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SPARC Europe signs agreement with Driver to jointly promote repositories - 09 Jul 2008
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Europe and European Digital Repository Research Infrastructure (Driver) have signed an agreement to work together for promoting repositories. The cooperation is seen to help progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories, in systems providing access to texts, data or other types of content. Driver is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. The programme relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories. SPARC Europe and Driver have expressed the shared vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a common, pan-European data and service infrastructure based on digital repositories. In recent years, research libraries have been pressed to improve scholarly communication by establishing digital repositories to expose institutional research outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, share and re-use are being built on the basis of institutional national and regional location, or by subject areas. Collaboration between SPARC Europe and Driver is framed by their joint support for an open access model for repositories in research institutions. They will present a common lobby at a national and international level to leverage change through the scholarly community within respective institutions and countries. Their reciprocal support is seen to ensure wider access to standards for interoperability between repositories, and the adoption of emerging technical standards to facilitate open archiving. The agreement is viewed as demonstrating their joint commitment to promote a European network of repositories offering access to research outputs across institutional and national boundaries. SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with US-based SPARC, which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America.
Australian universities join SCOAP3 to promote open access in particle physics research - 09 Jul 2008
Australia has joined SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), an international consortium that aims to provide free access to major particle physics journals worldwide. Six of the Group of Eight universities in Australia have agreed to participate in the consortium. These include Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian National University. The partnership will be coordinated by the University of Melbourne. SCOAP3 members include high-energy physics funding agencies and laboratories, national and international libraries and library consortiums. They represent the US, 12 countries in Europe and the multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) - and now, Australia. With the accession of Australia, SCOAP3 has received pledges for one-third of its budget. Once it is fully subscribed, SCOAP3 will make a tender offer to the current publishers of high-energy physics journals. The publishers would be guaranteed operating money to cover the cost of editorial work. In return, the publishers would make the journals freely available. With increasingly powerful IT and communication technologies, the pace of discovery in high-energy physics has increased immensely. Communication among researchers occurs mainly through arXiv.org, an open access repository of working papers and pre-print versions of articles. With arXiv, researchers can learn about new discoveries within 24 hours. However, the top refereed journals remain essential to the scholarly communication process. The peer-review process helps to ensure the quality of published scholarly work. A small number of the journals are used in measuring research performance. SCOAP3 partners hope to ensure that the top peer-reviewed journals maintain their integrity while remaining financially viable. Each SCOAP3 member country will contribute according to its share of high-energy physics publishing. Allowances are made for developing countries that are unable to pay their share. SCOAP3 members include: CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Swedish National Library, Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, several German institutions including the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron and the Max Planck Society, University of California, Fermilab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and California Institute of Technology.
Nature Publishing Group announces free service to archive on behalf of authors - 09 Jul 2008
Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, is initiating a free service to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates. The service, slated for launch later this year, will initially be open to authors publishing original research articles in Nature, the Nature research titles and the clinical research section of Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine. NPG will then extend the service to society and academic journals in its portfolio that wish to participate. The publisher has encouraged self-archiving, including in PubMed Central, since 2005. Later this year, NPG will begin depositing authors' accepted manuscripts with PubMed Central (PMC) and UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), meeting the requirements for authors funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and a number of other major funders in the US, the UK and Canada who mandate deposition in either PMC or UKPMC. NPG hopes to extend the service to other archives and repositories in future. For eligible authors who opt-in during the submission process, NPG will deposit the accepted version of the author's manuscript on acceptance, setting a public release date of 6-months post-publication. There will be no charge to authors or funders for the service.
Collexis Holdings, JISC Collections agreement to help widen access to essential biomedical research in the UK - 09 Jul 2008
Knowledge management and discovery software developer Collexis Holdings, Inc., US, has announced an agreement with JISC Collections for an online resource, which aims to encourage greater collaboration and expand scientific knowledge amongst the biomedical research community in the UK. Under the deal, teaching staff and students at universities and research councils in the UK will now be able to access Collexis' Expert Profiling for a specially negotiated subscription fee. Expert Profiling enables users to quickly identify experts within their institution as well as identify, locate and collaborate with other experts from around the world. Using the Collexis system, subscribing institutions can create expert profiles of investigators, researchers and departments to disseminate ground-breaking research and biomedical advances. These profiles are generated using researchers' publications from a variety of sources. Profiles are then available to all researchers, allowing them to easily find what is being published, what researchers are active and the pace of research in a particular area of interest. In addition to the new agreement with JISC Collections, Collexis Holdings Inc. is bringing its innovative technology to other research organisations and universities worldwide, including the Mayo Clinic Libraries; Johns Hopkins University; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the University of California, San Francisco; the University of South Carolina; Bristol-Myers Squibb; Lockheed Martin; World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health; and U.S. Department of Defense.
Springer publishes 5,000th volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science - 09 Jul 2008
STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced the publication of the 5,000th volume in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). The series provides scientifically reliable information on computer science in about 200,000 articles. LNCS claims to be one of the world's most authoritative computer science research forums, spanning all areas of computer science and information technology research and development. Since it was established in 1973, LNCS has provided the computer science community with a continuous flow of cutting-edge developments in the field. Initially launched as a series focusing on theoretical computer science and research advances in Europe, LNCS has evolved into the renowned broad cover-age international publication platform it is today. The majority of the volumes are conference proceedings. LNCS publishes original scientific results from all areas of computer science and information technology, including related interdisciplinary application fields such as bioinformatics and telecommunications. Offering a digital library with roughly 200,000 articles, LNCS is the most popular item on the electronic platform SpringerLink. Abstracts and tables of contents can be accessed through SpringerLink free of charge. All content is indexed and can be accessed immediately using the search functions.
Swets launches latest technical update to its SwetsWise portfolio - 09 Jul 2008
Subscription services provider Swets, Netherlands, has announced the launch of SwetsWise - Release 5.1, the latest technical update to its pioneering SwetsWise portfolio of products and services. Release 5.1 implements a whole host of additional features and functionalities into SwetsWise Subscriptions, the core focus of the SwetsWise portfolio. The main feature of SwetsWise 5.1 is the inclusion of the bulk renewal functionality. This new feature will allow the customer to manage their entire renewal process online, following existing renewal workflows and procedures, while reducing the amount of work they have to invest in this process. It will also provide the customer with the information they need to stay in complete control of the status of all their renewal subscriptions, including cancellation restrictions and upgrade options. Other main features of Release 5.1 include cancellation restrictions tracking; improved alerting capabilities; and Shibboleth authentication support. A complete list of all the features, functionalities and technical updates included in SwetsWise Release 5.1 has also been made available for customers inside the SwetsWise platform.
More BioMed Central journals chosen for inclusion in MEDLINE and CABI - 09 Jul 2008
Open access publisher BioMed Central, US, has announced that three of its journals have recently been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE. The journals - Biology Direct, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery and Neural Development - were accepted following review by the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee, an NIH-chartered advisory committee of external experts. MEDLINE is a bibliographic database containing over 15 million journal article citations, with a concentration on biomedicine. It contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 5,000 biomedical journals published in the US and 80 other countries, and is searchable for free using PubMed at http://pubmed.gov. In addition, five BioMed Central titles have been added to CABI for inclusion in their Global Health and CAB Abstracts databases. The journals are: AIDS Research and Therapy; BMC Immunology; BMC Systems Biology; Cough; and Infectious Agents & Cancer.
Attention Subscribers - Benefit now from the Content atomisation initiative from Knowledgespeak - 09 Jul 2008
Knowledgespeak is planning to atomise its content. A preliminary but significant initiative has already been taken in this direction. For an internationally esteemed association, we have repackaged and categorised our news under various topics to suit the information needs of its members. We are exploring other possibilities of bringing a granular dimension to our content that we believe can help us reach a wider audience, such as providing RSS feeds categorised into various topics of interest. Readers are invited to discuss mutually beneficial methods and possibilities of atomising such content, as we firmly believe this can help all of us in serving a better value proposition to our users. Please contact us at scope@scopeknowledge.com with your thoughts and for further discussions in this direction.
