The US’ National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) has announced that it will host a 90-minute webinar on June 20, 2012, from 11:00 am – 12:30 pm EDST to hear the just-released results of a three-year study on the behaviour of the 'Generation Y' scholar (students born between 1982 -1994) currently studying for a PhD in the UK.
Sponsored by the British Library and JISC and to be released this month, the study will examine students’ activities and habits in online and physical research environments, as well as their use of print and digital library information resources.
The webinar will feature Julie Carpenter, Founder and Director of Education for Change, who served as Project Director for the study. She will discuss the results of the study on issues such as emerging research behaviour trends across diverse subject discipline; how doctoral scholars from Generation Y seek information both on and offline; the relative use of digital resources and physical resources, including research spaces; how Generation Y students search for and use digital content for research; and Generation Y adoption and use of emerging technologies for information access and use.
Ovid, a US-based provider of information solutions, will introduce new capabilities in OvidMD, designed to meet the needs of medical librarians and the clinicians they serve. These will be unveiled at this year’s Medical Librarians Association (MLA) annual meeting in Seattle on May 19 – 22, marking the first anniversary of OvidMD, the company’s research platform of aggregated medical resources. Ovid is part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
OvidMD seeks to put research into practice, bringing the library resources to the clinician. Users search Ovid MEDLINE, UpToDate, evidence-based databases, with subscribed resources from Ovid's repository of aggregated, premium clinical journals and books to deliver clinically relevant search results. OvidMD is said to be the only tool that allows physicians to access information from UpToDate for quick clinical answers or Ovid for deeper research, all in one interface.
Highlights of the OvidMD enhancements with new clinical search productivity tools include Typeahead that Thinks Ahead; Clinical Focus Navigators; OvidMD Web App for the iPad and iPhone; Best Bets in Search Results; Shortcuts from ‘What Am I Searching?’; Library Co-Branding; OpenURL graphics; and Improved UpToDate Search Results (mid-June).
Attendees at the MLA annual conference can also view peer-reviewed open access content from Medknow and PubMed Central coming soon to OvidSP. Visitors to the Wolters Kluwer Health - Ovid’s booth #301 can register to win the latest in technology devices at Ovid’s first-ever Wii Home Run Derby.
McGraw-Hill School Education has announced that several of its digital solutions have been named finalists for the 2012 Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) Awards. Honouring excellence and innovation in the education community, the awards represent the longest-running and most highly regarded recognition programme in the industry.
For 2012, the AEP Awards were updated to ensure that they remain relevant, recognising the challenges and needs of education in the 21st century. Three key principles – quality content, age appropriateness and innovation –drove the judging criteria and evaluation process for selecting finalists and winners.
McGraw-Hill Education has been named a finalist across three of four categories. Products were judged in a three-tier process (educator review, professional review, and certification) with only the best materials advancing to the higher rounds. Having products judged first and foremost by educators is critically important because they know best which products will succeed or fail directly in the classroom and ensures that the winners are truly leaders in the field. All entrants will receive judges' feedback to help them improve their materials.
AEP Award finalists and winners earn the right to display the AEP Award Seal, nationally recognised by educators, administrators, and parents as a mark of outstanding quality and achievement. Winners will be announced at AEP's Content in Context Conference in Washington, D.C. on June 5, 2012.
The Massachusetts Medical Society has announced the appointment of Dr. Richard V. Aghababian, the Founding Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, as the President of the Society. The announcement was made at the organisation's annual meeting on May 17 at the Seaport Hotel in Boston.
Dr. Aghababian succeeds Worcester pediatrician Dr. Lynda Young as the top officer of the Society, the statewide membership organisation representing nearly 24,000 physicians and medical students in the Commonwealth.
Dr. Aghababian has a long record of distinguished service with the state medical society. He served as President-Elect and Vice President, respectively, for the last two years, and was Secretary-Treasurer for two years prior to that. He has also been a member of its District Leadership Council and House of Delegates and was a member of the committees on Finance, Nominations, Physician Preparedness, Global Medicine, and Medical Education.
Dr. Aghababian has also held a number of key leadership posts in local and national groups. He has served as president of the Worcester District Medical Society, the Massachusetts College of Emergency Physicians, American College of Emergency Physicians, and the Society for Airway Management. He is the secretary-treasurer of the Society for Chest Pain Centers, a national group that helps hospitals improve management of cardiac patients in an observation setting.
An editor-in-chief, associate editor, and contributing author for several textbooks and a widely-published author and lecturer on topics in emergency medicine, disaster response, and preparedness, Dr. Aghababian has received honors and awards for his contributions to medicine and the community from the American Red Cross, the Worcester District Medical Society, Massachusetts College of Emergency Physicians, and the University of Massachusetts. In 2007, he was a recipient of the Annual Health Care Heroes Award from the Worcester Business Journal.
