STM publisher Springer has announced a partnership with the Societe de Pathologie Exotique (SPE) to publish and distribute the journal Bulletin de la Societe de Pathologie Exotique. The Bulletin de la Societe de Pathologie Exotique will join Springer's publishing program, effective January 2010. Founded in 1908 by Nobel Laureate Louis-Alphonse Laveran, the society plays a major role in the promotion of health issues and information on tropical pathology.

  Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary has announced that it has enhanced its interface with a number of new capabilities in a bid to make content discovery, usage, and management quicker and more productive. All ebrary products now integrate with RefWorks and EndNote for easy citation management. End-users may choose to enable RefWorks, EndNote, or both. Once enabled, these options appear under the new InfoTools menu in ebrary's QuickView Reader, which does not require any software downloads or installations, as well as in search results and personal bookshelves.

  XML content server provider Mark Logic Corporation and JustSystems, an independent software vendor, have announced a technology partnership. The alliance will enable enterprise organisations to streamline data aggregation, content creation and publishing of financial reports using XBRL.

  Educational publisher Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. (J&B) has announced the acquisition of Sleep Ed, LLC, a publisher of references for sleep technicians and professionals as well as respiratory care students. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

  Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) has announced an alliance with IDS Project staff, creators of the Article Licensing Availability Service (ALIAS), and Atlas Systems staff, creators of ILLiad and Odyssey resource sharing management systems. The collaborative effort will seek to use holdings data and licence management tools to develop an integrated resource sharing solution for serials in any format.

  Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing and STM publisher Elsevier have entered into a partnership allowing hospitals to access EMBASE on EBSCOhost. EMBASE is a biomedical bibliographic database produced by Elsevier. Representing published journals from 70 countries and 30 languages, EMBASE includes more than 12 million records from 1974 to present. Over 600,000 records are added annually.

  The University of Michigan has signed an agreement with internet search services provider Google Inc. to create digital copies of millions of University of Michigan library books and journals. The amended agreement, which strengthens library preservation efforts and increases the public's access to books, is possible because of Google's pending settlement with a broad class of authors and publishers.

  The historical archive of the scientific publishing house Springer will be kept by Berlin's Central and Regional Library (ZLB) in future. The move is the result of a donation agreement between Springer Science+Business Media and ZLB. The whole collection includes the correspondence archive and more than 15,000 books published by Springer up to 1945. The move from Springer's Heidelberg offices to Berlin is currently taking place in various stages.

  The International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) and the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) have released special, complementary peer-reviewed journals containing ten articles on strengthening standards and quality assurance systems of global capacity in health promotion and health education. SOPHE's journal, Health Education & Behavior, and IUHPE's journal, Global Health Promotion, feature the results of a transatlantic meeting held in Galway, Ireland, in June 2008 on the status of, and needed improvements in, developing competency-based standards throughout the world to strengthen workforce capacity in health promotion.

  Open access publisher BioMed Central has announced the introduction of the 'Online Reporting System' for its open access Prepay and Postpay membership accounts. The move follows the recent rapid growth of institutional memberships for open access publications. Building on BioMed Central's publishing platform, the new reporting system is expected to assist organisations' annual publication budgeting and help reduce the administrative costs associated with managing open access publications.

  STM publisher Thieme Publishing Group has announced the launch of Pharmaceutical Substances Version 3.2. Available via Thieme-connect, Pharmaceutical Substances is projected as a comprehensive reference guide to every significant pharmaceutical compound and includes all FDA approved active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

  Academic and reference books publisher Oxford University Press (OUP) has announced that an online service comprising 13 Oxford Medical Handbooks will be available to librarians from May 2009 onwards. Aimed primarily at medical students and trainee doctors, the Oxford Medical Handbooks series is popular for its ease of use and practicality, with each book delivering reliable, up-to-date clinical information. Oxford Medical Handbooks Online will be hosted alongside Oxford Journals on the HighWire platform.

  Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, has launched a new, free, web-based resource called Common Chemistry. This resource is helpful to non-chemists and others who might know either a chemical name or a CAS Registry Number of a common everyday chemical and want to pair both pieces of information.

  Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing has announced that its clinical reference tool, DynaMed, now includes over 500 interactive clinical calculators, decision rules and statistics to provide clinicians with even more decision-making tools to use at the point-of-care. Most calculators include information to help clinicians interpret their results, as well as references to literature.

  The Research Information Network (RIN) is commissioning a toolkit to help stakeholders put the common principles set out in the 'Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: Towards strategic goals for public policy' into practice. The web-based toolkit is being developed to support key stakeholders, especially research funders, higher education institutions, libraries and publishers, to apply the principles set out in the policy. The project will run from March 2009 to November 2009.

  Academic and professional literature publisher Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. has announced the latest update of Emerald Management First, now customisable with content from the Emerald portfolio of scholarly journals. This development offers private and public organisations the flexibility to enhance their Emerald Management First subscription with access to entire subject collections or up to 175 publications of their choice.

  The British Library, the national library of the UK, is giving readers the chance to test drive three e-readers from Sony and iRex Technologies currently available in the UK. The e-reader display will give visitors the chance to familiarise themselves with these new devices and to freely explore the possible recreational and research benefits of the e-book revolution. Devices on display include Sony Reader, iRex DR1000 and the iLiad.

  Medical information provider Wolters Kluwer Health (WK Health) has signed an agreement with non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico to enable the digital preservation of its extensive online journal collection. The agreement ensures that the more than 300 periodicals published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), Adis International and Facts & Comparisons will be preserved for future scholars, researchers and students.

  Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico has announced an agreement with publisher M.E. Sharpe to preserve its entire online journals collection of 38 titles. With this inclusion, over 14,000 e-books and e-journals have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.

  Bibliographic information provider Bowker has released statistics on the US book publishing industry for 2008, compiled from its Books In Print database. Based on preliminary figures from domestic publishers, Bowker is projecting that US title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2 percent, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007. Despite this decline in traditional book publishing, there was another year of substantial growth in the reported number of 'on-demand' and short-run books produced in 2008.

  The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a report titled 'Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries.' The report seeks to provide a current picture of preservation activities in ARL member libraries, and makes recommendations about how libraries should characterise and measure those activities.

  Information research solutions provider Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced that it is showcasing various features of its products at the ongoing 2009 Annual MLA Meeting being held at the Hawaii Convention Center. The products include OvidSP search modes; Nursing@Ovid, Ovid's nursing and allied health portal; new and upcoming journals, books and book collections in a range of medical, nursing, health science and life science specialties; and new three-dimensional interactive anatomy tools from Primal Pictures.

  Publisher linking services provider CrossRef has announced that it has been awarded the Council of Science Editors' (CSE) Meritorious Achievement Award. This is only the second time CSE has granted the award to an organisation rather than to an individual.

  BioMed Central journal BMC Women's Health has announced that it has reached and surpassed its 100th article milestone. The journal is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of the health and healthcare of adolescent girls and women. Launched in 2001, it continues to steadily attract submissions, and publications have risen by 50 percent in the last three years.

  An Indian online forum on intellectual property rights has reportedly called for more transparency in the country's patent system and for information to be more easily accessible. A petition in this regard has been launched with the Indian patent authorities. The recently launched online petition follows an earlier petition submitted at the end of 2007. The second petition calls for more patent-related information to be made public.

  Research4Life has announced that the Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) programme has registered 1500 institutions since its launch in 2006, an increase of nearly 700 percent. Scientists, researchers and environmental policy-makers in 1,500 not-for-profit institutions in the world's poorest countries will now gain free or low cost access to the latest environmental science literature from the world's leading journals, books and databases.

  Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched an online reference website offering free access to research articles and publications relating to influenza A H1N1. The complimentary content includes articles from the Cochrane Library, The Hospitalist and from Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, among other books and journals.

  Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, published by IOP publishing, has announced the online publication of the 'Highlights of 2008' collection. Thirty articles represent some of the best work recently published in the journal. The collection is free to access until December 31, 2009.

  The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced the results of a study assessing influential research in bioterrorism from 1999 to 2008. The findings, published in the May/June issue of Science Watch, are based on more than 12,000 bioterrorism-related papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals during this time period.

  Academic publisher SAGE has announced that the American Journal of Men’s Health (AJMH) has been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE. Maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is a premier bibliographic database containing more than 16 million journal article citations.

  The ninth edition of blogspeak is now online. Featured are Stevan Harnad (Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA); Philip Davis (Dark Secrets: Open Access and Author Processing Charges); Fytton Rowland (Towards a grudging consensus?); and Tim O'Reilly (Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web). 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) is organising a free event, 'The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research.' The event, scheduled for July 1, 2009, in London, will look at the findings of the 'E-journals: their use, value and impact' report, which takes an in-depth look at how researchers in the UK use electronic journals, the value they bring to universities and research institutions and the contribution they make to research productivity, quality and outcomes.

  The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters and the University of Queensland (UQ) recently hosted an international bibliometrics conference in Brisbane. According to views shared by the delegates, metrics-based research evaluation offers a pragmatic approach to ensuring transparency, consistency and objectivity. It was also observed that the challenges in building robust research evaluation and management systems in institutions can be best overcome by the research management and librarian community working together.

  E-resource access and management services provider Serials Solutions has announced that it is building a new XML federated search connection to Infobase eBooks, which span a wide range of core, curriculum-oriented subject areas from history, science and literature to geography, social issues, the arts, biographies, and beyond. With the new connection, subscribers to the Serials Solutions 360 Search federated search service will soon be able to provide access to more than 2,000 current and backlist Infobase titles.

  Subscription services provider Swets has announced the appointment of Eduard Cohen as the new Chief Executive Officer, effective June 1, 2009. Prior to his appointment to Swets, Eduard has held several board level marketing and sales positions in the publishing and pharmaceutical industry most notably at Elsevier where he was the MD of the Science and Technology Division.

  Information services and publishing company Wolters Kluwer has announced the appointment of Elizabeth Satin as Senior Vice President and head of Corporate Development and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) North America. Satin succeeds Bruce Lenz, who will retire in May 2009.