‘Gold’ open access (OA) publication is the practical route to achieving sustainable OA, the project partners have agreed at the PEER End of Project results conference in Brussels. The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project, which will report to the European Commission in July 2012, seeks to provide large-scale, robust research to inform the debate about access to publicly funded research.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) welcomes the consensus of the partners, and hails PEER as a successful collaboration.
PEER, supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is a collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community. The project was a partnership between STM, Fondation Européenne de la Science Association (ESF), Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG) and Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA).
The project, which has run since September 2008, has been investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts on reader access, author visibility and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research, with the aim of informing the evolution of policies in this area.
Business information provider Thomson Reuters, US, has recognised Australia’s continuing influence on international scientific research and innovation. Thomson Reuters announced a total of 19 Australian-affiliated recipients including 12 of the most influential researchers and seven most innovative organisations during the 2012 Thomson Reuters Australia Citation & Innovation Awards event held at the National Press Club. The recipients were selected based on citation impact and patent analysis completed by Thomson Reuters.
This event is part of a series of Asia Pacific Research Days hosted by Thomson Reuters to recognise research excellence in the region demonstrating how various communities are leading the world through innovation in their respective fields. Similar events have taken place previously in China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
In selecting the Citation Awardees, a shortlist of candidates for each field was established using the h-index indicator which measures both the volume and impact of a researcher’s contribution to his or her field. The 12 Citation Awardees were then selected from the candidates using a quantitative process which identifies the average number of citations per paper their published research has over a period of time as indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science multidisciplinary citation database. This covers a 10-year period from January 2002 to October 2011 for published research with at least one author affiliated to an Australian organisation. The average number of citations per paper reflects the scientific influence of the published research in the given field.
The fields from which the Citation Awardees were drawn represent national strengths – either because of the size of Australia’s contribution to the global body of knowledge or because of its impact. The wide range of subject areas covered - astronomy & astrophysics, ecology, environmental studies, economics, neurosciences and psychology - illustrates the strength and diversity of academic research within Australia and the innovation inherent among its scientists.
Apart from the 12 Australian Citation Awardees, seven institutional recipients of the 2012 Thomson Reuters Innovation Awards in seven categories were also recognised during the award ceremony.
All academic institutions and enterprises headquartered in Australia were included for consideration for the 2012 Thomson Reuters Innovation Award. The award recipients were selected based on analysis using Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index data, Thomson Innovation, the premier IP intelligence and collaboration platform, and Thomson Data Analyzer.
Criteria used to assess the level of innovation of candidate institutions and companies include the size of patent portfolio, success rate, extent of globalisation and influence of the innovation. The most patent prolific collaborations between the top 10 ranked universities and companies were analysed using the methodology outlined above to determine the Best Collaboration Award recipient.
STM publisher Springer Science+Business Media, Germany, recently celebrated the 10,000th MyCopy purchase by a researcher at Auraria Library (library.auraria.edu), an academic library serving the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver and Community College of Denver. As a way to recognise this milestone, the researcher who purchased the 10,000th title will receive 10 free MyCopy books. In addition, all members of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries were presented with six months of free access to SpringerReference.
MyCopy is a service established in 2008 that allows library users to order personal, on-demand softcover editions of eBooks. This service is valid for more than 20,000 Springer eBook titles, and is available to registered patrons of libraries that have purchased one or multiple Springer eBooks packages.
SpringerReference gives researchers online access to living editions of the latest Springer eReferences, across every subject, through a single platform. It is continuously updated and enables leading scientists to contribute as scientific developments occur. All new and revised articles are peer reviewed to ensure high quality content.
Information and point-of-care solutions provider Wolters Kluwer Health (WK Health), US, has announced that Austin Health has selected its ProVation Medical Software for gastroenterology procedure documentation and coding. Located in Victoria, Australia, Austin Health is the major provider of tertiary health services, health professional education and research in northeast Melbourne.
ProVation Medical provides procedure documentation and clinical decision support solutions for hospitals and Ambulatory Surgery Centers. ProVation MD, ProVation MultiCaregiver and ProVation EHR software reduce transcription, paper storage and image printing costs and deliver a high Return on Investment (ROI). ProVation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support, puts evidence-based healthcare into practice by establishing and maintaining standards of care.
