The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched its first e-book, titled The e-Revolution and Post-Compulsory Education: Using e-business models to deliver quality education. The book seeks to offer senior managers in further and higher education best-practice guidance for applying e-business approaches to their institutions.

Particularly in the current economic climate, information technology - especially web technology - is seen as a powerful tool that enables institutions to manage their business in a more innovative, cohesive and strategic way. Applied effectively, in support of clear business processes, it can confer competitive advantage, as well as provide enriched opportunities for collaboration. From supporting teaching and research to managing strategic partnerships as part of business and community engagement, e-business is bringing new opportunities in efficiency and service improvement.

The e-book launch coincides with a new ‘e-textbook business models’ study that forms part of the JISC national e-books observatory project3. The study will trial a variety of business models to determine the viability of delivering e-textbooks through the library. It will also explore the management and economic impact of the trials on publishers, e-book aggregators and educational institutions over the course of the 2009-10 academic year.

The e-Revolution and Post-Compulsory Education was originally published in paperback by Routledge in 2008. Following its own lead on open access publishing, JISC agreed with Routledge that its contents would be made available on an open access basis, one year after publication.

The University of Aberdeen has announced a partnership with STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, to obtain expanded access to Elsevier’s complete back catalogue of e-journals, e-books and other reference works. The subjects range from medicine, health and life sciences to physical and environmental sciences, energy, engineering, information technology, mathematics and psychology.

The agreement is expected to boost the university's strength in research across a wide range of disciplines, and its consequent attractiveness to academics and students from around the world. As part of the deal, Elsevier will showcase the university and its new library through creating a case study illustrating the university’s professed commitment to flexible, modern learning, and the role of e-resources in the mission of a global university.

The University of Aberdeen library, due to start construction late spring, is designed to provide a visually striking piece of architecture and a modern learning environment. E-resources are offered alongside the university's existing collection of books, manuscripts and archives. The collections, along with the new e-resources, will be available to students, researchers and the wider public through individual and group study. Additionally, there will be public events including exhibitions and seminars.

Healthcare services provider Health Service Executive (HSE), Ireland, has launched LENUS, a comprehensive online repository of health-related reports, research and official publications. Built on BioMed Central’s ‘Open Repository’ system, LENUS makes available a wealth of material from former Irish health boards, the Health Service Executive, the Department of Health and Children and many other organisations active in Irish healthcare.

With this launch, HSE will now be able to provide a personalised in-house repository that maximises the distribution of its research and publications. LENUS embraces the ‘open access’ movement by allowing authors to submit their original research directly to the repository. Librarians are also encouraged to submit electronic documents, including articles, pre-prints, monographs, reports, movies and databases. As the only Irish resource of its kind, LENUS is a vitally important facility for medical professionals, policy-makers, academics, librarians, students and the general public.

The HSE is one of 16 organsations globally that have adopted Open Repository since its inception. Open Repository is built upon the latest version of DSpace, an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly material.

Scientific publisher RSC Publishing, UK, the publishing arm of the Royal Society of Chemistry, can now provide customers with COUNTER 3 compliant journal usage statistics, as the result of a new service delivered by MPS Technologies. RSC Publishing claims to be the first chemistry publisher to announce the availability of COUNTER 3 statistics for its journal customers.

RSC journal customers will now be able to access their reports via MPS Insight, the new service from MPS Technologies for providing usage reports to librarians on behalf of publishers. MPS Insight provides an easy-to-use interface and greater flexibility for users. The objectives of the new COUNTER release are to improve the reliability of COUNTER usage reports; to provide tools to facilitate consolidation, management and analysis of COUNTER usage statistics; and to improve COUNTER usage reports for consortia.

An important part of version 3 of the Code of Practice for journals is the provision of SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) as a method of delivery, enabling libraries to automate the retrieval of reports into local systems. Consortia administrators can also access both consolidated and individual member sites' statistics.

Subscription services provider Swets, Netherlands, has announced that SwetsWise Online Content can be accessed through the Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch. Powered by SwetsWise Subscriptions, SwetsWise Online Content is a single point of contact to one of the most extensive collections of electronic journals currently available in the scholarly information market.

