STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of CiteAlert, a new free automated service to notify authors when their articles are cited in an Elsevier journal.

CiteAlert was piloted one year ago, and after carrying out extensive research and user testing, this new user-friendly service is now in use. It automatically notifies authors by e-mail soon after their work is referenced in a newly published article in an Elsevier journal. Authors are eligible to receive CiteAlert notifications if their article has been indexed by Scopus, the largest citation database of research literature.

Weekly CiteAlert notifications are sent to authors of cited articles. Notifications include single cited articles or articles which have been highly cited. Some very popular articles are cited up to 50 times a week. Cited authors benefit as their research is recognised by others in their area of research. In retrospect, focus is given to the citing author and their written article. Self-citations are not included.

During the pilot, 50 percent of the citing authors indicated that the research described in the citing article was new to them and relevant in their research. Since its launch, reactions received from authors have been positive.

Media industry forecast and analysis firm Simba Information has released a new strategic market report, according to which, the overall growth in scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing fell a point and half to 3.8 percent in 2008 to approach $16 billion. The report provides an overview and financial outlook for the global STM publishing market based on specific research and analysis of the leading competitors and market performance in six content delivery categories. It also includes detailed profiles of leading STM publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Thomson and Wolters Kluwer.

The transition from print to electronic publishing has given STM publishers two ways to fuel revenue growth and the market leaders have taken advantage. Traditional models remain viable while publishers generate new revenue from the demand for tools to search, index, link, cite and manage the vast amounts of electronic information now available to researchers and clinical professionals.

According to the report, the Online Services/Abstract & Indexing segment grew fastest compared to the other content delivery segments in 2008. Online/A&I grew 6.1 percent to $2.97 billion in the STM market. Publishers touted the demand for workflow solutions and many have aggressively reorganised their operations to meet it. Medical publishing grew at a compound annual growth rate of 4.1 percent between 2006 and 2008, but growth dipped near the end of the period. It is expected that medical publishing will continue to slow due to the severe economic slump and its impact on advertising, a medical publishing revenue stream that had begun to weaken in 2007.

This research was conducted in conjunction with a larger study of the overall market for professional publishing, the results of which are published in the associated reports "Global Legal & Business Publishing 2008-2009" and "Global Professional Publishing 2008-2009."

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Digital Repository Issues Task Force has released its final report. The task force was charged with evaluating trends, contextualising repository activities among ARL libraries, and recommending leadership roles and activities for ARL.

The report, ‘The Research Library’s Role in Digital Repository Services’, identifies key issues surrounding repository development; explores common strategies that libraries are using; analyses relevant environmental trends; discusses issues where ARL and its member libraries should focus attention; and recommends actions for research libraries to undertake.

The report focuses on repository services generally, rather than concentrating on repository technologies or content. Repository services include services to authors, contributors and users, particularly of university-created content. Some examples of repository services provided by research libraries include long-term archiving and migration of content, dissemination and access management, metadata and format management, search and discovery tools, publishing and data mining. Illustrations drawn from a variety of digital repositories are used throughout the report.

The task force notes that, due to repository services’ powerful potential to enable key work and enhance the effectiveness of functions across the research enterprise, research institutions cannot afford to do without such services, even in difficult economic times. Researchers and scholars with access to a spectrum of repository services possess a substantial advantage in conducting cutting-edge research, delivering high-quality teaching and contributing valuable services to society. Libraries have key strengths and missions requiring them to undertake various roles in repository service development. This report seeks to present a fresh perspective on the digital repository environment and is intended to inspire ARL member libraries and others to assess their views and plans for service development.

The report is available for free at the ARL website http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/repository-services-report.pdf.

Biomedical IT/text-mining company Bioalma, Spain, has reportedly launched a free search tool called novo|seek for the PubMed literature database. The company claims that the new tool provides intelligent search functionalities to help life scientists guide and refine their searches of biomedical literature.

novo|seek is projected as a ‘dynamic information extraction system’ for searching biomedical records in repositories, particularly PubMed. The tool indexes the biomedical literature in PubMed and enables researchers to find relevant results efficiently by using external sources of data and contextual term information. It provides familiar chronological listings of search results, but a sidebar presents a series of additional related terms based on relevancy, allowing researchers to drill down and refine additional queries.

Bioalma downloads and indexes 18 million documents in Medline each day. That information is then put into the company’s own database using the open-source Lucene search engine library. While the company believes that novo|seek will help introduce its other products to a broader audience, it also hopes to generate revenue by selling online advertising through Google ads, targeting companies selling reagents or equipment.