ProVation Medical is part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE in Australia has chosen the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to allow students and staff better discoverability of the institution’s resources and to increase online usage. The institute also believes that EDS will be advantageous in attracting potential students by providing the latest innovative technology.
EDS will play a significant part in helping the library at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE achieve its goal to serve all the students’ technology needs.
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box.
The Base Index for EBSCO Discovery Service forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library expands its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library’s collection.
The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.
Financial and ideological backing from EUREKA Eurostars, an R&D initiative funded by the European Community and the UK’s Technology Strategy Board, has reportedly helped rapidly establish Mendeley as a serious player in the academic industry.
Mendeley is a research collaboration platform helping millions of researchers and scientists organise their research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest papers in their subjects. Through the use of collaborative filtering technology seen on sites like Last.fm, Mendeley learns about users when they add documents to their personal libraries. It then recommends related articles that may have been missed, and helps connect them to people with similar interests.
The Eurostars project brought together Mendeley with the Estonian Technology Competence Centre in Electronics-, Info- and Communication Technologies (ELIKO) and Austria’s Competence Centre for Knowledge Management (Know-Center). Building on their complementary fields of expertise, the three organisations collaborated with one another to produce a number of Web 2.0 services for researchers that operate efficiently at large scale. The services leverage the wisdom gained from crowdsourcing in combination with exploiting modern semantic technologies (e.g. Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to produce novel tools that provide researchers with information on the impact of their research. This is done in real time.
The resulting technological improvements and subsequent funding received from Eurostars and the UK Technology Strategy Board have allowed Mendeley to create a database of more than 225 million indexed documents. Mendeley has also signed up over 1.6 million users from across academia and industry world-wide. It has now reportedly become the largest crowd-sourced academic research database in the world.
EUREKA Eurostars is the first European funding and support programme specifically directed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) working in R&D. Since 2009, the UK funding body, the Technology Strategy Board, has invested over £3 million into projects as part of the Eurostars programme.
Publishing-specific software solutions provider Publishing Technology plc, UK, has announced agreements with 10 new scholarly publishers, further strengthening its client portfolio and online collections.
In a series of recent signings, content from six academic publishers is now open to the ingentaconnect network of over 25,000 libraries, including James Nicholas Publishers, Paris Legal Publishers, the Institute of Noise Control Engineering, Science International Corporation, the Association for Perioperative Practice and Rosenberg & Sellier Editori.
Alliances have also been formed with several Chinese content providers to extend their reach outside of China, including three of the country’s largest publishers. China Publishing Group, Guangdong Publishing Group, Hebei Publishing & Media Group and Qingdao Publishing Group will soon command access to an international audience of academics and researchers.
With significant upgrades and development of the platform’s core technology currently underway and user testing of e-journal discovery, access and readership in progress, the ingentaconnect portal remains the largest and most comprehensive gateway to international content for the academic community.
DeepDyve, a research engine for the Deep Web, has announced major updates to its service. Most notably, the company now offers the ability to purchase discounted, downloadable PDFs, making DeepDyve the one-stop destination for unaffiliated researchers (so-called ‘knowledge workers’) to search, rent and now purchase articles in life sciences, technology, medical, and business journals. The company also unveiled a number of enhancements to its monthly plans, and established corporate pricing that enables affordable, company-wide deployment of DeepDyve’s service.
Users have long wished for the ability to quickly read and sample an article before making the larger investment to purchase and download the PDF. DeepDyve now provides that flexibility via a single, convenient interface. With DeepDyve’s monthly subscription plans starting at just $5.99, users will receive 20 percent discount coupons each month that can be applied to the purchase of PDFs.
Another improvement to DeepDyve’s monthly subscriptions is the ability to roll over unused rental tokens and PDF discount coupons. While some users have very predictable rental habits, others have needs that fluctuate greatly. Rollover ensures that unused rental tokens and discount coupons can be stockpiled and used in future months. This feature is especially well suited for users with project-based needs, or anyone whose research needs change throughout the year.
DeepDyve now offers group plans for companies of all sizes wishing to make DeepDyve’s vast library of articles available to their employees. Start-ups and small workgroups can opt to bundle together multiple Silver or Gold accounts, which are prepaid annually and sold at a discounted rate.
STM welcomes PEER conference’s support for gold open access
Thomson Reuters recognises Australia’s contribution to global research and innovation
Springer celebrates 10,000th MyCopy purchase