SwetsWise Online Content provides users with access to direct links for more than 11,000 journal titles − all from a seamless Web interface and through the convenience of their Personal Digital Assistant. Information users can search relevant online content, utilise multi-level linking, download subscription lists and much more. SwetsWise Online Content offers over 25 million searchable references along with links to full-text articles through an intuitive Web interface. This service also provides informative usage statistics on each title, and includes fast access set-up for new electronic journal subscriptions.

In addition to SwetsWise Online Content, SwetsWise Subscriptions is also available through the iPhone and iPod Touch. Information users can manage their subscriptions, view publication schedules, check the title status to thousands of print and electronic content and many other SwetsWise Subscriptions functions.

The Apple iPhone 3G also support WiFi, a standard wireless connection that allows SwetsWise Online Content and SwetsWise Subscriptions access using IP authentication. Customers can easily facilitate research and view e-content.

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced the addition of a new feature to its clinical reference tool, DynaMed. The feature is aimed to help DynaMed users immediately go to content updates in topics.

When significant new content is added to a DynaMed topic, the update reason will contain a link to the new content in the topic. The new feature can be viewed by clicking on any of the topics shown on the Recently Updated page.

DynaMed is a clinical reference tool created by physicians for physicians and other healthcare professionals for use primarily at the 'point-of-care'. With clinically-organised summaries for nearly 3,000 topics, the tool is claimed to be the only evidence-based reference shown to answer most clinical questions during practice. Updated daily, DynaMed monitors, evaluates and integrates the content of over 500 medical journals and systematic evidence review databases directly and indirectly by using many journal review services.

The Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters, US, has been selected by VHA, Inc., the national healthcare alliance, as its preferred vendor for mobile clinical quality improvement solutions. With this preferred vendor designation, Thomson Reuters is authorised to sell its Clinical Xpert suite of products to VHA members across the US. Clinical Xpert has been named the KLAS Category Leader for Mobile Data Systems for the past seven years.

Clinical Xpert Navigator provides clinicians with real-time access to patient data via mobile devices such as Palm, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones, as well as through web-based platforms such as desktop, laptop and tablet PCs. Navigator consolidates data from multiple hospital information systems and delivers it to clinicians at the point of care.

Clinical Xpert CareFocus provides clinical surveillance, automating the process of identifying high-risk patients and informing the appropriate caregiver when clinical intervention is needed. VHA hospitals using CareFocus have shown significant improvements in length of stay, cost savings and mortality rates. The suite also includes offerings for handoff, charge capture and medication reconciliation.

VHA, a national healthcare alliance serving more than 1,400 not-for-profit hospitals and 23,000 non-acute health care facilities in the US, helps member organisations improve clinical and economic performance. It achieves this through its network of agreements with leading healthcare vendors across the continuum of care.

Medical information publisher BMJ Group, UK, has announced the appointment of Professor Dana Loomis as the new editor of international specialist title Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Professor Loomis succeeds Professor Keith Palmer, who has edited the title for the past five years.

Loomis has served as deputy editor of the journal since 2004. He has published widely and served on the editorial boards of several international peer reviewed journals on epidemiology and occupational health. He has also been a member of many US expert panels and committees, including for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the Centers for Disease Control.

Published monthly by the BMJ Group, Occupational and Environmental Medicine is an international peer reviewed journal concerned with areas of current importance in occupational medicine and environmental health issues throughout the world. Original contributions include epidemiological, physiological and psychological studies of occupational and environmental health hazards as well as toxicological studies of materials posing human health risks. The journal is the official journal of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of London.

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced that ISI Web of Knowledge now includes Global Health and the Global Health Archive from CABI. The comprehensive database of public health information will provide users with global and regional public health coverage.

Derived from over 3500 journals, plus reports, books and conferences, Global Health contains over 1.2 million scientific records from 1973 to the present and more than 90,000 records are added each year. The addition of these records provide users access to weekly content updates, the ability to detect emerging trends to pursue successful research and grant acquisition, and help to identify potential collaborators through their publication records.