The first release of novo|seek focuses on PubMed, but in time Bioalma plans to integrate additional resources, such as grant information and full-text search.

The WorldWideScience Alliance has announced that it will hold its Annual Meeting in Paris, France, on March 1, 2009. The meeting is being held in conjunction with the winter meeting of its primary sponsor, the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI).

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information offers a unique forum for interaction between organisations that create, disseminate and use scientific and technical information. ICSTI's 2009 Winter Meeting will be held in Paris from February 28 – March 2. This year the meeting does not require attendees to pay a registration fee.

The WorldWideScience Alliance is the governing body for the (http://worldwidescience.org) web site. The website searches over 50 scientific and technical databases and portals from nearly 60 countries. Officially formed in June 2008, the Alliance recently welcomed its latest member, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC).

Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced the launch of a new journal - Gut Pathogens. This brings the number of journals published by BioMed Central to a total of 200, covering a broad range of subjects in biology and medicine. Niyaz Ahmed, Francis Megraud and Leonardo Sechi will serve as the Editors-in-Chief of the journal. They will be supported by an internationally renowned Editorial Board.

Gut Pathogens will publish articles on all aspects of the biology and pathogenesis of bacterial, parasitic and viral infections of the gut, including their diagnosis and clinical management. The journal is the official journal of The International Society for Genomic and Evolutionary Microbiology (ISOGEM).

All articles published in the journal will be archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

Subscription services provider Swets, Netherlands, has announced that it recently signed an exclusive three year contract with the Chinese JALIS consortium for the delivery and support of a full eAccess solution for the universities in the Jiangsu province.

Under the deal, Swets will provide a suite of SwetsWise eAccess services to all JALIS member institutions that will give their end-users an efficient and intuitive solution for searching, browsing and accessing their catalogue of titles. With direct links to full content, this tailor-made suite of services will allow end-users to get to the information they need in the most straightforward and hassle free manner.

With clients in over 160 countries and more than twenty offices worldwide, Swets claims to provide the most comprehensive and sophisticated e-commerce platform currently available in its field. The company has been included in E-Content Magazine's ‘100 companies that matter most in the Digital Content Industry’ for the past five years.

Knowledge management and discovery software developer Collexis Holdings, Inc., US, announced that Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has put the institution’s Collexis Expertise Portal online (http://www.institutionaldashboard.collexis.com/jhu). The portal is a public website where individuals can search, sort, or view compiled views of the research conducted by JHU and its faculty. JHU is the first institution to allow public access to Collexis Expertise Profiles.

The Collexis approach has become popular with research intensive institutions like the National Institutes of Health that want to have a complete system to identify potential partnerships, translational research projects, or other unique connections between research experts. To date, most institutions have limited their systems to internal collaborations. Johns Hopkins University has elected to give public access to help promote relationships and translational research with other partnering institutions in the public and private sector. JHU has also contracted with Collexis for an ongoing search engine optimisation project designed to make Johns Hopkins researchers more widely read and identified online through search engines like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.

Collexis develops applications that range from search tools for users' websites to highly sophisticated discovery applications that are utilised by the intelligence community and R&D organisations worldwide. These applications allow users to identify and search for documents, experts, trends or new discoveries that may be hidden in the materials.

The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced the August 2009 launch of the new JISC Services Management Company. The move is part of JISC’s ongoing strategy to deliver world-class services to the further and higher education sector. Guy Lambert has been appointed as the new managing director to lead this new company.

Lambert recently worked for the FCO during a major change initiative, when its services business, reconstituted as a Trading Fund, helping it to develop a commercial approach to business management within a set of traditional core values.

He has spent his career in commercial and managerial roles at UK board level within the IT industry, both within the public and private sectors. His roles with Honeywell, Bull, Steria and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have all involved managing operational improvement programmes and cultural change alongside delivery of a variety of services to clients.

Database and research services provider Scope eKnowledge Center, India, a Quatrro Group Company, has achieved the milestone of delivering the 1 millionth abstract of patent documents for a major information and business intelligence provider. Further, the company recently met an additional client need by adding the capability to abstract non-English language patent documents, including French, German, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Scope launched its patent abstraction services in 2003, processing 150 abstracts per week. It has successfully scaled its capability to more than 15,000 patents per week, with drastically reduced turnaround time. The company has a large pool of highly experienced and trained engineers across major engineering domains, including Mechanical, Electrical & Electronics, Communication & Computers, Semiconductors, Instrumentation, Transportation and Industrial Engineering, who partner with well qualified English language editors to deliver the final product.

