatGPT. For example, you can add “answer in German” or “answer in French” to the end of your research question.

Unsupported questions/instructions. Some instructions are not currently supported by the Research Assistant, like requests for materials of a particular type (e.g. “give me peer reviewed articles about bird migration”) or from a certain time period (e.g. “give me the newest research on climate change”). You will still receive an answer when including these instructions and the ranking algorithm will take keywords like “peer-reviewed” into account, but the tool will not filter content by type or date. The Research Assistant does not yet support follow-up questions. Each question stands by itself. For example, if you ask “what topics did Simone de Beauvoir write about”, you cannot follow up by asking “and what is the content of that work” and expect the system to understand what you mean. At this time, you will have to include all relevant information in each question, e.g. “what is the content of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex”?

Video presentation on “Science Assistant”

Web of Science Research Assistant is on trial

The Web of Science Research Assistant is a generative AI-powered tool that enhances your research. The assistant is designed to keep up with your research needs as they develop. Research Assistant is situated in the middle of top bar of Web of Science.

The access for the University community is valid to 20 October, 2024.

Learn more about the Web of Science Research Assistant here

English-Corpora.org subscription

English-Corpora.org are a collection of highly curated corpora (or collections of text) designed for searching text from a range of resources to observe language, variation, and change between specified dates on specific items. These online corpora are used for many different purposes by teachers and researchers at universities throughout the world. The corpus data (e.g. full-text, word frequency) are used especially in language learning.

Training Sessions on “How to Publish with Oxford Journals”

These sessions will help you determine whether you are ready to publish your work, the following topics will be discussed :

Differences between a thesis and an article
How to write a manuscript
Types of journal manuscripts
How to select which journal you want to write for
OUP & DORA – Journal metrics in the context of how they’re calculated
Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC).
Credit Taxonomy – Levels as a Researcher
How do you upload a manuscript on the OUP platform – Article submission process
The journal publishing cycle
What is Open Access – Kinds of Open Access
Understanding Read & Publish – How it benefits your Institution

Sep 19 th, 2024 (10:30 AM–12:30 PM) Register

Sep 26 th, 2024 (10:30 AM–12:30 PM) Register

Trial access to EBSCO literary criticism databases

The trial access to selected EBSCO Literary databases has been activated and resources are now available in test access for academic community of Vytautas Magnus University:

LitBase

LitBase database supports literary research on the most widely studied authors, poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction worldwide, providing resources such as author interviews, bibliographies, biographies, book reviews, classic books, encyclopedias and dictionaries, nonfiction, full-text journals, literary criticism, novellas, plays, poems, short stories, and more. LitBase provides more author interviews, biographies, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, poems, poetry reviews, screenplays, and short stories from antiquity to the 21st century, including works of high culture not produced in the West. Among its 1.5 million records, users will find historical and contemporary texts from around the world, including Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, Ireland, Latin America, New Zealand, Scandinavia, the Slavic countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Literary Reference Source eBook Subscription

Additional database to LitBase, containing reference works covering a wide range of literature-related topics, including literary criticism and guides to the study of classic literature.

The databases were added to EBSCOhost platform at https://search.ebscohost.com/ and are available for end users directly within the network of IP addresses and remotely, from home computers and mobile devices.

The access for the University community is valid to 8 November, 2024.

Online session dedicated to LitBase

NEW! LitBase

18th September 2024, 11:00 AM EEST (40 minutes) | Register

Trial access to PressReader (newspapers and magazines database)

PressReader has the largest selection of newspapers and magazines from over 120 countries in over 60 languages. That’s 7,000 trusted publications on a single platform: global news from the world’s most reputable journalists and sources from The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Figaro, Forbes, National Geographic, GQ, Vogue, Harper‘s Bazaar, etc.

The access for the University community is valid to 7 October, 2024.

Oxsico has become Identific

Educational technology start-up Oxsico has changed its name to Identific. The change was prompted by a change in service profile, such as the addition of artificial intelligence recognition, and the supplier’s desire to more clearly communicate the company’s core values. The news release states: “The word “Identific” conveys the problem areas identified during the training process and the corresponding corrections in response to the marked areas. Therefore, with the new name, we will present a different approach to the plagiarism prevention process as well as new functionality. The system will become an educational tool, making it easier for students to understand and correct mistakes, reducing stress and saving time and administrative burden for lecturers and university administrators.”

All changes will be made within the system. User logins will remain the same, but users should use the identific.com environment to connect to the system.