STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of an expert identification and discovery application that connects SciVerse Hub, a platform for search, analysis and research synthesis, with the DIRECT2Experts online network of scientific researchers.
The Direct2Experts Expert Discovery Application enables researchers to find potential collaborators who conduct related research within a variety of expertise areas while they search for abstracts and full-text articles from multiple sources directly within SciVerse Hub, resulting in workflow enhancement.
Many of the institutions in the DIRECT2Experts network use SciVal Experts, Elsevier’s expertise profiling and research networking tool that is pre-populated with publication histories from the SciVerse Scopus database. The new expert discovery application helps users make connections between the wide range of scientific data in SciVerse Hub and researchers at particular institutions that use SciVal Experts and other research networking tools, including VIVO, Harvard’s Profiles Research Networking Software, Stanford Community Academic Profiles and the University of Iowa’s Loki.
DIRECT2Experts is a pilot project facilitated by the Research Networking Group of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), a consortium led by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Research Resources.
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E-book sales are rising to offset a decline in physical book purchases, but only in volume, according to the latest Books & Consumers survey. With the lower price points of e-books versus their print counterparts, the value of book sales is shrinking, the report further says. The survey is an ongoing study of the habits of British book buyers by category experts at BML, a Bowker business.
The Books & Consumers survey shows that in the 48 weeks ending November 27, 2011, compared to the same period the previous year, British consumers’ purchases of physical books declined by 4 percent, with value down some 6 percent. However, with e-book purchases included, the total consumer book market grew very slightly in volume terms, up 0.4 percent, with a market value drop of 3 percent overall.
The survey also looks at how the e-book industry fares by genre. The adult fiction market saw spectacular e-book growth in 2011, up from 2.8 percent of purchases in the four weeks ending December 26, 2010 to 12.5 percent in the four weeks to November 27, 2011. But again, as e-books are being bought for lower prices, they accounted for only 7.1 percent of adult fiction spending in the latest period.
Full 2011 results from the Books & Consumers survey will be released at BML Bowker’s annual conference on March 29, 2012 in Central London.
The survey seeks to measure consumer book purchasing of both adult and children’s print and e-books from all sources. The data above are taken from the Quarterly Bulletin for 48 weeks to November 27, 2011 and the Ebook Monitor for 12 weeks to the same date.
In addition to monitoring e-book purchasing via Books & Consumers, researchers at BML Bowker are currently conducting an international study, the Global eBook Monitor, in partnership with Pearson, Tata Consultancy Services, Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and A.T. Kearney. This study will compare and contrast e-book purchasing and growth in countries around the world, including the UK, US, Australia, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France and Spain. Results from this will be released in April. Additional contextual information on e-book discovery, buying behaviour and future buying intentions in the UK are being investigated via BML Bowker’s research project, Understanding the Digital Consumer, now in its second year.
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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and the Australasian Society for Immunology (ASI) have announced a partnership to publish a new open access journal from December 2012. The journal, Clinical and Translational Immunology (CTI), will be a companion title to Immunology and Cell Biology, currently published by NPG in partnership with the ASI. CTI will be hosted on nature.com and will begin accepting submissions in the second half of 2012.
CTI will publish the latest advances in biomedical research for scientists and physicians. The journal will focus on fields such as cancer biology, cardiovascular research, gene therapy, immunology, vaccine development and disease pathogenesis and therapy at the earliest phases of investigation. CTI will publish articles on basic, translational, and clinical studies in all aspects of human immunology, including experimental models specific to human diseases. There will also be reviews of timely topics in basic immunology, case reports, and letters to the editor.
The editorial team is led by Editor-in-Chief Gabrielle Belz, of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. An international editorial board supports the editorial team.
All content will be open access and will be freely available to researchers worldwide through the nature.com platform. An article-processing charge (APC) will be levied per article accepted for publication, and authors will have a choice of two Creative Commons licenses.
NPG works with more than 30 societies and organisations worldwide to provide publishing services and publishes over 50 journals in its academic and society journals programme. Open access options are available on more than 90 percent (55 of 59) of NPG's academic and society journal portfolio.
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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced a new partnership with Oriprobe Information Services Inc, Canada, a supplier of information solutions and China/Asia electronic resources. The deal will allow content from China/Asia On Demand (CAOD) to be accessible within EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). The agreement allows for metadata from this collection of research literature from Asia to be added to the Base Index of EDS.
The EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.
China/Asia On Demand features a vast collection of reliable, authoritative information spanning arts and humanities, STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) research, social and business information. The collection includes over 10,000 journals and more than 40 million research articles. The addition of this content to the EDS Base Index will benefit EDS users looking for unique research literature from China, Japan and Korea.
CAOD is part of a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s leading scholarly journal and book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.
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.
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Healthcare information provider Wolters Kluwer Health (WK Health), US, has released Facts & Comparisons eAnswers Mobile to provide smartphone users with authoritative answers to drug information questions. The app, which combines industry leading content from Facts & Comparisons eAnswers and Lexicomp, is available for iPhone and Android smartphones.
The interactive resource helps practitioners ensure the safety and accuracy of therapeutic decision-making through quick and easy mobile access to independently reviewed and researched drug information.
Facts & Comparisons eAnswers Mobile addresses the key pain points of workflow efficiency and patient safety by providing the tools and information needed to support drug dispensing activities, including patient safety screenings for Drug Utilization Review and drug reference information. With eAnswers Mobile, data resides on the user’s smartphone and can be accessed even when no Internet or network connection is available.
Facts & Comparisons provides pharmacies and academia with access to updated drug information tailored to their unique needs, enabling better therapeutic decisions in less time. For the academic community, Facts & Comparisons provides students, residents and faculty with instant access to reliable, current drug information and medication management tools. Helpful links, student and resident support, scholarships and other information are also available to help meet course and drug reference needs.
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The Association of Lithuanian Serials, an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) participant, hosted a conference on unique author identifiers on February 14, 2012, in Vilnius, Lithuania. The conference took place in the Lithuanian parliament (seimas). Three members of ORCID working groups presented at the conference, and their presentation files are now available at http://about.orcid.org/presentations.
Mike Taylor from Elsevier gave an introduction of why unique identifiers for researchers are important, and why using names or disambiguation algorithms only works most of the time. Particularly striking was his own example of him getting mixed up with another Mike Taylor. Taylor also stressed in his presentation that ORCID will enable ‘not just one big thing’, but rather many interesting uses, some of which we might not even know today. His presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/creating-scholarly-universe-importance-asserting-researcher’s-identity.
Gudmundur Thorisson from Leicester University/University of Iceland spoke about contributor identification as a core challenge in data publication. He pointed out that ORCID would facilitate data citation, and this in turn would increase data sharing. Similar to Taylor, he also stressed that ORCID identifiers were intended not only for claiming publications and datasets, but for all relevant scholarly contributions. His presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/contributor-identification-core-challenge-data-publication.
A presentation from Martin Fenner from Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany gave an overview of how ORCID tries to solve the problem of author name ambiguity, with a focus on what the first version of the ORCID software (phase I) will do and will not be able to do. He also gave a status update of ORCID, e.g. that ORCID has released two APIs (including a mock API server), is working hard to finish the phase I software, will soon hire the first permanent staff, and expects to launch the ORCID service in the summer. The presentation is available at http://about.orcid.org/content/orcid-unique-identifiers-authors-and-contributors.
The three other presenters at the conference where Thomas Krichel (Open Access to Scholarly Metadata: Author Claiming and Institutional Identification), Janifer Gatenby (ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier for Creators and Organisations) and Eleonora Dagienė (The Survey on Data Gathering on Researcher Activities: Initial Findings). Dagienė showed preliminary results of a survey conducted with up until now more than 3,000 researchers about their attitudes towards collecting academic outputs. Most survey respondents had not yet heard of ORCID, and there were notable differences in what information researchers found important (e.g. listing their presentations) and what their institutions requested (e.g. patents).
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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the Website for Small Libraries project, which began as an OCLC Innovation Lab experiment in 2011, is now available as a beta service for any library wishing to set up its own website.
By participating in the project, libraries will be able to quickly and easily set up a website that provides basic functionality for making small collection information available on the Web, setting up users, checking materials in and out, placing holds, and providing library contact, location, service and event information.
Four South Dakota libraries, as well as the South Dakota State Library, were part of the project’s pilot.