Scope provides content and knowledge services, including document abstracting and indexing, in other domains including all branches of chemistry, pharmaceuticals, business, and healthcare. The company is uniquely positioned to offer accurate and high value added services through an optimal mix of technology, subject matter/domain expertise and the use of proprietary knowledge repositories and processes.

Led by an experienced management team, Scope eKnowledge Center offers a range of remote knowledge services. This includes business research, scientific and technical databases, abstraction and indexing, patent drafting, patent analytics and business and competitive intelligence. The Company’s capabilities were further strengthened after the Quatrro group, one of the largest BPO companies in India, took a majority stake in April 2007. With offices in New York, Florida, Amsterdam, London and Chennai, Scope’s clientele include leading print and online publishing companies, patent offices, corporate organisations, legal firms and a host of information intermediaries in the US, UK and Europe.

The British Library is hosting a digital conference called the Digital Lives Research Conference at the British Library in London February 9-11, 2009. The event, hosted by the Digital Lives Research Project and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, will examine how libraries and archives can support individuals who wish to organise, preserve and transfer their personal digital archives.

On February 11, virtual delegates can join the conference on the Elucian Islands, the Second Life home of Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Publishers. The programme for the day focuses on the web, and is oriented towards life online and online lives. Topics range from virtual worlds and iScience to cloud computing. Speakers include Dame Wendy Hall DBE and Nature Publishing Group's Timo Hannay. The day finishes with polar explorer Ben Saunders talking about 'Digital Life at the Extremes'.

The conference is free to attend on February 9 and 11, registration is required as space is limited. There is a registration fee of £35 for February 10, but waivers are available. Interested parties can register at http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/conference.html.

The Digital Lives Research Conference takes advantage of the Elucian Islands meeting and conference facilities for science groups, universities and businesses. The Elucian Islands promote communication and collaboration by providing a fully functional virtual conference facility, with practical and technical support available.

Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press (OUP), UK, and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) have announced a publishing partnership for the journal - European Journal of Heart Failure. The journal is the fifth title from the ESC Journal Family to join Oxford Journals. The journal is published 12 times a year and will be freely available online for the first three months of 2009.

The European Journal of Heart Failure, published on behalf of the Heart Failure Association of the ESC, seeks to advance knowledge in the field of heart failure management. The journal publishes original articles, short reports, reviews and editorials on molecular and cellular biology, pathology, electrophysiology, and pharmacology, as well as the clinical, social, and population sciences.

As a result of this partnership, authors will benefit from manuscript sharing within the ESC Journal Family during the review process and also faster production times of under 4 weeks. The European Journal of Heart Failure offers optional open access through the Oxford Open initiative, which allows authors to pay for their research to be freely available online immediately at point of publication.

Medical journal, the Medscape Journal of Medicine (MJM), owned by WebMD, will not publish new papers hence forth, it has been reported. The announcement was made by Editor-in-Chief George Lundberg and colleagues. MJM believes it can provide the most value to its members by focusing on its role as an aggregator and interpreter of medical information and not as the primary source for original scientific articles. The journal’s archives will remain live at Medscape.

Established in 1999, MJM was among the first open access medical journals to be published. It published original research, video commentaries and even letters "to help clean up the messes” made by other medical journals.

MJM started publication before BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS). But unlike BMC and PLoS, MJM did not charge author or publication fees, which is generally paid out of research grants, and are waived for those in developing countries.

Library management systems provider Talis, UK, has announced a partnership with LibLime, a leading provider of open solutions for libraries. Under the deal, over five million bibliographic records will now be made available to the library community on LibLime's ‡biblios.net platform.

The ‡biblios.net is a free browser-based cataloguing service with a data store containing over thirty-million records. The database is maintained by ‡biblios.net and uses a similar model to Wikipedia. Cataloguers can use and contribute to the database without restrictions because the records are freely-licensed under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (http://biblios.net/pddl).

Talis is providing data from the Talis Union Catalogue, the open shared core of records from the Talis Base service, to ‡biblios.net. This includes over 5 million bibliographic records, catalogued by public and academic libraries in the UK over the last 30 years. The Talis Union Catalogue further complements the existing ‡biblios.net database. The sharing principles of Talis Base, established over the years, are now being supplemented by reciprocal sharing with other open sources such as ‡biblios.net.

