Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced that 60 ebooks from Clinical Publishing, an independent medical publisher based in the United Kingdom, are scheduled to be available on OvidSP in 2009. Many of the titles are already for sale and accessible via Books@Ovid, OvidSP's ebook platform. All titles will be available to Ovid's global customer base as an annual subscription or for one-time purchase.

  Bookshare, an online accessible library for individuals with print disabilities, has announced partnerships with leading publishers in the US. Agreements with publishers, many of which include permissions to distribute worldwide, will add a wealth of accessible books to Bookshare, including academic, scientific and technical books; and textbooks for students in grades K-12, higher education, graduate school, and continuing education.

  Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has announced details of a membership agreement with open access publisher BioMed Central to cover publication costs for research articles published by its researchers. Under this membership arrangement, Pfizer will centrally cover the publication fees for any researcher employed or funded by Pfizer when they submit a research article to one of BioMed Central’s over 190 peer-reviewed open access journals.

  Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, has added University of Calgary as a beta development partner for the Summon unified discovery service. Several new content providers, including BMJ, an international peer-reviewed medical journal and subsidiary of the British Medical Association, have also signed onto the Summon service. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment.

  Scientific information services provider FIZ Karlsruhe has entered into an agreement with US-based SequenceBase Corporation for promoting the USGENE in-house version more effectively in Europe. USGENE is a resource for life-science intellectual property professionals, providing unrivalled searchable access to all available peptide and nucleotide sequences from the published applications and issued patents of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This agreement adds to the already existing partnership between SequenceBase Corp. and FIZ Karlsruhe with respect to the offering of USGENE via STN International.

  Open access publisher Medknow Publications has signed an agreement with Globethics.net, a global network of institutions and persons interested in different fields of applied ethics. Under the deal, both companies will cooperate in the acquisition, production, subscription, distribution, availability and marketing of online and print journals on applied ethics, worldwide, with a special focus on ethics journals from developing and transition countries.

  Wolters Kluwer Health has announced that its ProVation Medical procedure documentation and coding software allows users to transition to the new ICD-10 code set with minimal expense, training or disruption of workflow. The product, which is seen to answer the call for healthcare technology vendors to play a proactive role in the switch to ICD-10, is claimed to be ready to accommodate the expanded code sets. Also, its implementation and training teams are prepared to support client organisations throughout the transition process.

  The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced the latest release of ScholarOne Manuscripts (formally Manuscript Central). The upgrade includes the implementation of Cognos, a leading business intelligence and performance management tool. The new reporting functionality in ScholarOne Manuscripts has the ability to change the way journals manage, evaluate, and report on peer review operations within a journal.

  E-resource access and management services provider Serials Solutions has announced a series of medical resource enhancements to the Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase. Enhancements include the addition of over 1 million National Library of Medicine eBook MARC records and Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) data to KnowledgeWorks, as well as a new feature supporting the PubMed LinkOut service within the 360 Link OpenURL link resolver.

  Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched a new journal, Asian Journal of Endoscopic Surgery. Masaki Kitajima, Vice President and Professor, International University of Health and Welfare, Tokyo, Japan, serves as Editor of the journal, the inaugural issue of which is currently available online.

  Academic and professional literature publisher Emerald Group Publishing Limited has announced that Reprint and Permissions for Emerald's eBook content is available through Rightslink. Rightslink is a service created by the Copyright Clearance Center that provides a content licensing solution for publishers.

  Nstein Technologies, Inc., a Canada-based provider of online publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines and online content providers, has announced the launch of WCM (Web Content Management) 4.1, a feature-rich upgrade to its content management system (CMS). Most notable among the additions is WCM Mojo, a portable, mobile back-office version of WCM designed to empower smart-phone equipped writers, journalists and editors to create, edit and publish content in the field.

  Life sciences informatics company Molecular Connections has announced the availability of XTractor Premium, a knowledge management platform, for the biomedical research community. The product is projected to provide scientists with new and refined ways to access the latest scientific facts from PubMed. Pharmaceutical companies, researchers and scientists can use it to identify, verify and develop predictive relationships from PubMed Literature.

  The American Chemical Society has announced the forthcoming launch of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Dr George C. Schatz, Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, will serve as the Editor-in-chief of the journal, the inaugural issue of which is planned for January 2010.

  Building information modeling (BIM) solutions provider Reed Construction Data launched its latest BIM offering, SmartBIM Spaces, at the recently concluded AIA 2009 National Convention and Design Expo. SmartBIM Spaces seeks to offer architects a simple way to view and download BIM objects specific to their projects. It also seeks to provide building product manufacturers with a targeted distribution method to get their products in the hands of architects during the design phase.

  SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) developer Aries Systems has announced the general release of Editorial Manager and Preprint Manager Version 7.0. The new version of Preprint Manager enhances the ability of journals to transact issue workflows in tandem with individual manuscript processing. Workflow solutions from Aries Systems are used by more than 3,200 scholarly publications to process over a million scholarly manuscripts, abstracts and book chapters each year.

  The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced the annual Top 20 ranking of Japanese research institutions for all fields based on citation data of academic papers published from January 1998 to December 2008. Using the 22 categories defined in Essential Science Indicators, four categories - Material Science, Physics, Chemistry and Biology/Biochemistry - were identified where Japanese institutions were ranked within the top 5 and top 10 in the world.

