Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, and the creators of the readers’ advisory service, NoveList have announced the launch of LibraryAware, a new online marketing programme designed to meet the growing needs of libraries to create, deliver and measure promotional messages that extend outreach into communities and bring patrons into libraries.
LibraryAware equips librarians with expert tools to reach out to patrons and help them discover the programmes, products and services libraries have to offer. Librarians can combine professionally-designed templates with their own pieces of ‘reusable content’ to carry information across an entire suite of promotional materials that can then easily be delivered to customers, community partners, elected officials and the media.
LibraryAware improves upon what libraries are already doing by providing continually-updated designs and best practice recommendations as well as a way to integrate messaging easily into popular event software and social media.
With the inclusion of hundreds of images and photographs from Getty Images, creators and distributors of still imagery, video and multimedia products, LibraryAware offers access to professional-grade art that library staff can use alongside their own locally-held collection of images. More than clip art, these images are hand-selected by the LibraryAware team of marketing professionals to address the particular communications and publicity requirements of libraries. As part of its commitment to libraries’ success, LibraryAware will continually add to the image collection based on subscriber feedback.
LibraryAware is available as a subscription service to libraries. Uses for the LibraryAware programme include a full range of marketing and communication channels including email blasts, e-newsletters, flyers, bookmarks, brochures, website inserts, letters, invitations, and social media.
The Intellectual Property and Science division of Thomson Reuters, US, has announced that Inova Software has joined its Partner Ecosystem for Life Sciences programme. Partner Ecosystem is projected as an exclusive group of organisations focused on meeting the business needs of joint customers by working together to provide tightly integrated solutions.
Inova’s life sciences customers are seen to rely on its innovation management software to help identify and evaluate partnership and acquisition opportunities. Using Thomson Reuters Cortellis for Informatics application programming interfaces (APIs), Inova will make information about drugs, companies, patents and comparable partnering deals available directly in its platform to customers who have licensed the Inova Partner or Explore software and Thomson Reuters Cortellis.
The Cortellis for Informatics APIs are said to enhance the pharma R&D and partnering processes by delivering real-time access to powerful information and tools for biopharmaceutical competitive intelligence, drug pipeline and drug research and development.
Inova’s software is reportedly used by more than 30 percent of the Big 50 pharmaceutical companies’ business development and licensing units. Those same companies are also seen to use Thomson Reuters intelligence, but until now have had to rely on largely manual processes to integrate the content between the two systems.
The Thomson Reuters Partner Ecosystem for Life Sciences is stated to be an exclusive group focused on meeting the business needs of customers, where each partner brings its own unique expertise to the life sciences industry. For more information, visit cortellis.thomsonreuters.com/partners
STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the appointment of Professor Ted Abel of the University of Pennsylvania as the new Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. He succeeds Professor John Guzowski of the University of California at Irvine.
Professor Abel will work to increase the presence of the journal, build its reputation as the place to publish important findings in a timely fashion and expand its coverage in two areas - the cognitive and systems neuroscience of memory and the molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory.
Professor Abel is the Brush Family Professor of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Co-Director of the Biological Basis of Behavior Program and Director of an NIMH-funded pre-doctoral training program in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. He has received numerous awards, including the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research, a John Merck Scholars Award, a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and the Daniel X. Freedman Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD).
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory provides a forum for developing and nurturing an international community of scholars and practitioners who are interested in all aspects of the neurobiology of learning and memory. The journal welcomes high quality articles that contribute to the full range of research on neural and behavioral plasticity, including learning and memory and related aspects of neural adaptation, at all levels of analysis from molecular biology to behaviour. Research areas include all areas of the neurobiology of learning and memory.
STM publisher Springer and Tsinghua University Press will jointly publish the new SpringerOpen journal, Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC). This new international journal claims to be the only English-language ceramics journal based in China, fully sponsored by the State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing at Tsinghua University. Articles are now available online on www.springerlink.com.
JAC is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the timely publication of new results and significant findings of theoretical and experimental studies related to the structure, processing, properties and applications of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. The journal publishes research papers, rapid communications and review articles, which are submitted by scientists from the international research community.
Professor Longtu Li from the Chinese Academy of Engineering serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. He will be supported by an international advisory board made up of accomplished ceramics scientists.
Knovel, provider of a superior cloud-based application integrating technical information with analytical and search tools, has announced the creation of its Technology Advisory Board. Filled with NYC-based technologists, the Board will help Knovel continue to provide engineers with the most advanced technology for identifying and accessing content resources.
Knovel’s Technology Advisory Board members, selected based on technology leadership, offer diverse perspectives on trends related to business models, technology systems and building technology teams. Members will advise Knovel on decisions related to the product roadmap, specifically focusing on integrating new technical elements into Knovel’s platform.
The Technology Advisory Board’s initial members include Andy Parsons, Co-founder and CEO, Happify; Harish R. Rao, Founder and Principal, Interpersonal Frequency, LLC; and George Weiner, CTO, DoSomething.org. The members have experience building technology companies and developing advanced social networking strategies. Together they will offer insight and advice as Knovel enhances its technology and creates new product offerings.
IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), the standards development arm of IEEE, has announced the appointment of Srikanth Chandrasekaran as Senior Regional Program Manager, India. In this strategic role, Sri will drive all of the standards related initiatives and programmes in India.
The appointment of a senior industry professional to drive Standards is in line with the increasing commitment of IEEE-SA to the Indian market. Attached to IEEE India office in Bangalore, Sri will continue to chair the IEEE-SA India SIG (Standards Interest Group). One of the key focus areas for Sri would be forging strategic partnerships in the region with government institutions, academic, corporate sectors and other relevant stakeholders important to the standards development activity in India.