Academic publisher Maney Publishing, UK, recently celebrated 25 years of publication of two leading journals - Materials Science and Technology and Surface Engineering. The journals are published by Maney on behalf of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3).

Materials Science and Technology publishes refereed contributions covering both fundamental and technological aspects of the properties, characterisation and modelling, processing, and fabrication of engineering materials. The journal has a particular interest in the continuum from understanding and modelling of process routes leading to the generation of microstructure, through characterisation, understanding and modelling of how microstructure is controlled and manipulated, to the modelling, control and prediction of relevant engineering properties.

Surface Engineering provides a forum for the publication of international, peer reviewed material on this important enabling technology. The journal embraces science, technology, engineering and design aspects of the use of surface engineering to produce cost-effective substrate-surface systems having functional, mechanical, tribological and/or chemical properties that cannot be achieved from the individual components alone. Coverage includes, inter alia, design, surface modification technologies and process control, and the characterisation and properties of the system or component, including quality control and non-destructive examination.

Information services provider McGraw-Hill Companies, US, has announced the appointment of D. Edward (Ted) Smyth as executive vice president, Corporate Affairs and executive assistant to the chairman, president and chief executive officer of The McGraw-Hill Companies, effective February 16, 2009. He succeeds David Stafford who will rejoin the Corporation's Legal Department as vice president and associate general counsel.

In his new position, Smyth will be responsible for the marketing, communications, government affairs and community relations activities of the Corporation. Also, he will advise the chairman on matters involving the Board of Directors and the management and operation of the Corporation.

Founded in 1888, The McGraw-Hill Companies is a leading global information services provider meeting worldwide needs in the financial services, education and business information markets through leading brands such as Standard & Poor's, McGraw-Hill Education, BusinessWeek and J.D. Power and Associates. The Corporation has more than 280 offices in 40 countries.

Scientific and medical information resources provider McGraw-Hill Professional, US, and medical journal JAMA have announced the joint development and launch of a new state-of-the-art digital resource, JAMAevidence (http://www.jamaevidence.com). Updated monthly, the learning tool is designed to meet the needs of students, educators, and practitioners alike.

JAMAevidence provides medical students, residents, educators, and clinicians with the fundamental tools required for understanding and applying the medical literature and making clinical diagnoses. It provides full-text access to both the second edition of The User's Guides to the Medical Literature and the newly published The Rational Clinical Examination. In JAMAevidence these titles are combined with online-only content, updates, teaching tools, media, and interactive features to convey the best practices of evidence-based medicine - including the careful assessment and interpretation of medical research, as well as the application of that research to ensure the optimal care of the patient.

The online Education Guides enhance classroom and conference learning by offering detailed presentations on core topics in evidence-based medicine. The Education Guides are available to subscribers as both online slideshows and downloadable PowerPoint presentations. Interactive worksheets enable users to hone their critical appraisal skills and master the information cycle, while question wizards assist in formulating well-built clinical queries. Functional calculators and nomograms, organised by therapy, harm, diagnosis, and prognosis, provide evidence tools for use in daily practice. Finally, new podcasts are posted each month, bringing analysis and commentary from leaders in evidence-based medicine directly to users.

Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, has announced the online launch of the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs). The WIREs are unique hybrid publications that combine powerful features of review journals and online reference works, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in research and education. The individual WIREs titles will cover a broad range of topics across the life, physical, clinical, and social sciences.

The WIREs publications focus on high-profile research areas at the interfaces of the traditional disciplines. Content for each WIRE is selected, invited, and reviewed by an internationally renowned Editorial Board, ensuring that the highest scientific and presentational standards are maintained. Coverage is carefully crafted to provide an encyclopedic coverage of the field. New and updated reviews will be added every month, ensuring that the most current information in the field is always available. Reviews are structured and consistently formatted, maximising the accessibility and utility of the content to the user.

Each WIREs title will initially be made available via complimentary online access to universities, businesses, libraries and other institutions.

Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced that the eight Nature Clinical Practice journals will be rebranded Nature Reviews, effective April 2009, increasing the size of the Nature Reviews portfolio from seven to fifteen titles. Launched in 2004 and 2005, the Nature Clinical Practice journals cover the fields of cardiology, clinical oncology, endocrinology, gastroenterology & hepatology, nephrology, neurology, rheumatology and urology.