ISI Web of Knowledge, an integrated, versatile research platform, delivers easy access to high quality, diversified scholarly information in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as search and analysis tools that enhance this content. The platform provides users the ability to search the right content and find relevant information for discovery and research evaluation — whether that information is found in international journals, open access resources, books, patents or proceedings.

The Taiwan Library Consortium, in conjunction with the government of Taiwan, has announced a three-year agreement with digital content services provider Ingram Digital, US. Under the deal, Ingram Digital will supply 250,000 users with access to 5,000 digital titles covering a wide spectrum of subject matter.

Through this agreement, the Taiwan Library Consortium will provide 88, or about 75 percent, of the country’s libraries with access to e-books. E-book titles will be accessible to member libraries via Ingram Digital’s e-content aggregation platform, MyiLibrary. Titles that will be available through this agreement were methodically chosen after a one-year survey evaluating usage patterns of print titles. Content will be available in both Chinese and English, continuing a longstanding tradition of providing citizens with access to education through the highest quality reference materials available.

The agreement marks the third international government-funded deal for Ingram Digital. Ingram Digital is also currently engaged in partnerships with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK.

Ingram Digital’s MyiLibrary platform is claimed to be the fastest-growing e-content aggregator, adding an average of over 5,000 titles each month to its current catalogue of more than 175,000 e-books. Thousands of libraries and hundreds of publishers worldwide choose MyiLibrary for its premium front-list content, flexible pricing models and global distribution networks.

RPS Publishing, the publishing arm of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, has announced that Drug Administration via Enteral Feeding Tubes is now available on the MedicinesComplete platform. The move further strengthens the platform's position in offering online access to world-leading drug and healthcare resources.

Enteral Feeding Tubes is a practical guide to administering medicines safely and effectively via enteral feeding tubes such as nasal gastric tubes. It includes drug therapy review, medication formulation choice, health, safety and interactions, restoring and maintaining patency, tube flushing and type of tubes available.

MedicinesComplete is a comprehensive online service that brings together some of the world’s leading drug and healthcare references on one integrated platform. The platform now offers users access to fifteen resources including Martindale: The Complete Drug Reference, Stockley's Drug Interactions and the BNF. Packages can be tailored to suit the needs of each client to ensure they receive an optimum solution.

STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has published a special issue of Behavioural Processes, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12, 2009. Guest edited by Karen Hollis, the issue features 16 papers. These include original research articles as well as theoretical reviews by researchers in the field of comparative cognition, demonstrating how animals perceive, learn about and understand their physical and social worlds.

Titled "Comparative Cognition in Context", the special issue honours the scientific contributions of Sara J. Shettleworth, whose book Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior (Oxford University Press) argues for an evolutionary approach to animal cognition.

This year, all around the world, Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his work, On the Origin of Species, are being celebrated.

Behavioural Processes seeks to publish high-quality original research on animal behaviour from any theoretical perspective. It welcomes contributions that consider animal behaviour, from behavioural analytic, cognitive, ethological, ecological and evolutionary points of view.

Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced the release of version 20.0 of its Aleph integrated library system. More than 85 enhancements, the majority of which have been garnered from the Aleph user community, focus on further streamlining staff workflows to maximise efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership. New functionality in this release enables library staff to be even more responsive to the special requests of their users.

Significant enhancements have been made in all the modules of Aleph 20.0, assisting libraries worldwide in continuing to meet their goals. Among these enhancements are features that enable librarians to perform a wide range of cataloging and administrative tasks on bulk records, perform editing work offline, and accelerate their response to user requests. For this release, collaborative testers from Utrecht University (in the Netherlands), Porto University (in Portugal), the Online Dakota Information Network (ODIN) and University of Minnesota (both in the United States) joined Ex Libris development and product management staff at Company headquarters to test Aleph version 20.0.

The Ex Libris Group provides automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. The company maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents. Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with its customers, Ex Libris enables academic, national, and research libraries to maximise productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.

STM publisher Hindawi Publishing Corporation, US, has announced that it has received more than 1,000 monthly submitted manuscripts in its Open Access journal collection for the first time in February 2009. Hindawi's monthly submissions exceeded 500 for the first time in May 2007, less than two years ago.

