From Birdcage Walk

The latest in our ongoing series of updates about activities at the Institution.

Dear Member,

One of the highlights of this week has been a trip over to Sage Publications in the City of London. As many know, they acquired the commercial interests in our ‘Proceedings’ back in 2010, whilst we retained a very strong and important interest in the technical content. There is a Publication Panel which continues to meet once a year to oversee how the relationship is working. They look at what actions we might take in the following year to attract more papers of a high quality as well as how to support the Editorial Boards to ensure that the peer review process continues to be of the highest standard.  Many of our senior members including Trustees and those on Council have been, and indeed still are, either on the Panel or on the Editorial Boards.

A key part of the arrangement with Sage is that all of our past Proceedings that are more than a year old are available free online in full text form. Just go to our website and find the Library and Archive page and click on the link ‘browse the full list of catalogues and databases’ which will take you to here.

As you’ll see you can scroll down to an ‘IMechE Proceedings’ link which when you click it takes you to your member log in page. Once through there you have all sixteen ‘Parts’ as well as the Journal of Engine Research and the Journal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design – all back to the original issues! Do remember of course in addition that the very latest issues from the last twelve months are also available via the library here at Birdcage Walk.

Sage were keen to emphasise that they wanted to encourage more of you come forward if you would be interested in being part of raising awareness of these great journals.  That’s especially for our membership outside the UK where Sage are looking to make sure that the papers are truly available to a worldwide audience. Please just email us here at governance@imeche.org if you are interested to help with the governance but can’t get through directly to Sage.

Finally, back on the ‘full list of catalogues and databases’ page, you are reminded of the wealth of technical output that is available through your membership. Books and papers from McGraw-Hill, Springer, ScienceDirect and Knovel amongst others. It’s a great resource and one we are extremely proud of. If you ever find that you’ve reached the limits of your own searching skills then just ask one of our Information Officers or Archivists via library@imeche.org to help you. It may well be that you don’t need to know what the thermodynamic efficiency of a horse is, but just in case you do, then you know where to come.

Chief Executive, Institution of Mechanical Engineers

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