Alongside the name change, the Nature Clinical Practice journals will be given a 'facelift' in print and online. The journals will be printed in full colour and the websites will be redesigned with improved navigation. Each issue will contain 25 percent more content, providing customers with more high-quality articles each month. Prices for personal subscriptions and institutional site licenses will be unchanged for 2009.

Content will include editorials, research highlights, news & views, reviews, case studies, and perspectives articles. The journals will not alter their editorial scopes or commissioning strategies and will retain their distinguished external Editors-in-Chief and international Advisory Boards. Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced that the eight Nature Clinical Practice journals will be rebranded Nature Reviews, effective April 2009, increasing the size of the Nature Reviews portfolio from seven to fifteen titles. Launched in 2004 and 2005, the Nature Clinical Practice journals cover the fields of cardiology, clinical oncology, endocrinology, gastroenterology & hepatology, nephrology, neurology, rheumatology and urology.

Alongside the name change, the Nature Clinical Practice journals will be given a 'facelift' in print and online. The journals will be printed in full colour and the websites will be redesigned with improved navigation. Each issue will contain 25 percent more content, providing customers with more high-quality articles each month. Prices for personal subscriptions and institutional site licenses will be unchanged for 2009.

Content will include editorials, research highlights, news & views, reviews, case studies, and perspectives articles. The journals will not alter their editorial scopes or commissioning strategies and will retain their distinguished external Editors-in-Chief and international Advisory Boards.

Medical information publisher BMJ Group, UK, has signed an agreement with the Saudi Pediatric Association (SPA) to provide a customised on-line medical education service for the Association’s 1500 members.

The service is available through a new BMJ Learning Channel for the SPA: http://learning.bmj.com/spa. This provides SPA members with online access to over 440 learning modules dealing with everyday issues in primary care and hospital medicine. All are peer-reviewed and based on the latest medical evidence and the site will be updated regularly with additional modules and content.

BMJ Learning claims to be one of the world’s largest and most trusted independent online learning and course providers for medical professionals in over 100 countries. In the Middle East BMJ Learning is already deployed by the Department of Health and Medical Services Dubai, the Oman Medical Specialty Board, the Iranian Ministry of Health National Consortium and the Ministry of Health in Bahrain. It has also been formally endorsed for Continuous Medical Education (CME) accreditation by the Department of Health and Medical Services Dubai and the Health Authority of Abu Dhabi.

Other organisations in different parts of the world that use BMJ Learning for CME accreditation include the Malaysian Medical Association, The Royal College of General Practitioners in the UK and The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.

Future Medicine Ltd., part of Future Science Group, UK, has announced the launch of a new journal – Immunotherapy. The journal is the latest addition to Future Medicine's collection of titles addressing modern medicine and biomedical research.

Immunotherapy involves the treatment of disease through immune manipulation of the host. The valuable role of this approach in oncology is increasingly recognised alongside conventional chemo- and radio-therapies. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of immunotherapy in melanoma, leukemias, lymphomas and myelomas, and in breast, cervical, ovarian, kidney, prostate and colorectal cancers.

Immunotherapy publishes reviews, original research, perspectives, commentary and news and views for interdisciplinary community with an interest in the development and clinical use of immunotherapeutics. The journal operates rigorous peer review and disclosure policies.

Prof. Yutaka Kawakami of Keio University School of Medicine, Dr Francesco M. Marincola of the National Cancer Institute and Prof. David C. Wraith of the University of Bristol will serve as Senior Editors of the journal. They will be supported by a team of eight Associate Editors, together with an Advisory Panel of more than 50 international experts.

YBP Library Services, a leading provider of materials to academic libraries, has announced the availability of fully customisable MARC records for all titles included in Oxford Scholarship Online eBook Collections. Oxford Scholarship Online is a rapidly expanding cross-searchable library which now offers quick and easy access to the full text of 2,556 Oxford books.

Oxford University Press initially launched Oxford Scholarship Online in a subscription database in 2003, and added the perpetual purchase option in 2005. At least 450 new and recently-published books are added each year. YBP Library Services began offering Oxford Scholarship Online to its customers late last year. Now, whether one opts to purchase one, two or all of the 16 available subject collections, YBP can easily deliver cataloging for the content of those collections, including the new updates as released. This eContent Cataloging Service is expected to further enhance YBP’s extensive technical service offerings to libraries and consortia.