Hindawi currently publishes over 150 journals covering several subject areas of science, technology, and medicine, and is aggressively expanding its Open Access journals into all areas of STM.

Earlier in January 2009, Hindawi announced the addition of the ePUB digital format on its online platform for all of its journal and book publications. ePUB is a modern, industry standard format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, of which Hindawi is a member, as an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications.

Scientific Publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) have announced that authors publishing research in the European Journal of Human Genetics (EJHG) can now opt to make their articles open access. The EJHG Open option, introduced by NPG and ESHG, gives authors the choice of immediate open access on publication. This includes deposition of the final published version in PubMed Central.

The open access option is available to authors submitting original research articles to EJHG. Authors who opt in to EJHG Open agree to pay a publication fee of £2,000 / $3,000 / €2,400 per accepted article. Open access articles will display the EJHG Open logo in both the print and online editions of the journal. EJHG Open articles will be freely accessible on the journal website and via PubMed Central immediately after publication. Authors who choose EJHG Open are also entitled to self-archive the final published PDF of their articles upon publication.

Open access articles will be published under a Creative Commons license, meaning the final published version of EJHG Open articles can be shared and reused for non-commercial purposes as long as the author and original publication are cited. Authors can choose from two Creative Commons licenses, including one which permits derivative works, ensuring that authors can comply with funders such as the Wellcome Trust.

Authors submitting original research articles who do not wish to take up the EJHG Open option can still comply with funder and institutional mandates, by self-archiving or opting into NPG's Manuscript Deposition Service. The author's version of the accepted manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication, in line with NPG's License to Publish and self-archiving policy.

The European Journal of Human Genetics (www.nature.com/ejhg) is the official journal of the European Society of Human Genetics, published in partnership with NPG. The journal joins 14 other journals published by NPG that now offer an open access option to authors.

Expert-driven article evaluation services Faculty of 1000 Biology and Faculty of 1000 Medicine are each launching a journal to complement their service. Most of the content in the new journals, called F1000 Reports, are already filtered for importance by Faculty of 1000’s community of over 5,000 of the world’s top scientists and clinicians.

The rise of online publishing has given academics a completely new platform for publishing their findings, which has been beneficial in some respects but has also contributed greatly to doctors’ and scientists’ sense of information overload. With human community-driven filtering, Internet users can get straight to the best online content. Faculty of 1000 has added a new level to this model with the launch of F1000 Reports.

F1000 Biology Reports and F1000 Medicine Reports select and highlight the most significant and interesting articles recently evaluated on Faculty of 1000, as well as identify emerging trends within the large F1000 database of articles. In this way, F1000 Reports spot the tips of some new scientific icebergs before they become apparent elsewhere. With so much new literature for scientists and clinicians to read, F1000 Reports are projected as easy routes to the must-read content.

Designed to make sense of the vast and growing body of scholarly literature in the fields of biology and medicine, the F1000 service comprises over 5000 of the world's distinguished and respected researchers and clinicians who select key recent articles and evaluate them. This 'faculty of experts' highlight articles that make a difference to biomedical scientists in their research and to clinicians in their every-day practice. The articles are identified from over 2000 reputed biomedical journals from a wide range of publishers, and they are then graded from an expert perspective.

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters, US, has announced the launch of InCites – a web-based solution that provides users with the tools needed to demonstrate the impact and importance of their institution's research. Through InCites, Thomson Reuters seeks to provide its customers with a one-stop system to quantitatively evaluate productivity and influence in order to make strategic decisions.

InCites provides unique value through the delivery of customer-defined datasets in a web interface for research and analysis. The product enables users to conduct analyses on their own institution's productivity and benchmark its output against peers in both a national or international context. Also, it enables users to create sub-sets around entities such as departments or authors, providing additional analysis at a local level.

This product integrates the same high quality citation content users have come to expect from Thomson Reuters. Datasets derived from Web of Science include bibliographic data and citing articles, current metrics, inbound linking to full records, and the ability to export data and graphs. More information on InCites is available at www.isiwebofknowledge.com/incites/.