In order to make the site as easy to use as possible, the site relies on simple editing of predefined templates to populate the Web presence. It can take just a few minutes to have a library site up and available to patrons on the Web, as well as on mobile and tablet devices. The service uses a set of wizards to import collection and user information in a wide variety of formats. It uses statistical algorithms and WorldCat to determine structure and field contents to ease the import processes. Complexity is kept to a minimum by focusing on the minimum fields necessary to make collections accessible.
Libraries interested in signing up can do so at http://beta.worldcat.org/lib/. Participation in the project costs $500 per year and comes with a 90-day trial period. Libraries are free to import and export their collection and patron data as they try the service, as well as through the product life.
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Library automation solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that Brigham Young University (BYU) has selected the Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system. The first member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to adopt Rosetta, Brigham Young will implement Rosetta initially for the Harold B. Lee Library’s digital collections and will later expand the implementation to the digital assets of the university’s colleges and schools.
Installed in libraries and archives worldwide, Rosetta encompasses the entire digital preservation workflow, including the acquisition, validation, ingest, storage, preservation, and delivery of digital objects. Rosetta enables academic institutions as well as libraries, archives, and other memory institutions to manage, preserve, and provide access to institutional documents, research output in digital formats, digital images, websites, and other digitally born and digitised materials.
Having embarked on a thorough evaluation of digital preservation systems in 2002, BYU became more interested in the Ex Libris system in light of the National Science Foundation’s requirement that all grant proposals contain a data-management and preservation plan—a requirement that Rosetta would help the university to comply with.
The adoption of Rosetta marks the latest phase of the university’s 10-year digital preservation initiative.
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Ingram’s Vital Source is now providing access to its leading e-textbook platform through Blackboard Learn, which claims to be one of the most used learning management systems. The Blackboard Building Block for VitalSource gives institutions a comprehensive tool to implement digital textbooks for students in mobile, online and offline environments.
The new Blackboard Building Block for the VitalSource platform developed collaboratively with both educators and publishers, gives higher-ed institutions and their students an efficient and cost-effective way to acquire content from the world’s leading publishers through the Blackboard Learn platform. Through the Building Block, students and educators have immediate, one click access to VitalSource’s comprehensive content library with more than 80,000 titles, and the functionality of the platform, including integrated notes, highlights, annotations and sharing capability through a single sign-on environment.
Using the Building Block, educators can preview and customise content used in courses. Through the functionality of the application, they can also link to required assignments and relevant activities within digital course materials and easily share that information with students. The Building Block supports the Bookshelf platform for viewing content in any modern browser, as well as downloading to clients on the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, Apple’s iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch devices, and Android smart phones and tablets.
Ingram’s Vital Source continues to grow its set of tools to give educational institutions, publishers, and other places of learning, options to connect their infrastructure to commercial as well as custom electronic and printed content in the platform. The Building Block is available to all institutions on Blackboard Learn 9.1.
A member of Blackboard Partnerships Program, Vital Source also participates in the Blackboard Developers Network, an innovative community of educational and technical experts with a passion for using technology to enhance teaching and learning.
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The Springer journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry (ABC) has chosen Andreas Römpp (38) and Sabine Guenther (30) as the recipients of its Best Paper Award 2011. Römpp and Guenther are the lead authors of a paper published in ABC on mass spectrometry imaging.
The award, accompanied by 1,000 euros, was created by Springer to honour exceptional young scientists and to stimulate their research careers. The ABC Best Paper Award has been given since 2005.
Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, an international journal dealing with all aspects of analytical and bioanalytical sciences, celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2012. The journal covers all fields of pure and applied analytical chemistry and bioanalysis, including topics at their interfaces with life and health sciences, engineering and materials sciences, environmental sciences, earth sciences and others. ABC counts among the top 10 of 70 journals in the category ‘Chemistry, Analytical’ ranked by Impact Factor.
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Mobile access for Knowledgespeak is now available in a mobile browser version and a Java application version.
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Elsevier’s new expert discovery application enables collaboration by connecting SciVerse Hub to DIRECT2Experts
UK e-books sales rising but sales values falling, says Books & Consumers survey
China/Asia on Demand metadata now accessible via EBSCO Discovery Service
Presenters at Lithuanian event examine importance of unique author identifiers 
Brigham Young University selects Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system
Springer journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry announces recipients of Best Paper Award 2011
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