A Baker & Taylor company, YBP Library Services provides books and supporting collection management and technical services to academic, research, and special libraries in North America and around the world. The company recently announced an agreement with Greenwood, a publishing imprint of ABC-CLIO, to act as the non-exclusive agent for the sale of Greenwood's online databases in the US. Earlier this month, publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. also partnered with YBP Library Services to address the growing need of libraries to discover and order book content in the format of their choice using one consolidated book-purchasing channel.

Non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), UK, has announced the appointment of Professor Nikolay Zheludev of the University of Southampton, UK, as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics. Professor Zheludev will succeed Professor Colin Sheppard who successfully led the journal from January 2003.

In addition, further enhancements are planned for 2009-10 to take advantage of the rising profile and impact of Journal of Optics A. The journal will seek to become a prime destination for quality papers in optics and photonics for the whole international community spanning from the Far East to Europe and the USA.

From 2009 the journal contents will be broken down into eight key sections - Nanophotonics and plasmonics; Metamaterials and structured photonic materials; Nonlinear and ultrafast optics; Photonics at the life science interface; Information and communication optics; Integrated optics systems and devices; Material processing with light; and Propagation, diffraction and scattering.

In 2010, Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics will be renamed Journal of Optics. The journal will continue to offer free web access to all papers published in the last 30 days creating a broad and unrestricted dissemination of research results.

Digital content services provider Ingram Content companies, US, has announced the launch of a new eBooks cooperative service enabling members of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) to offer multi-publisher collections to libraries. The ALPSP eBook Collection (AeBC) consists of over 1,200 titles contributed by specialist society, academic and university press publishers. Many titles have not previously been available in digital format.

The collection’s 1,200 titles cover 11 subject areas including education, law, medicine, political science and technology. Institutions may choose the entire core offering or create a custom package of various sub-collections. The AeBC is available as a one-time purchase, with multi-user access delivered exclusively through MyiLibrary, Ingram Digital’s next-generation e-content aggregation platform.

The AeBC is available to libraries and other institutions through the extensive network of MyiLibrary distribution partners, which include Swets, the current provider of the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, Coutts Information Services and ProQuest. The Collection also may be enhanced with any of the 175,000 additional titles already available for purchase through MyiLibrary. With over 5,000 new titles added every month, MyiLibrary claims to be the fastest-growing and most comprehensive online e-content platform on the market today.

Publishers participating in the ALPSP eBook Collection will also benefit from access to Ingram Digital’s full range of content solutions including the MyiLibrary platform for individual e-book sales, the CoreSource digital asset management platform and print-on-demand services from Lightning Source.

The AeBC is not available through any other aggregator or platform.

Cambridge Information Group (CIG), a privately held investment firm and parent company to Bowker and ProQuest, recently made an equity investment in LibraryThing, an emerging provider of online book cataloging services and solutions. Under the deal, CIG has purchased a minority stake in LibraryThing and has designated Bowker as the exclusive worldwide distributor for the library marketplace of LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL), LibraryThing’s flagship library product. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The addition of LTFL to Bowker and ProQuest’s growing suite of offerings, including AquaBrowser Library, is projected to help librarians and their patrons embrace Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and improve the efficacy of their book search and discovery efforts.

LibraryThing is an online service and social network to help library patrons and booklovers to easily catalogue their books. LTFL is made up of the Catalog Enhancements, which includes tags, recommendations and other editions and translations, and the Reviews Enhancement, which places 250,000 reviews into library catalogues and lets patrons review books as well. Bowker will make available LTFL as a service level option within its Syndetics Solutions OPAC enrichment offerings.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have published a guide to “Developing a Scholarly Communication Program in Your Library.” The guide provides background information and outlines steps for setting up a scholarly communication program at a library and on the campus.

Scholarly communication initiatives can take many forms and focus on different issues, such as the University of California’s innovative recruitment of faculty publications into its eScholarship Repository, the University of Minnesota’s author’s rights education program, or SPARC’s student-focused “Right to Research” campaign. Whatever the issues particularly relevant to an institution, librarians can engage faculty members, students, and administrators to make a significant impact on the scholarly landscape.

This online guide offers both generic tools one can adapt locally under a Creative Commons license and examples of how these tools have been implemented at other schools. It provides help at your point of need, and leverages the expertise and experience of library colleagues everywhere.