GenomeQuest, Inc., a US-based provider of biological sequence search, content and analysis services, has announced the release of two new functionalities for sequence data management. The new functionalities - GQ Rapid Annotation Pipeline (RAP) and GQ Gene - are both part of the latest 5.2 version of GenomeQuest, the company’s sequence data management solution.

Researchers can utilise GQ RAP and GQ Gene in compliment, based on their scientific needs, and can also employ the recently announced GQ Base for next-generation workflows. The GQ RAP works with reads from Roche/454’s Titanium instrument as well as with Sanger reads.

GenomeQuest is a sequence data management company providing applications and services to search, manage and mine the world’s sequence data. The company’s flagship product, GenomeQuest, is a web-based sequence data management platform that enables users to exploit genomic information resources including the latest sequencing tools and worldwide biological sequence reference databases.

Non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), UK, has announced that librarians with subscriptions to IOP Publishing titles can now access COUNTER Release 3 results, via a new interface called MPS Insight, ahead of the compulsory deadline of August 2009. MPS Insight is a new service that has passed an independent COUNTER audit to provide the new reports required by COUNTER Release 3.

The new interface allows librarians to access reports through a much more user-friendly system. Librarians will also benefit from the functionality to retrieve reports via SUSHI in addition to the familiar CSV spreadsheets. This allows libraries with SUSHI enabled ERM systems to automate report collection.

MPS Insight, a service delivered by MPS Technologies, is seen to offer an attractive, easy-to-use interface, allowing customers to make real-time changes to accounts and create additional user accounts for non-library staff. The service is claimed to have been very well received by a group of librarians invited to beta test the new service; over 96 percent rated MPS Insight as "easy" or "very easy to use".

Technical professional society IEEE has announced the appointment of Dr. E. James (Jim) Prendergast as its new executive director. He succeeds former IEEE Executive Director Jeffry W. Raynes, who resigned in June 2008.

Dr. Prendergast will assume the role 6 April 2009. In his new position, he will serve as chief operating officer and will manage the more than 1,000 IEEE staff members at seven US and overseas locations. Prior to this, he served as vice president and chief technology officer for DuPont Electronic and Communication Technologies in Wilmington, Del.

With 375,000 members across 160 countries, IEEE is projected as an authority on several areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. It publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields and has developed nearly 900 active industry standards. The organisation is commemorating its 125th anniversary in 2009 by celebrating 125 years of engineering the future around the globe.

Publishers Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and Palgrave Macmillan Journals (PMJ) have announced that upgraded usage statistic reporting is now available for all online publications. With immediate effect, NPG and PMJ statistic reports now include the additional reports and services required by the new COUNTER Release 3, including SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). The enhanced statistics reporting is provided by MPS Insight, a new service for publishers from Macmillan’s sister company, MPS Technologies.

The move to MPS Insight is seen to provide site licence customers with an enhanced service including more timely reports and consolidated consortia statistics. Reports are now also available in XML, in addition to the familiar CSV (Comma Separated Value) formats that can be opened in Microsoft Excel. XML reports can be automatically harvested into local systems using SUSHI, with time-saving benefits for librarians and library consortium administrators. Reports meet the criteria set by COUNTER Release 3, which publishers must comply with by August 2009 in order to retain their COUNTER-compliant status.

MPS Insight is seen to offer an attractive, easy-to-use interface, allowing customers to make real-time changes to accounts and create additional user accounts for non-library staff. The service is claimed to have been very well received by a group of librarians invited to beta test the new service; over 96% rated MPS Insight as "easy" or "very easy to use".

NPG and PMJ customers can now access usage statistic reports for the period January 2006 to January 2009. Older reports have been archived. Site licence administrators will shortly receive full instructions and login details for using the system, and can access the service from their regular Administration Accounts. Palgrave Connect will also be served by MPS Insight.

STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced that it will, from henceforth, publish Neurotoxicity Research, the official journal of the Neurotoxicity Society. The publication is an international, interdisciplinary broad-based journal reporting on both basic and clinical research on classical neurotoxicity effects and mechanisms associated with neurodegeneration, necrosis, neuronal apoptosis, nerve regeneration and other related topics.

