Non-profit copyright licensing solutions provider Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), US, is set to host a new Copyright Symposium - OnCopyright 2008. The event, scheduled for May 1, 2008, will bring together thought leaders and change agents to exchange ideas about where copyright is headed and what those changes mean for the future of written works, music, movies and other types of intellectual property.
The symposium will be organised around four themes - technology, society, law and the arts. The technology panel will focus on digital technologies that challenge established rules for content distribution and sharing. The panel focused on society will consider how these developments impact social norms and behaviours. The law panel will look at how copyright law can influence or be influenced by these developments, and the arts panel will feature writers and other artists discussing the significance of these trends to them.
Scheduled speakers include Michael Carroll, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law; Allan Adler, Vice President, Legal & Governmental Affairs, Association of American Publishers; Stanley Pierre-Louis, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Intellectual Property & Content Protection, Viacom Inc.; and Mark Tribe, Assistant Professor, Modern Culture & Media Studies, Brown University, among others.
Publisher linking services provider CrossRef, US, has announced an agreement with iParadigms, LLC to launch the CrossCheck service, which helps verify the originality of scholarly content. Following a recent pilot, the CrossCheck service is scheduled to go live in June. iParadigms is a provider of web-based solutions to check documents for originality and plagiarism.
CrossRef is partnering with iParadigms to offer its members - which includes scholarly and professional publishers - the opportunity to verify the originality of works submitted for publication using the iThenticate service. The service checks against a vast database of proprietary as well as open web content. Until now, according to the company, there was no automated way to check submissions against previous publications because the published literature had not been indexed and 'text fingerprinted' for this purpose.
The CrossCheck database will include the full-text journals of leading academic publishers, and is expected to grow rapidly over the coming months as CrossRef member publishers sign up for the service. It will be available to all CrossRef members who opt to contribute their content to the database. To use the service, publishers will need to integrate the checking tool into their editorial processes and develop suitable policies and guidelines. CrossRef is working with iParadigms, member publishers, and editorial system software producers on appropriate technical information and guidelines for CrossCheck.
US-based pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co. regularly prepared scientific studies by itself or farmed them out to medical publishing companies, it has been reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). According to the report, the company hired research scientists to claim authorship, even if their involvement was minimal. Merck is the manufacturer of Vioxx, a drug currently involved in several lawsuits.
Researchers of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reviewed nearly 250 documents relating to Vioxx. While some of these documents were studies published in the medical literature, others were court documents related to lawsuits involving the drug.
The investigators found that Merck employees frequently prepared manuscripts describing scientific research on Vioxx themselves and then recruited academically-affiliated research scientists to act as guest authors. Scientific papers that reviewed the data available to date on Vioxx were often planned by Merck marketing employees. The employees hired medical publishing companies to ghostwrite the articles, academically-affiliated researchers to guest author them, and dealt with the medical journals in which they were published. The scientists who acted as guest authors were paid for the service, but this was not always disclosed in the study.
The research emphasises the need for more ethical practices in the publishing of medical research. The authors recommend that academic researchers provide medical journals with information on everyone involved in preparing scientific manuscripts and that they fully disclose their relationship with drug manufacturers. It was recommended that collaborative oversight be used to maintain ethical standards.
The journal has called on all players - authors, journals, drug companies, regulators and the scientists who assess or 'peer-review' articles for medical journals - to address the problems.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently participated in a case study with Accucoms, a Netherlands-based provider of sales and marketing services to scholarly and society publishers. The case study, available at http://www.accucoms.com/about/AAP_AccucomsCaseStudy.pdf, illustrates how outsourcing sales, marketing and customer service functions has helped to fulfill AAP's mission to expand the reach of its content and improve children's health worldwide.
AAP signed an agreement with Accucoms to represent them in Europe in January
2007. The company serves as the point of contact for customer service issues in Europe. It is also responsible for generating new leads, organising free trials, representing AAP at industry events, delivering quotes, negotiating with consortia and working with other agents and distributors in the region. The Academy recently signed an agreement with Accucoms to cover Latin America as well.