The guide is authored by Kris Fowler, Mathematics Librarian and Physical Sciences & Engineering Library Collections Coordinator at the University of Minnesota; Gail Persily, Director of Education and Public Services and Associate Director of the Center for Instructional Technology at the University of California; and Jim Stemper, Electronic Resources Librarian at the University of Minnesota. It is freely available online from the ARL-ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication at http://www.arl.org/sc/institute/fair/scprog/.

Versita, a leading STM e-publisher and e-publishing technology marketer in Central and Eastern Europe, has announced a partnership with MPS Technologies to implement the MPS ContentStore platform for launching and developing their new digital business. MPS Technologies is the technology arm of Macmillan India.

Versita is building localised platforms, which is expected to put the company at the forefront of online publishing in Central and Eastern Europe. MPS' ContentStore platform will catapult Versita to markets beyond the STM segment, integrating and expanding their existing content business to become a leading e-publisher and e-content distribution platform serving the academic and professional information markets.

ContentStore provides an end-to-end solution for publishers to aggregate, sell and distribute eBook, journal, database and news content. Versita has selected the BookStore Academic module of ContentStore to disseminate valuable information to individual researchers, libraries and other organisations.

Established in 2001, Versita is fast becoming the leading scientific publisher in Central and Eastern Europe. They publish science journals based in Central and Eastern Europe, many of which are co-published with Springer. Besides publishing, Versita also offers publishing and e-publishing technology services to societies, institutes, universities and other scientific publishers.

BioSpace.com, an online source for life sciences, has added scientific research videos to its online community for life science careers and industry resources. Video content is paired with advertising options and made available through a partnership with the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

JoVE is a scientific journal that publishes video articles of biological experiments from academic institutions including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. The journal was the first and only video-based scientific journal to be indexed in PubMed. Today, JoVE is an established biomedical publisher that focuses on video-based scientific communication and publishes video articles from prominent institutions in the US, Europe and Japan. These communications are seen to significantly increase transparency and reproducibility of contemporary biomedical research, while serving as convenient resources.

JoVE video articles are several minutes long and include opportunities for 12-second advertisements at the beginning and end of each video. Each video on BioSpace reaches an audience of more than 400,000 unique Web visitors every month.

Pricing and market intelligence service provider ICIS Pricing, US, has launched the ICIS pricing daily Ethylene Asia report. The report helps track latest movements in ethylene prices enabling industry professionals to compete globally, function efficiently and be resilient to the fluctuations of an international market economy.

The daily ethylene report provides CFR NE and SE Asia assessments, capturing deals and market conditions in both regions. The report includes updates on cracker developments and plant operating rates as well as market-moving events that affect prices.

ICIS Pricing is an independent pricing and market intelligence service from ICIS, part of Reed Business Information. It provides petrochemical and oil markets with reports published daily, weekly or monthly on more than 120 commodities.

FOBID, the organisation that represents Dutch libraries, archives and museums, recently reached an agreement with VOI©E, which represents right holders, on the digitisation and accessibility of the latter’s heritage collections. The agreement was reached within the Digiti©E Committee (Digitisation of Cultural Heritage) that was set up when a Declaration of Intent was signed at the opening of Amsterdam World Book Capital in April 2008. It is seen as a major breakthrough in the discussion regarding the copyright aspects of digitising collections held by libraries and archives.

The agreement is being projected as the first such in the world, between libraries and right holders. There is concern in many other countries too regarding how to deal with the rights of right holders who cannot be traced, i.e. the holders of rights in “orphan works”. If the recent Dutch arrangement is imitated in other European countries, it is expected to have an enormous effect on the availability of recent works in the “Europeana” digital library.

The essence of the agreement is that the libraries that are represented receive permission, on certain conditions, from virtually all right holders to digitise their collections and make them publically available on their own premises. The works concerned must be part of the Dutch cultural heritage and no longer commercially available, and must be used for teaching or research purposes. The libraries do not need to pay the right holders as long as the works are only made available on their own premises.

Separate consent is required, however, if the digitised works are made more widely available, for example by means of remote access or via the Internet. In that case, an agreed payment must be made; agreements in principle can be made regarding payment by the Digiti©E committee. Even then, the library will not need to go in search of the right holders because this will be done by collecting societies such as Lira and Pictoright.

The organisations representing right holders will shortly be setting up a registration centre for digitisation where libraries and archives can register proposed projects and get in touch with right holders regarding how they should be implemented.

Individual right holders can still object to their work being digitised and made accessible. In that case, the libraries and archives concerned are required to cease making the works accessible; in practice, very few titleholders are actually seen to object.

