STM publisher Elsevier Australia recently launched Clinical Herbs - a new medical app for local students and practitioners alike. Offering an alternative to bulky textbooks, the Clinical Herbs app delivers a comprehensive herbal database directly to the user's iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.
Clinical Herbs claims to be the first resource of its kind - linking evidence-based Phytotherapy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic therapies and herbal monographs in an easily-searchable, illustrated database.
The app comprises 100 percent new content from eight highly-qualified expert contributors. Its scientific rigour and easy accessibility make it a valuable and convenient tool for health care professionals from a wide range of fields.
This handy app features the herbal therapeutics of an expansive list of medical conditions. Users can search by herb or by condition and add personal notes and bookmarks as they go. Each herbal monograph includes high-quality images as well as information on that herb's chemical constituents, pharmacological activities, clinical efficacy, dose form, dosage, side effects and precautions.
The clinical efficacy of all herbal therapies is ranked based on the Levels of Scientific Evidence defined by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), so users can be confident they can trust the content in Clinical Herbs.
Healthcare information provider Wolters Kluwer Health (WK Health), US, has announced that UpToDate, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, was featured in the current issue of the Global Public Health journal.
The article, Health care workers in Africa access a broad range of topics using evidence-based online medical information, was co-authored by Dr. Margaret L. McNairy, Dr. Alysse G Wurcel, Dr. Franklin Huang and Dr. Johanna P. Daily. The article investigates the relationship between access to evidence-based, online clinical resources and improvements in patient care in RLS. Clinicians in RLS can now access UpToDate by applying to the international grant subscription program on Global Health Delivery Online (GHDonline.org).
A total of 102 healthcare workers (HCW) were trained to use UpToDate across four hospitals in Africa. Of the 102, 64 completed a survey at the end of the program. The majority of users were doctors (63%), nurses (25%) or medical officers and/or students (12%). Ninety-six percent of users felt ‘very comfortable’ with English. The data suggests that the provision of evidence-based medical information resources via the Internet is feasible in RLS, is used for a broad variety of topics, and could improve providers' knowledge, clinical practice and potentially patient outcomes. The methodology also demonstrates that initial and regular training and support is needed for these resources to be fully used in RLS.
Four hospitals were chosen for this study based on their affiliation with the authors’ sponsoring institutions: two medical centers in Rwanda, one hospital in Malawi, and one hospital in South Africa. UpToDate provided unlimited, 24 hour free access to its knowledge system via the Internet and all hospitals had satellite or cable Internet access that was free for the clinical staff. The study began in January of 2009 and lasted 6 months.
ACM, which presents the A.M. Turing Award each year, the highest honor in computing and computer science, will join with the societies that confer two prestigious awards in mathematics to enable these laureates to interact with young researchers from around the world. In an annual forum initiated by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, ACM Turing Award winners as well as recipients of the Abel Prize and the Fields Medal will meet with a select group of highly talented young researchers. The meeting, to be known as the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, is modeled after the annual meetings of Nobel laureates in Lindau, Germany.
ACM Europe Council Chair Fabrizio Gagliardi lauded the opportunity for young researchers to come in contact with prominent innovators in computing. Gagliardi will represent ACM at a signing ceremony in Oslo, Norway on May 22 to officially create the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
The thematic focus of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum will alternate each year between mathematics and computer science. Recipients of the Abel Prize (from the Norwegian Academy for Science and Letters), the Fields Medal (from the International Mathematical Union), and the Turing Award will be invited. The first Heidelberg Forum is scheduled for September 2013, and the second is planned for September 2014. The meetings will be supported by a newly established foundation, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, to be created by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.
The ACM A.M Turing Award, widely considered the ‘Nobel Prize in Computing,’ carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th birthday anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners.
Online books retailer Amazon.com, Inc., US, and books distributor Independent Publisher's Guild (IPG) have reportedly announced an agreement. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move comes three months after Amazon pulled e-book titles off its site from clients of IPG over a dispute on terms.
Amazon’s actions in February came after negotiations between the online retailer and IPG over Amazon’s request for better terms and higher co-op broke down. Since late in 2011 Amazon has been meeting with publishers and distributors looking for, among other things, co-op on e-books.
IPG representatives had observed in February that if the distributor agreed to Amazon’s terms, its clients would not be able to make money selling Kindle titles.
Amazon believes that the investments it has made in the e-book market and the fact its terms have been in place for a significant amount of time warrant a better deal.
To give a boost to its publishers, IPG will not take a distribution fee on Kindle sales on titles sold from June 1 through August 31, 2012.