Established in 2004, Accucoms caters to a global market. The company offers publishers worldwide a sales representation service that includes face-to-face selling, account management, representation at library events, telesales and local language marketing activities.
STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that it has added three new modules to Procedures Consult in orthopedics, anesthesia and emergency medicine. Procedures Consult is an online multimedia training and reference tool that helps physicians, medical residents and students prepare for, perform and test their knowledge of the most frequent medical procedures. The site currently contains 140 separate procedures including actual procedure videos, text and animation.
Other unique features include highlighted patient safety guidelines consistent with standards established by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
In addition to medical students and residents, other potential users of Procedures Consult include practicing physicians, physician assistants, certified registered nurse anesthetists, operating room nurses, advanced practice nurses and respiratory therapists. Healthcare organisations, including hospitals, medical groups and medical schools, can customise Procedures Consult to fit their needs. They can add procedure-specific alerts and links to organisational resources, such as informed consent forms, hospital standard procedures or patient education materials, while also monitoring physician test completion for credentialing compliance.
An open house event, where users can view the entire site for free, is available from April 15-May 15, 2008.
Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that the Universite du Quebec (UQ) has selected the Primo discovery and delivery solution to serve as the main portal for the libraries of eight of the university's constituents. Major factors in the university's choice of Primo were its flexible consortial functionality, one-stop search solution, and out-of-the-box multilingual support for all aspects of the system.
Primo is claimed to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles, and digital objects. It assists libraries in exposing the richness of their collections and engaging users with an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience. Primo services can be embedded in commonly used applications such as course management systems and institutional portals, enabling a library to meet the needs of users wherever they are.
The service will be hosted at the Universite du Quebeca Trois-Rivieres site.
Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, and the Orbis Cascade Alliance are working together to migrate the Alliance's Summit union catalogue to a consortial borrowing solution based on the integration of WorldCat.org, VDX, WorldCat Resource Sharing and a new circulation gateway. The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a consortium of academic institutions in Oregon and Washington.
The Alliance will implement a WorldCat Group Catalog with an interface based on WorldCat.org, one of the world's largest online databases for discovery of items in libraries. This union catalogue will present the 28-million-volume collections of the 35 Alliance member institutions at the top of results sets, followed by results from the rest of WorldCat. The migration of Summit to OCLC's consortial borrowing solution will include an immediate initiative to increase the accuracy and comprehensiveness of member library holdings in WorldCat and the implementation of a resource sharing system that combines the best of ILL and circulation capabilities and workflows.
Alliance member libraries also will have the option to implement WorldCat Local, a new service that combines the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries worldwide with the ability to customise WorldCat.org as a solution for local discovery and delivery services.
Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group has announced that its website, www.nature.com, is one of five websites shortlisted for Best Science Website of 2008 in the 12th Annual Webby Awards.
Hailed as the 'Oscars of the Internet' by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is a leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including websites, interactive advertising, online film & video, and mobile websites. The 12th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from over 60 countries.
Nature.com is eligible for two awards in the science category - The Webby Award and The People's Voice Award. The Webby Award winners are chosen by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a global organisation of industry experts and technology innovators. The People's Voice Award is decided by a popular vote. Voting is open to the public until May 1st at http://pv.webbyawards.com. The winners will be announced on May 6, 2008.
Nature.com serves almost 12 million visitors a month with over a million registered users, and is the gateway to NPG's broad offering of publications and services. The website provides access to all NPG publications including its flagship title Nature, the Nature research, Nature Reviews, and Nature Clinical Practice journals and a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications.
Through Nature.com, users can access news and features from Nature News and visit Naturejobs, NPG's careers information and science recruitment website. NPG launched Connotea, the document tagging and social bookmarking web site in 2003. Nature Network, NPG's social networking service connects scientists at a global and local level. The success of the weekly Nature Podcast has led to the construction of NPG's own in-house podcast studio. The site also hosts a number of NPG blogs, the preprint service Nature Precedings, and country-focussed portals such as Nature China and Nature India.
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