The Massachusetts Medical Society, with nearly 24,000 physicians and student members, is dedicated to educating and advocating for the patients and physicians of Massachusetts. The Society publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, a global medical journal and web site, and Journal Watch alerts and newsletters covering 13 specialties.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has been awarded the Council of Science Editors (CSE) highest honour for its significant contribution to improving scientific communication by promoting high editorial standards.
The award was presented to Dr Virginia Barbour, Chair of the COPE council, in a ceremony held during the CSE Annual Meeting, which was recently held in Seattle, Washington.
COPE was established in 1997 by a small group of medical journal editors in the UK and now has more than 7,000 members worldwide, from all disciplines. Membership is open to editors of academic journals and others interested in publication ethics. Many of the world’s largest international publishers have signed up their journals as COPE members.
The Council of Science Editors is a community of editorial professionals dedicated to the responsible and effective communication of science. Its mission is to serve editorial professionals in the sciences by creating a supportive network for career development, providing educational opportunities and developing resources for identifying and implementing high quality editorial practices.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) seeks submissions in the field of text-mining research for a collection to be launched across all of its journals in 2013. All submissions submitted before October 30, 2012 will be considered for the launch of the collection. Submissions after this date will still be considered for the collection, but may not appear in the collection at launch. All articles must adhere to the submission guidelines of the PLoS journal to which one submits.
As part of its commitment to realising the maximal utility of open access literature, PLoS is launching a collection of articles dedicated to highlighting the importance of research in the area of text mining. The launch of this Text Mining Collection complements related PLoS Collections on Open Access and Altmetrics (forthcoming), as well as the recent release of the PLoS Application Programming Interface, which provides an open API to PLoS journal content.
As part of this Text Mining Collection, PLoS is making a call for high quality submissions that advance the field of text-mining research, including new methods for the retrieval or extraction of published scientific facts; large-scale analysis of data extracted from the scientific literature; new interfaces for accessing the scientific literature; semantic enrichment of scientific articles; linking the literature to scientific databases; application of text mining to database curation; approaches for integrating text mining into workflows; and resources (ontologies, corpora) to improve text mining research.
The paper ‘21st-Century Collections: Calibration of Investment and Collaborative Action’ is the work of the ARL 21st-Century Research Library Collections Task Force. The task force is co-chaired by Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University, and Thomas Leonard, Kenneth and Dorothy Hill University Librarian at the University of California Berkeley.
ARL staff support to the task force included Visiting Program Officer Christine Avery, Head of the University College Libraries and Collection Development Coordinator for Commonwealth Campus Libraries at Penn State University.
At a panel discussion at the 160th ARL Membership Meeting held in Chicago on May 2–4, ARL Vice President/President-Elect Wendy Pradt Lougee, University of Minnesota, a member of the task force, emphasised that for research libraries in the 21st century, collections are still a core asset and the provisioning of content is still a core role, but ‘the context and strategies for decisions and investments are changing.’
According to the issue brief, in the new, fully networked context, libraries will need to collaborate on a greater scale in order to maintain the caliber of collections they once built for a primarily local constituency.
Carton Rogers, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, chairs the ARL Transforming Research Libraries Steering Committee, which originally requested the issue brief.
Engineers and technical experts association SAE International, US, has announced a new book that delves into engine failures and what causes them. ‘Engine Failure Analysis: Internal Combustion Engine Failures and Their Causes’ is a translation of a popular German reference work and sheds light on determining engine failure and remedies.
Authored by Ernst Greuter and Stefan Zima, the publication examines how engine components are designed and how they function, along with their physical and technical properties. The authors present a selection of engine failures, investigate and evaluate why they failed, and provide guidance on how to prevent such failures. A large range of possible engine failures is presented in a comprehensive, readily understandable manner, free of manufacturer bias. The scope of engines covered includes general-purpose engines found in heavy commercial vehicles, railway locomotives and vehicles, electrical generators, prime movers, and marine engines. Such engines are technical precursors to automotive engines.
This book is projected to be ideal for those who deal with engine failures - those who work in repair shops, shipyards, engineering consultancies, insurance companies and technical oversight organisations, as well as R&D departments at engine and component manufacturers. Researchers, academics, and students will learn how even the theoretically impossible can happen.
The latest edition of Blogspeak is now online. Featured are: Joseph Esposito (A Publisher’s Strategy for Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA)); Practical Ethics (Should Peer Review be Rejected?); Phil Davis (The Black Market for Facebook “Likes,” and What It Means for Citations and Alt-Metrics); and Elizabeth Marincola (STEM Education = Scientific Success). Blogspeak includes blog posts relevant to the publishing industry, particularly STM publishing. Subscribers are invited to participate in the latest edition of Blogspeak Here.
NFAIS webinar to discuss information behaviour of researchers of the future
Committee on Publication Ethics receives Council of Science Editors’ highest honour
Latest edition of Blogspeak now online