  The American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, recently announced cost-saving measures in light of investment losses, declining ad revenues, and falling institutional print subscriptions to its journals and other publications. In addition to job cuts, the society has capped certain retirement health benefits and reduced general expenses across all operating units.

  Online information services provider Dialog, part of the ProQuest family of brands, has announced that corporate customers of Dialog will now be able to purchase a variety of ProQuest products through their Dialog sales contacts. The new initiative focuses on those ProQuest products that are most complementary to Dialog information products.

  Academic publisher SAGE has announced that four SAGE Reference titles have been included in Library Journal’s annual Best Reference feature announced this month. The titles were chosen in four different categories - Sciences, Social Sciences, Business/Economics and current events.

  The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries have filed comments with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for the judge to consider in his ruling on the proposed Google Book Search Settlement. The associations have asked the judge to exercise vigorous oversight of the interpretation and implementation of the settlement to ensure the broadest possible benefit from the services the settlement enables.

  iCopyright, a US-based provider of intelligent copyright systems for digital content, has published a study according to which online publishers are losing significant revenue and, in many cases, the rights to their material, because of the way they implement 'Article Tools' on their web pages. Article Tools are common on almost every news and information website. They appear as links and/or icons that allow readers to print, email, save, share, post, and do other things with the articles.

  Publisher linking services provider CrossRef has announced that the American Psychological Association (APA) will implement CrossCheck, the plagiarism screening service powered by iThenticate. The Association is the 50th participant to implement the plagiarism service.

  Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group has announced that the bX recommender service is now available to libraries worldwide. Leveraging the networked research community, the bX service seeks to generate recommendations for scholarly articles based on the analysis of tens of millions of linking activities carried out by users at research institutions worldwide. The recommendations are accessible through a library's SFX interface or through the interface of a local application of choice. Registration for bX, offered in a service model, is available online.

  Publishing software developer Content Data Solutions has announced the release of its Web Publishing Solution (WPS) as Software as a Service (SaaS). WPS SaaS is being offered to reduce or eliminate the upfront financial investment typically required when implementing a content management system. WPS SaaS is seen to result in an immediate return on investment for businesses, allowing companies to publish content at an extremely low cost with minimal infrastructure costs.

  The BMJ Group has announced that every article published since the British Medical Journal’s first issue in October 1840 is now freely available online from bmj.com. Eighteen of the BMJ Group's specialist journals - including Heart, Gut and Thorax - are also available. Creating a complete and fully searchable BMJ archive has taken nearly a decade and was made possible by the US National Library of Medicine and the UK's Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee.

  Journal subscription services provider EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced that following the recent success of its first wave of Open Days during the last two months, it will continue the 30-event series through November 2009, in major cities across Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. These EBSCO-sponsored Open Days provide a convenient and beneficial communications exchange platform for all involved in the information supply chain.

  The American Psychological Association (APA), publisher of titles such as Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Psychological Bulletin, has developed a Wellcome-Trust compliant author-pays model. In return for paying an OA fee ($4000), APA will now deposit on behalf of the author, the final, published version directly into PubMed Central (PMC), where it will be mirrored to the UK PubMed Central (UKPMC).

  Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing and editors of its clinical reference tool, DynaMed, are making DynaMed's latest information about Swine Influenza freely available to health care providers and institutions throughout the world. The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for health care providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flu-like illnesses during this outbreak.

  Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of technologies for R&D, has announced the release of Symyx Isentris Personal Edition scientific software. Designed for small to mid-size R&D organisations and for individuals, Isentris Personal Edition brings advanced scientific information management, exploration, and sharing capabilities to scientists without requiring an enterprise deployment.

  The Open Access Directory (OAD), a Wiki hosted by Simmons College, celebrated its first anniversary on April 30. Under OAD, community contributors create and maintain simple, factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship. Launched in 2008 and operated entirely by an international corps of volunteers, the OAD grew from six to 40 lists and has served more than 250,000 unique users. The OAD will serve as a central component in the programme for the upcoming Open Access Week (October 19 to 23, 2009), which will feature educational resources that local hosts can use to customise events to suit local audiences and time zones.

  The seventh edition of blogspeak is now online. Featured are Roy Tennant (Library of Congress Releases Official Linked Data Site); Philip Davis (Paying for Open Access Publication Charges); Stevan Harnad (Conflicts of Interest in Open Access); and Steve Helyin (The World’s Foremost Consultant on the Future of Publishing). A service of Knowledgespeak.com, Blogspeak includes blog posts relevant to the publishing industry, particularly STM publishing. Subscribers are invited to participate in the latest edition of blogspeak Here.

  The Research Information Network (RIN) and the Repositories Support Project (RSP) are holding a free event to look at how researchers are responding to mandates to include the results of their research work in repositories. The event, scheduled for May 29 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, will cover issues around both research funders' and institutional mandates (at institutional, subject-based and national levels), and ask how well these mandates are working in practice.

  Energy industry publisher Gulf Publishing Company has announced the appointment of John T. Royall as President and Chief Executive Officer. The announcement was made by Christopher Brown, Director of Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. Gulf Publishing Company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Euromoney Institutional Investor, PLC.

  STM publisher Elsevier has announced that Dr. David Goldmann has joined Elsevier Health Sciences as Vice President, Editor-in-Chief, First Consult. As Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Goldmann will be responsible for developing the overall content strategy and vision and leading the entire content production of First Consult and derivative products.