Prior to joining IEEE, Sri was with Freescale Semiconductors (formerly Motorola Inc.) as part of its Technology Solutions Organization for 17 years, focusing on development of internal tools and methodologies used by hardware designers. As chairperson of IEEE-SA India SIG (initiated by the IEEE Standards Association and the IEEE Bangalore section), Sri over the past year was involved in enabling participation and contribution to standards development activities through focus groups aligned to areas like Smart Grid, Cloud etc. among others.
Academic publisher Cambridge University Press has announced that it will become the new home of Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) from January 2013.
PASA publishes new and significant research in astronomy and astrophysics. It covers a wide range of topics within astronomy, including multi-wavelength observations, theoretical modelling, computational astronomy and visualisation. It also maintains its heritage of publishing results on southern hemisphere astronomy and on astronomy with Australian facilities.
An official publication of the Astronomical Society of Australia, PASA publishes research papers, review papers and special series on topical issues, making use of expert international reviewers and an experienced Editorial Board. As an online-only journal, it publishes article by article, ensuring rapid publication on Cambridge's publishing platform, Cambridge Journals Online (journals.cambridge.org/pas). This platform includes increased usability, added functionality and many new features to enhance and optimise article discovery and usage.
Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, and BGI, one of the world’s largest genomics institutes, have announced the launch of GigaScience, a new open access, open data journal with a scope that embraces all life science research that generates ‘big data’.
This launch is a major first step towards the open access publication of complete, reproducible accounts of all parts of data-intensive scientific research projects. Together GigaScience and its integrated database GigaDB provide scientific analyses, full dataset hosting, and access to the software tools used to conduct these analyses, along with publication of more traditional scientific articles describing the studies.
Having all these together finally allows readers to not only glean the scientific conclusions in the papers, but also to directly test these using the underlying data and analysis tools. In this way, the new journal seeks to help overcome the growing problem of the lack of reproducibility of research.
GigaScience publications also include Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) for all datasets in the journal database, GigaDB. This helps make datasets more permanent, as well as fully track-able, discoverable, linkable, and citable, which traditionally has only been possible for journal articles. Citation enables scientists, who generate these enormous datasets and share them with the community, to gain more appropriate credit for their contributions to research.
In addition to this innovative, big-data-driven publication format the journal also provides reviews and commentaries that address the many hurdles that still need to be surmounted to improve future big-data handling.
BioMed Central and the GigaScience editors will be marking the journal’s launch at the ISMB conference (booth number 36), scheduled for July 15-17, 2012.
Biomedical publisher Karger Publishers, Switzerland, has released a book titled Alzheimer's Disease - Modernizing Concept, Biological Diagnosis and Therapy. The book seeks to address the need for effective early diagnosis and therapy. It is edited by Dr. Maria Carrillo, Senior Director of Medical and Scientific Relations at the Alzheimer’s Association, and Prof. Harald Hampel, MD, MSc, chair of Psychiatry, at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
The book aims to outline the current knowledge as well as future perspectives on Alzheimer's disease as a decade-long continuum with the goal of advancing early detection, diagnosis and effective disease-modifying therapeutic interventions in individuals throughout all stages of the disease.
The book is said to underscore intense worldwide efforts to enable earlier, more precise diagnosis and interventions to counter and prevent the neurodegenerative disease. In this volume, various experts discuss emerging and novel conceptual models of Alzheimer's disease and advances in the development of surrogate markers that will improve the accuracy of diagnostic technologies.
The book explains the importance of recognising the worldwide Alzheimer's disease situation and ever-growing epidemiology, and outlines how current biological markers are auspiciously modernising diagnosis. It highlights both current research on biomarkers and efforts to validate technologies for early and accurate detection, therapy and prevention. The latest in the Karger series “Advances in Biological Psychiatry”, the title is available in print and online at www.karger.com and other booksellers.
Carrillo and Hampel will discuss their work and answer questions at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) in Vancouver on July 17.
Journal supply chain support provider Ringgold Inc has announced that it is launching a new tool to help publishers assess the extent to which their institutional customer data is supporting the development of successful sales strategies. The Ringgold Challenge is a 15-question survey covering critical areas of business intelligence such as market penetration, sales growth and cancellations. It is designed to be taken by sales, marketing, customer service, technology and executive staff within scholarly and professional publishers, publishing societies and related content or service providers.
Participants in The Ringgold Challenge do not need an existing relationship with Ringgold; a $1 charity donation will be made for each participant. The Ringgold Challenge takes about 10 minutes and provides the participant with a Ringgold score to help them understand how their organisation's customer data management rates against proposed best practice. Survey participants that provide contact details will then receive a report of anonymised findings to help them benchmark themselves against other organisations, and to assess the pace of the industry's progress towards common practices. A summary report will also be made publicly available.
The Ringgold Challenge will be repeated in future years to reveal trends and enable participating organisations to assess their own progress as well as that of their peers and competitors. The Ringgold Challenge is free, and there's no limit to the number of staff from any organisation that can participate. To take the survey, visit http://bit.ly/Ne91Pk.
EBSCO Publishing and NoveList launch online marketing tool to help libraries create, deliver and measure promotional campaigns 
Elsevier appoints Prof. Ted Abel as new Editor-In-Chief of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 
Springer and Tsinghua University Press launch new open access journal 
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia joins Cambridge's list of astronomy publications
Karger Publishers releases book on Alzheimer's diagnosis and therapy