The impact of academic research has long been measured using citations, often with the Journal Impact Factor being used to assess individual publications within it, it has been observed. However, the Impact Factor is a journal level - not an article level - metric and, as academic publishing and the surrounding discussion move increasingly onto the web, novel opportunities to track and assess the impact of individual scientific publications have emerged.
These web-based approaches are starting to offer an article-level perspective of the way research is disseminated, discussed and integrated across the web. The hope is that a broader set of metrics to complement citations will eventually give a more comprehensive view of article impact, and help to make the most relevant and important publications discoverable to individuals, based on their interests.
Altmetric.com is seen as one of a growing number of web-based tools taking a novel approach to the assessment of scholarly impact – it aggregates the mentions on Twitter and social media sites, and coverage in online reference managers, mainstream news sources and blogs to present an overview of the interest a published article is receiving online.
To take impact factor to the article level, open access publisher BioMed Central has reportedly added the Altmetic.com 'donut' to the about page of published articles. The donut will display for articles receiving coverage which has been tracked by Altmetric.com, along with an article score.
The donut visualisation shown on the 'about this article' page aims to convey information about the type of attention the article has received - the colours surrounding it reflect the mix of sources. The link takes the reader to a summary of the activity surrounding the article, including a geographical breakdown of coverage on Twitter.
The addition of the donut is aimed to supplement BioMed’s existing article-level measures of impact – article accesses and citations are displayed on all 'about this article' pages, and links to Faculty of 1000 appear when articles are reviewed. Articles that have been especially highly accessed, relative to their age and the journal in which they were published, are awarded the highly accessed tag.
As more indicators of article performance, visibility and impact emerge, the hope is that authors, readers and funding institutions will be able to assess research impact in a way which is more informed than relying on Impact Factors alone. Research into the web based metrics or 'altmetrics' is a gathering pace, and as more data becomes available, so do attempts to tease apart the relationship between established and emerging measures of impact (high visibility of course does not mean high quality or citation count). BioMed plans to keep adding to this range of metrics and indicators as they continue to expose a fuller image of research impact.
Print and digital education materials provider Pearson has announced the acquisition of GlobalEnglish from its current ownership group for $90 million in cash. The transaction is subject to approval by GlobalEnglish’s shareholders.
Founded in 1997 in California, GlobalEnglish is a provider of cloud-based, on-demand Business English learning, assessment and performance support software. It serves more than 450 corporate customers, including 20 per cent of the Forbes Global 2000 companies, including General Electric, HSBC, Tata Consultancy Services and Unilever. Its product suite is uniquely suited to serve the needs of global professionals with a comprehensive offering – formal Business English learning coursework, informal and social learning capabilities, performance support tools, an enterprise collaboration platform, a mobile app, assessments and a premium one-on-one coaching service.
GlobalEnglish’s Business English content is focused on the application of Business English to real life business situations such as composing emails and participating in conference calls, and its efficacy is highly rated by global companies and their employees. About 75 percent of GlobalEnglish’s more than 200,000 active subscribers are in fast growing economies in Latin America and Asia.
The acquisition supports one of Pearson’s major priorities, which is to play a much bigger role in helping the two billion people around the world estimated to be learning English as a second or foreign language.
Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, presented the Open Access Advocate of the Year award at the recent 6th Annual Research Awards ceremony held at Emirates Stadium, UK. Dr Helena Asamoah-Hassan, University Librarian of the Kwame University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana and a Fellow of the Ghana Library Association was only the second individual winner of this award.
The award recognises institutions or individuals who have done the most to show leadership in taking steps to expand access to the published results of scholarly research.
Helena has been instrumental in creating the Open Access mandate at KNUST, ensuring they became BioMed Central's first Southern Foundation Member, and she has been tireless in her support for the Open Access Africa event, including acting as host for the OAA conference in 2011.
The latest edition of Blogspeak is now online. Featured are: Kent Anderson (Intellectual Access — It Takes More Than Accessibility); James Hartley (Titles are the hardest thing: How can we make them more effective?); Alok Jha (Text mining: what do publishers have against this hi-tech research tool?); InTechWeb (To know the importance of providing free access to taxpayer-funded research); and Martin Gardiner (Academic Inbreeding Alert). Blogspeak includes blog posts relevant to the publishing industry, particularly STM publishing. Subscribers are invited to participate in the latest edition of Blogspeak Here.
Elsevier Australia launches new medical app - Clinical Herbs 
Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate featured in current issue of the Global Public Health journal
Tools to assess research impact at the article level gaining ground
Latest edition of Blogspeak now online