Published eight times a year and aimed at neuroscience researchers and neurologists, the journal features original papers, reviews and society news. Richard M. Kostrzewa from Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University, USA, is editor-in-chief.

Neurotoxicity Research will be published at Springer both electronically and in print. Backfiles, going back to 1999, will be available on Springer’s online platform, SpringerLink. The journal will include Online First, Cross Reference Linking and Alert services. All Neurotoxicity Research authors, via the Springer Open Choice programme, will have the option of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model. All issues from 1999 through March 2009 will be available free online on www.springerlink.com.

Neurotoxicity Society seeks to unite basic and clinical scientists in the neurotoxicity field. It facilitates the advance of preclinical research discoveries to clinical and medical utility, promotes dissemination of knowledge on these topics to the public and hosts scientific meetings on a neurotoxicity theme at regular intervals.

McGraw-Hill Professional, a US-based provider of information resources for the scientific and medical communities, has launched AccessAnesthesiology (http://www.accessanesthesiology.com), an online resource dedicated solely to pain management, critical care and perioperative medicine. The learning website seeks to give anesthesiology residents a suite of detailed reference materials and multimedia, educators a powerful tool for managing workflows, and professionals an in-depth resource for maintaining certification.

In a bid to continue with the innovations begun with McGraw-Hill's Access online medical and scientific resources, AccessAnesthesiology provides searchable, full-text versions of several McGraw-Hill references. These include David Longnecker's Anesthesiology, G. Edward Morgan, Jr.'s Lange Clinical Anesthesiology, and Admir Hadzic's NYSORA Textbook of Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Management. In addition, the site features procedural videos, with a basic skills series from the authors of Management of the Difficult and Failed Airway, and ultrasound videos prepared by members of AccessAnesthesiology's editorial board.

The site also includes the Custom Curriculum, a functionality that enables anesthesiology programme directors to create and assign activities, as well as track and monitor resident progress. With this functionality, anesthesiology programmes map AccessAnesthesiology content and functionalities to their own educational structure, creating a site that matches their specific needs.

For program directors, AccessAnesthesiology offers detailed assignment monitoring, student assessment tests and tools and robust reports, as well as an ability to share assignment designs with other programmes. For residents, the Custom Curriculum provides an educational tool that allows them to view the available activities from their programme director and monitor their own individual progress.

The European Academy of Paediatrics (EAP) has announced that specialist international title Archives of Disease in Childhood (ADC) has been named its official journal. This is the second time the title has acquired this status – it is already the official journal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which co-owns ADC with the BMJ Group.

The latest move will mean that EAP members will automatically receive a copy of the journal and its sister titles, Fetal and Neonatal Edition and Education in Practice, as part of their subscription. EAP will also be able to appoint a deputy editor from one of its EU member countries and additional associate editors to sit on the journal's editorial board.

The journal, which was launched in 1926, has an Impact Factor of 2.786. It is edited by Howard Bauchner, Professor of Paediatrics and Public Health, Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts.

EAP, formerly known as the Confederation of European Specialists in Paediatrics, is the paediatric section of the European Union of Medical Specialists. Its remit is to promote the health of children and young people and improve professional standards of training and practices.

STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that its journal Molecular Oncology (Molonc) has been accepted by Thomson Reuters for inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch), Biosis Previews and Biological Abstracts. Elsevier publishes the journal on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS).

The inclusion in the SciSearch index is claimed to be an exceptional achievement for a journal that is just 18 months old in a fast-moving and highly competitive field. The 2009 Impact Factor will be the first for MOLONC. Coverage starts from Volume 1, 2007.

Molonc, published six times a year from January 1, 2009, highlights new discoveries, approaches and technical developments in basic, clinical and discovery-driven translational research. The first issue was published in June 2007 and has been managed from its inception by Prof. Julio E. Celis, Director of the Institute of Cancer Biology at the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen. It covers reviews, original articles, technical notes, editorials, news and views (commentary, science policy issues, ethical and legal issues, patient organisations, industry needs and alliances, regulatory issues, news items), letters to the editor, conference announcements and advertisements. The journal also publishes thematic issues.

FEBS has created various scientific publication forums for European life scientists by its two leading journals, the FEBS Journal and FEBS Letters. The organisation is a federation of learned societies with over 40,000 members and a charity established for the public benefit to advance research and education in biochemistry and molecular biology and related life sciences.

Informa Pharmaceutical Science, the pharmaceutical science division of Informa Healthcare, has announced the appointment of Prof. Vladimir Torchilin as the new Co-Editor of its journal, Drug Delivery. Prof. Torchilin is currently a Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director at the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences.

Prof. Torchilin’s career began when, at 16, he was admitted two years early to an academically rigorous science programme at the Moscow State University. He earned an MS degree in Polymer Science and a PhD in Chemical Kinetics and Catalysis by the age of 25. He was one of the youngest scientists ever to win the Lenin Prize – the highest scientific award in the former Soviet Union.

In his latest role, Prof. Torchilin will work alongside Dr. Alfred Stracher as co-Editor of Drug Delivery. The journal is focused on drug delivery research, innovation and news.

GlobalSpec (www.globalspec.com), the US-based provider of a specialised search engine, information resource and e-publishing services for the engineering, industrial and technical communities, has announced that it has exceeded five million registered users. This is seen to reinforce the company’s industry position as “the place” for engineering and industrial sector knowledge workers to perform essential work-flow related tasks.

Over the past year, GlobalSpec’s worldwide base of registered users has increased by one million, growing from four million registered users in January 2008 to its current level. On registration, visitors to the site gain access to more than 180 million parts in 2,300,000 searchable product families from over 24,000 supplier catalogues, all searchable by specification. This is projected to offer users the ability to easily locate products, components and services from manufacturers, distributors and service providers. Advertisers benefit from targeted media solutions that provide qualified sales leads, web traffic, product promotion and brand exposure among this audience of industrial professionals.

In addition to specification-based industrial product search, GlobalSpec offers its users access to other products and applications designed to help them perform key job tasks accurately and productively. More than 60 product and industry specific e-newsletters, with a combined subscription base of over 7.6 million, are available in topics ranging from aerospace technology to alternative power; from MEMS technology to medical equipment design; and from plastics and resins to pneumatics.

GlobalSpec also offers The Engineering Web, a specialised search engine comprised of more than 250 million pages of technical content, including application notes, material properties, patents and standards. Engineering, technical and industrial professionals also have access to GlobalSpec’s CR4 online community, which provides a collaborative environment to ask questions and discuss issues via forums and blogs in a variety of engineering disciplines.

The American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, has created a Board-Presidential Task Force on Education to identify a unique role for the society in transforming education in the US. The task force’s charter calls upon it to review recommendations contained in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) reports released in the last five years. This is to identify specific actions the ACS might take to implement those recommendations, and to create a list of priorities to determine areas where the Society might have a unique impact on STEM education.

The task force – created in late 2008 – grew out of discussions among then ACS President Bruce Bursten, Chair of the Board of Directors Judy Benham, and Society Committee on Education Chair Bryan Balazs. It is led by Richard Zare, chair of the chemistry department at Stanford University and a prominent researcher and educator. The task force is slated to report its findings at the ACS National Meeting in Washington in late August.

The task force’s charge extends across all educational levels, from primary through graduate and post-graduate science studies, as well as continuing professional development and more informal science education forums, such as museums and programs sponsored by civic and special interest groups.

Information technology (IT) media company TechTarget, Inc., US, has announced the launch of a web portal, SearchCompliance.com. The site seeks to give strategic technology and business professionals the resources they need to better understand Federal regulations and bring their organisation into compliance. The expert editorial for the site is lead by Mark Schlack, TechTarget’s vice president of editorial and a 20-year veteran of IT publishing.

SearchCompliance.com aims to serve the needs of business and technology professionals actively engaged in compliance-related projects. It enables technology solution marketers to align themselves with respected, relevant content and generate interest in their compliance-related products and services.

The site will cover a wide range of editorial topics designed to help IT professionals in understanding the regulations; detailing the processes and procedures needed to comply with regulations; describing governance structures needed to manage those processes and procedures; examining key technologies to leverage for compliance; and discussing best practices for automating compliance technologies and meeting compliance challenges. Because compliance encompasses more than just a single technology market, SearchCompliance.com includes links to relevant server, networking, data centre and security content from other TechTarget sites.

SearchCompliance.com launches with more than 40,000 active members from large companies, who have expressed interest in compliance-related content. On-going audience development is expected to increase the member base to more than 100,000 by the end of 2009.

Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced an agreement with Medknow Publications, India. Under the deal, Portico will preserve the latter’s entire online journals collection of 77 titles. Medknow is a publisher of academic and scientific peer-reviewed open access journals.

Through this agreement, Medknow Publications seeks to ensure that its online journal collection will be preserved and available for future scholars, researchers and students. Medknow has also agreed to make an annual financial contribution to Portico and has named Portico as a mechanism to fill post-cancellation access claims.

With the inclusion of Medknow's publications, nearly 8,300 e-journals and 4,700 e-books have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.

Online submission system provider Aries Systems Corporation, US, has announced an agreement with EMH Swiss Medical Publisher Ltd. (Schweizerische Ärzteverlag AG). Under the deal, Aries’ Editorial Manager online peer-review system will be deployed to journals published by EMH.

The project will begin with deployment of Editorial Manager to two of the publisher’s leading journals - Swiss Medical Weekly (SMW) and Kardiovaskulare Medizin. First published in 1871 and indexed in Medline, the Swiss Medical Weekly has recently transitioned to English only Open Access format. The deployment of Editorial Manager is expected to further strengthen the rigorous statistical and peer review already undertaken by the journal.

The Editorial Manager online submission system is used by more than 2,900 scholarly journals and processes tens of thousand of manuscripts per month. Earlier in January this year, Editorial Manager was selected by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), published by Cambridge University Press, to successfully transition editorial workflow to the web.

Schweizerische Ärzteverlag EMH (www.emh.ch) is a joint venture of the Swiss Medical Association FMH and the Basel based Schwabe AG. With nine renowned medical journals, a comprehensive online offering as well as its book program, the publisher covers the wide spectrum of topics relevant to medical discussion and constitutes an important player in Swiss health care. All the publisher’s journals are the official organs of the respective associations.

E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has announced that six of its resources have been selected as finalists in the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) 24th annual CODiE Awards. The awards celebrate achievement and vision in software, education technology and digital content, and are claimed to be the only peer-reviewed honour in the industry. Winners will be announced in May at the Annual CODiE Awards Gala.

Gale has three finalists in the Best Online General Reference Service category. These include Gale PowerSearch Plus, Academic OneFile and Encyclopedia.com, which joined the Gale family through the HighBeam Research acquisition in December. This category awards the online service that best packages reference information and includes encyclopaedias, maps, wikis and other information for home and business use.

Gale Directory Library is a finalist in the Best Online Directory & Business Leads Service category, which awards the online service for comprehensiveness and usability in providing directory and /or business lead data.

Books & Authors is a finalist in the Best Education Reference or Search Service category. This category awards the service that either best packages reference, library or research information, or best brings relevant information to educational users, with primary use in educational settings, either preK-12 or postsecondary. The service can either include content, such as encyclopaedias, maps, databases and source material, or indexing and abstracting tools, such as web crawlers, spiders or robots.

HighBeam Research (www.highbeam.com) is a finalist in the Best Content Aggregation Service category, which awards the best service that combines third-party content for distribution for wholesale or retail markets. Services may be directed toward other sites and services or directly towards end-users.

The Board of Directors of the Association of American Publishers has announced the appointment of Tom Allen as President and CEO. He succeeds former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who served in that position since June 1997.

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the US book publishing industry. Its more than 300 members include most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. AAP members publish hardcover and paperback books in every field, educational materials for the elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and professional markets, scholarly journals, computer software, and electronic products and services.

AAP advocates on issues of paramount importance ranging from free speech and education to the protection of intellectual property rights and international freedom to publish.