STM publisher Springer Science+Business Media, Germany, has launched AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research.

The portal currently searches over three million journal articles to deliver a variety of useful information. The current searchable content is from all Springer journals. Metadata from other STM publishers will be included in the near future. The tool can provide a variety of analyses, such as keyword tag clouds and "Top 5" bar charts for various important metrics, and includes an interactive world map of the results.

AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search function also allows complex queries using keyword, discipline, institution, journal and author. The results can identify new and historic scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics, allowing for identification of trends in the literature, discovery of wider scientific relationships, and locating other experts in a field of study.

The trend timeline graph, for instance, allows authors to see whether their area of expertise is growing or has already peaked. Users that are only interested in open access content can restrict their searches accordingly, and all search results provide link-outs to content on SpringerLink. For graduates, post-docs and emerging researchers, AuthorMapper.com shows which institutions are the most prolific in specific research areas and allows for their comparison.

AuthorMapper.com’s can even be useful for members of the general public seeking to identify experts, for example, medical specialists, working close to where they are located.

Web content management (WCM) platforms provider EPiServer, Sweden, has announced that B2B publisher Reed Business Information (RBI), UK, has selected its content management system (CMS). RBI will use EPiServer CMS to help redevelop and manage content for existing websites and deploy new ones, with an aim to deliver news and content faster and more efficiently to its customers.

RBI reportedly carried out a thorough examination of the CMS available from some of the world’s leading vendors and chose EPiServer. The decision was based on the product’s ability to cut overheads on RBI’s many websites, as well as its speed of deployment and user-friendliness.

After the initial look and feel of an RBI site is established by internal developers on the EPiServer platform, new sites can be quickly created. Each individual site’s owners will be responsible for updating and uploading new content as well as quickly configuring page layouts with the drag and drop functionality using X3. This in turn enables individual RBI product owners to have complete control of their online presence.

RBI also wanted a Microsoft .NET solution because of the considerable investment and expertise it already has in this technology. According to EPiServer, RBI joins thousands of organisations and companies of all sizes around the world who are saving time and money by using its CMS to manage their websites and intranets.

Journal Metrologia, published by non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) on behalf of the BIPM, has announced a special issue on Timescale Algorithms. The issue is freely available until April 8, 2009.

Led by Guest Editors Demetrios Matsakis and Patrizia Tavella, the issue showcases selected papers from the Fifth International Time Scale Algorithm Symposium. These papers encompass the full breadth of the symposium, including tutorials, laboratory-specific innovations and practices, GNSS applications, UTC generation, TWSTFT applications, GPS applications, small-ensemble applications, robust algorithms, and statistical measures that are either robust themselves or which reflect nonstationarity and robustness characteristics of the clocks.

Metrologia is an international journal dealing with the scientific aspects of metrology. The journal pubilishes articles that report the results of original research directed towards the significant improvement of fundamental measurements.

The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) will be the main sponsor of its 6th annual conference. The conference, scheduled for March 23-24, 2009, will be held in Edinburgh.

The conference will showcase how JISC is enabling further and higher education institutions to enhance the students’ learning experience, provide greater access to digitalised resources and gain from the expertise of the organisation’s services. It will also feature discussions, debate and most of all, hands-on experience of technology which is bringing to life research, teaching and learning within higher education.

Both organisations are engaged in national and global collaborative efforts to ensure education and research communities can meet their agendas and shape future service delivery. Delegates who attend the conference this year will benefit from tailored 1:1 networking opportunities while those not able to attend in person will be able to be there virtually through blogging, webinars, podcasts and online conferencing.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced that it has been chosen to conduct the 2009 E-book Think Tank at the ER&L09 Conference, held February 9-12, 2009, in Los Angeles, CA.

In addition to covering successful innovations regarding e-books and electronic content, panelists will discuss how libraries can integrate electronic content across multiple vendors and platforms. They will also address the functionalities and technologies needed to achieve cohesiveness and make content accessible and useful for their end-users.

Moderated by ebrary CEO Christopher Warnock, the panel includes Xan Arch, Acquisitions Librarian at Stanford University; Caroline Crouse, Electronic Resources Librarian at George Washington University; Kat McGrath, Serials Librarian at the University of British Columbia; and Kristen Anderson, Collection Development Librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

ebrary seeks to help libraries, publishers and other organisations disseminate information to end-users, while improving end-user research and document interaction. The company has developed a flexible e-content platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities.