Niche information services provider United Business Media Ltd. has announced that it has acquired the remaining 48 percent of the holding company of RISI, Inc. from its joint venture partner Pegasus Partners II, LP for a total cash consideration of $14.3 million. As a result of this transaction, RISI is now effectively owned and controlled by UBM. RISI provides online and printed market, pricing, news, analysis and benchmarking products and services on the forest product industry.

  Research and learning solutions provider HealthStream, Inc. has announced a partnership with Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Under the deal, HealthStream will offer Lippincott’s Nursing Procedures and Skills, an online point-of-care support tool, to the nearly 1,900 hospital customers of its learning products and services. It is expected that, for the first time, healthcare providers will have the additional option of utilising Lippincott’s Nursing Procedures and Skills in a convenient courseware format through HealthStream’s learning platform, the HealthStream Learning Center (HLC).

  Academic publisher SAGE has announced a publishing partnership with the American Sociological Association (ASA). Under the deal, the global publisher will publish eight of ASA’s journals beginning in 2010 and 2012. Publishers’ proposals were judged on the strength of their list in sociology and related fields and on the publisher’s reputation and references.

  Content solutions and services provider Really Strategies has announced the acquisition of DocZone.com, a SaaS XML content management provider. DocZone.com is known for its affordable DITA-based technical publications solution that is easy to configure and use. The acquisition will complement Really Strategies’ RSuite product line, offering publishers, media companies, and technical publishers an array of pricing and implementation models that fit their business needs.

  The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has announced the sale of its Funnelback search engine technology company to content management company Squiz. Funnelback was developed by CSIRO and the Australian National University, originally under the name of P@noptic.

  Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group has announced the first academic institutions to begin collaborating with the company as development partners for Unified Resource Management (URM), a framework for library management services. The three initial development partners include Boston College and the Princeton University Library, both in the US, and K.U.Leuven in Belgium.

  The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Special Collections Working Group has launched a blog on ‘Transformative Issues in Special Collections’ to accompany the web conference held July 7, 2009. Members of the community who have read the recent ARL Special Collections Working Group report, or who attended the web conference and have feedback about transformative issues for special collections, are encouraged to participate in the blog.

  Research4Life has announced the launch of www.research4life.org. The website will act as the public face of the Research4Life partnership for journalists, partners and institutions considering joining one of the programmes. It will include news about the programmes, information on the partners and participating institutions, testimonials and case studies.

  The Society for Vascular Nursing (SVN) has released the first in a series of guidelines being developed that will focus on the nursing care of patients with vascular disease. Working as a collective group of experts, members of SVN have developed guidelines based on the latest available evidence supporting patient care. The 2009 Clinical Practice Guideline for Patients Undergoing Endovascular Repair of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms appears in the June issue of the Journal of Vascular Nursing, published by Elsevier.

  The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced plans to launch a new journal, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, focusing on the molecular basis of neurological disease. Slated for launch in January 2010, the journal targets a growing demand for publication of neuroscience research and represents an expansion of the ACS journal portfolio relating to biological chemistry. Dr. Craig W. Lindsley of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine will be the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.

  STM publisher IOS Press has announced that a recent special issue of WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment and Rehabilitation, covering Children and Ergonomics, is being made freely available. Guest-edited by Prof. Carolyn M. Sommerich, the articles in this issue seek to provide an interesting cross-section of current research concerning youths and ergonomics, from authors around the world.

  Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has announced latest updates to its online learning and reference product - Royal Marsden Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures (RMM). The online version of RMM, created for Wiley-Blackwell by Semantico, extends the usefulness of the print editions by employing User Generated Content (UGC) to enable local trusts to add their own Trust-specific procedure guidelines.

  The University of Manchester and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have launched a new e-science resource for biologists – Biocatalogue.org. A centralised registry of curated life science web services, Biocatalogue.org was officially launched at the 17th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the 8th European Conference on Computational Biology conference (ISMB-ECCB 2009) in Stockholm.

  STM and business publisher Inderscience recently published the first issues of four new titles. The journals are: European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management; International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics; International Journal of Granular Computing, Rough Sets and Intelligent Systems and International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems.

  The Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced the availability of three Pharma Matters reports covering the time period January – March 2009. The quarterly Pharma Matters series covers all aspects of the pharmaceutical pipeline. It is projected to leverage strategic intelligence and competitive analysis from Thomson Pharma, Newport Horizon Premium and the Thomson Messaging Mapping System.

  Bibliographic databases, books and interactive electronic resources publisher CABI has announced the launch of the new and improved VetMed Resource, a comprehensive online veterinary information service. The authoritative content contained in VetMed Resource has been made more discoverable as a result of the new design and improved navigation across the site. VetMed Resource is a subscription based service with access to over 1.3 million records, more than 17,500 full text documents, and almost 850 datasheets covering diseases and pathogens affecting animals.

  Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Foundation Lindau Nobel prize winners Meetings at Lake Constance have signed an agreement to collaborate in the production of online videos of this year's Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on chemistry. Produced by Nature Video, the videos will be hosted and made freely available on the nature.com website. The films will feature one-on-one or small group discussions between individual Nobel Laureates and young scientists, selected by NPG from among the 580 young scientists from all over the world participating in the 2009 Lindau meeting.

  Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) has announced that the WorldCat Mobile pilot, a programme that makes collections from libraries visible through mobile devices, has been extended to Europe. Based on WorldCat.org, the pilot has already proved a huge success in the US and Canada. The WorldCat Mobile pilot allows users to search for and find books and other materials available in libraries near them through a Web application they can access from a PDA or smartphone.

  STM publisher Elsevier has announced that PM&R -The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation has been accepted for coverage by MEDLINE, just six months after its launch in January 2009. 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 references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. PM&R is the official scientific journal of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R).

  The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). PMC Canada will be a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research resulting from CIHR funding. This searchable web-based repository will be permanent, stable and freely accessible.

  Knowledge Exchange, a co-operative effort, has commissioned a study on the costs and benefits of scholarly communication in three countries - Denmark, the UK and the Netherlands. The study titled ‘Open Access – What are the economic benefits? A comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark’ was conducted by Australian economist Prof. John Houghton. The study compared the costs and benefits of scholarly communication based on three different publication models. The modelling revealed that the greatest advantage would be offered by the OA model. Adopting this model could lead to annual savings of around €70 million in Denmark, €133 million in the Netherlands and €480 in the UK.

  Trials, a journal brought out by open access publisher BioMed Central, has published a study questioning the authenticity of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published in Chinese journals. The study says that more than 90 percent of a sample of RCTs published in these journals between 1994 and 2005 did not adhere to recognised methodology for randomisation. This is seen to cast doubts on the reliability of research that has the potential to influence medical decision-makers. The study was carried out by Taixiang Wu and colleagues of the Chinese Cochrane Centre at Sichuan University, China and Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

  Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) a leading organisation of European research libraries, has named Mike Rossner, executive director of the Rockefeller University Press (RUP) in New York, as the latest SPARC innovator. Rossner was chosen for creating forward-thinking publishing policies to expand access and verify scientific research.

  The partners of Research4Life announced at the World Conference of Science Journalists 2009 that a new research impact analysis has demonstrated a dramatic rise in research output by scientists in the developing world since 2002. Comparing absolute growth in published research before (1996 – 2002) and after (2002 - 2008) the advent of the Research4Life programmes, the analysis has revealed a 194% or 6.4-fold increase in articles published in peer reviewed journals. Research4Life is the collective name given to HINARI, AGORA and OARE, the three public-private partnerships that offer health, agriculture and environmental research for free or at very low cost to developing countries. The analysis was conducted by Elsevier’s Associate Director of Scientometrics & Market Analysis, Dr Andrew Plume.

  A research paper which argues that mobile phones and portable devices can lead to new perspectives and practices in learning has become the 10,000th item to be deposited in The Open University’s research repository – Open Research Online (ORO). The 10,000th item, Will mobile learning change language learning?, was written by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Professor of Learning Technology & Communication at The Open University. The paper looks at the impact mobile phones and other portable devices are beginning to have on how learning takes place, and concludes that an emphasis on mobility can lead to new perspectives and practices.

  Medical scientific publisher Informa Healthcare has announced highlights of its latest journal Impact Factor results, with impressive results across the division’s comprehensive range of titles. Impact factors are a method of measuring the influence which a journal has on the scientific community. They are calculated by Thomson Reuters and are designed to indicate how many times the published articles of a journal are cited during the course of a year, providing an insight to how much ‘impact’ the journal is making on its audiences.

  Thieme Publishers, part of STM publisher Thieme Publishing Group, has announced that it is freezing journal prices for 2010. The move is in response to the current recession and assist libraries during their budgetary difficulties. The new pricing policy applies to journals with electronic subscriptions and those journal subscriptions that include both the print and electronic formats.

  Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has announced that 338 of its journals are ranked in the top 10 of their subject categories in the Thomson Reuters 2008 Journal Citation Reports (JCR). A total of 949 Wiley-Blackwell journals are ranked in the JCR, up from 926 in 2007. Impact factors are a method of measuring the influence which a journal has on the scientific community.

  Academic publisher Brill has ceased price increases for certain subscription types in 2010. According to the company, the EURO electronic-only price and the US$ electronic and print price will not increase and US$ electronic-only price will decrease by 7 percent. The combined electronic and print price is set at 120 percent of e-only. The introduction of this new pricing policy will allow Brill's customers to either freeze their expenditure on Brill's journals or even pay less by switching from combined electronic and print to e-only.

  The latest edition of blogspeak is now online. Featured are Michael Nielsen (Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?); Kent Anderson (The Impact Factor: A Tool from a Bygone Era?); Stevan Harnad (Beyond Romary & Armbruster On Institutional Repositories); and David Crotty (Successful Web 2.0 Business Models). 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

  Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest is leveraging its extensive research of end-users, librarians and faculty search behaviours to drive the creation of an all-new platform that will redefine search experience for library users worldwide. To be available in 2010, the new platform will facilitate and simplify access to the broad range of authoritative resources, content, and services that only ProQuest offers. The ProQuest, CSA Illumina, and selected Chadwyck-Healey products will be available on the new platform at launch, and all ProQuest products will migrate to the new platform over time.

  E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions has announced that information solutions provider LexisNexis has signed up for the former’s web-scale discovery service, Summon. About a hundred other content providers are already participating in the service. ProQuest and Gale contribute indexing of titles from 4,700 of their participating publishers between them, while LexisNexis will enable Serials Solutions to index content from LexisNexis Academic, LexisNexis Congressional Digital Collection, and the redesigned LexisNexis Statistical. The Summon service has been in beta for six months and will be available commercially later this month.

  Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group has announced additional libraries from around the world that have selected Primo as their discovery and delivery solution. Primo is claimed to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. It assists libraries in fully utilising their collections and offering users an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience.

  Stem cells and regenerative medicine journal Stem Cells, co-published by AlphaMed Press and Wiley-Blackwell, has announced the promotion of Professor Miodrag Stojković to Editor. Professor Stojković is Deputy Director of the Prince Felipe Research Centre and head of its Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory in Valencia, Spain.

  Medical publisher The BMJ Group has announced the appointment of Professor Constantin Polychronakos as the new editor of the genetics title, Journal of Medical Genetics (JMG), effective July 2009. He succeeds Professor Eamonn Maher who held the post of editor for 11 years.