Information research solutions provider Ovid, US, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced an agreement with the UK Department of Health. Under the deal, students and faculty of all medical schools throughout England, that have an associated transplant unit, will obtain electronic access to the Transplant Library via OvidSP, beginning April 1, 2009. The Transplant Library database, produced by the Centre for Evidence in Transplantation, is an electronic evidence-based resource for organ transplantation.

First released in early 2008, the Transplant Library now includes nearly 6,500 references to all reports (full articles and conference proceedings) of randomized control trials (RCT) in organ transplantation published since 1970. The database is updated every two weeks and, since the beginning of 2004, all RCTs are assessed for methodological quality. The Transplant Library also includes limits that allow users to search for trials of interventions in a specific organ transplant. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are scheduled to be added during 2009.

First released in October 2007, the OvidSP platform incorporates Ovid's precision search technology and mapping tools. It is designed to deliver answers to important scholarly research questions faster, simpler, and more effectively for all types of users, from beginners to expert searchers.

STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced that it has been selected by the Japanese Association of Anatomists to publish the latter’s official journal, Anatomical Science International. The first Springer issue will be published in April 2009. Dr. Kiyotaka Toshimori, Professor and Chairman in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at Chiba University School of Medicine, will take over from Dr. Shohei Yamashina as editor-in-chief in April 2009.

A quarterly publication, Anatomical Science International focuses on the morphological sciences in animals and humans. Topics include molecular, cellular, histological and gross anatomical studies. In addition to original research articles, the journal also publishes reviews, essays, case reports, book reviews and commentaries.

The journal will be published in both print and electronic formats. It will be available via Springer’s online information platform, www.springerlink.com. It will include fast, electronic publication in Online First, as well as Cross Reference Linking and Table of Content Alerts. Springer will digitise the back volumes of the jouranl to 2002, making them available to readers through the Springer Online Archives Collection.

Scientific and medical information resources provider McGraw-Hill Professional, US, has announced the launch of AccessEngineering (www.AccessEngineeringLibrary.com), a comprehensive aggregation of the best engineering content published in the past decade. Derived from a selection of more than 250 engineering handbooks, monographs, and textbooks, AccessEngineering supports multiple levels of scientific and technical research in the academic, corporate, industrial, and government sectors.

Developed from the highly successful Digital Engineering Library, AccessEngineering will feature a popular Pay-Per-View (PPV) access for 48 hours for individuals, in addition to one-year subscriptions to institutions. The site offers a broad and deep repository of fully searchable engineering content from industry-leading books that engineers have trusted and depended on for years. Updated biweekly with all new content, the site delivers authoritative information that accelerates research, innovation, and problem-solving, while featuring content from a broad range of must-have McGraw-Hill Professional engineering publications.

To accommodate the needs of engineers to have access to a broad and growing body of technical knowledge, AccessEngineering focuses on 14 major subject areas ranging from Mechanical and Civil Engineering to Green and Optical Engineering. Subscribers to the service will also gain access to the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Engineering, which is embedded on all search pages, offering access to more than 18,000 entries containing synonyms, acronyms, abbreviations, and a pronunciation guide.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced that it is partnering with three book distributors to make its e-books and other digital materials available to academic libraries in Europe and Israel under various subscription and purchase models. The company’s new representatives are Massmann Internationale Buchhandlung in northern Germany; Dietmar Dreier Wissenschaftliche Versandbuchhandlung in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and Ziur Information Systems Ltd. in Israel.

Massmann International Booksellers was founded in 1989 by booksellers Dorothea and Kay Massmann in Hamburg and has operated since then as supplier and service provider for university and research libraries in Germany. The company specialises in the worldwide procurement of books, monographic continuation orders, databases and e-books.

Dietmar Dreier is focused on university libraries, research institutions and other scientific libraries. It specialises in the supply of monographic titles and monographic periodicals from all over the world. Dealing with e-content has increased the range of titles Dietmar Dreier supplies.

Ziur Information has been in the information business in Israel since 1978. It is mainly active in information management within organisations and in marketing and distributing academic and scientific information. The information management activities include information work flow within the organisation, archives construction and management, operating a large microfilm and imaging service bureau, and hardware & software supply for these activities. Ziur also distributes in Israel academic and scientific information as per customer preference and need: online databases, journals and books in printed and electronic versions, information on microform and dissertations & theses from around the world.

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.

Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that its journals Chinese Medicine and Patient Safety in Surgery have been accepted for indexing by Cinahl. Cinahl indexes titles relevant to nursing and allied healthcare.

Chinese Medicine is the official journal of the International Society for Chinese Medicine. The journal is projected as a credible channel to disseminate unbiased scientific data, information, and knowledge in Chinese medicine to researchers, clinicians, academics, and students in Chinese medicine, integrative Chinese-Western medicine, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and related biomedical fields.

Patient Safety in Surgery encompasses all issues related to safety and quality of patient care in surgery and surgical subspecialties. The journal provides a scientific platform for specialists from all surgical fields, and for other healthcare professionals, to report, discuss, debate, and critically review all aspects related to errors, complications, and other safety issues in the management of patients undergoing surgical procedures.

Neural Development, another journal published by BioMed Central, has been added to the indexing service PsycINFO. PsycINFO is an abstract database of psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. An essential tool for researchers, it contains bibliographic citations, abstracts, cited references, and descriptive information to help users find what they need across a wide variety of scholarly publications in the behavioral and social sciences.

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters, US, has announced the results of its annual roundup of the "hottest" researchers and research papers. In its March/April issue of Science Watch, Thomson Reuters identified the top 13 authors who fielded the highest numbers of Hot Papers in 2007-2008 as well as the most-cited research papers of 2008.

Kuo-Chen Chou of Gordon Life Sciences Institute and Shanghai Jiao Tong University was this year's hottest researcher, authoring 17 Hot Papers published during this time period. His papers unveil a variety of sequencing tools used to predict protein location. Another hot researcher, Hong-Bin Shen, co-authored 13 of these Hot Papers. Also making to the list, both with 13 papers, are Rudolf Jaenisch, Whitehead Institute at MIT, and Konstantin Novoselov, University of Manchester.

Thomson Reuters Hot Papers are derived from the Web of Science database. A published work is identified as a Hot Paper if it is less than two years old and has achieved a rate of citations in scientific journals that is markedly higher than papers of comparable type and age. The researchers named have published the most Hot Papers in the latest two-year period indexed by Thomson Reuters for inclusion in Web of Science.

e-communication and clinical information solutions developer EPG Health Media, UK, has announced the launch of a new interactive contraception knowledge centre within the web-based physician resource www.epgonline.org.

Sanctioned by the European Medical Association (EMA), EPG Online is a free educational service dedicated to providing healthcare professionals (HCPs) with access to best practice diagnosis and patient management guidance. This independent service provides access to a range of EU pharmaceutical drug data via an innovative search tool.

The EPG contraception knowledge centre is designed to help general practitioners, nurses and other healthcare workers in the UK to communicate with patients about contraception needs and ensure the patient is able to make an informed and considered choice. Detailed information is provided on all methods of contraception currently available, including hormonal and non-hormonal methods for women, male contraception, emergency contraception and surgery. Content also includes NICE guidelines, case studies and a KOL webcast.

The new contraception knowledge centre is the latest addition to the EPG Online ‘library’ of more than twenty knowledge centres. Other disease knowledge centres focus on a range of chronic and acute conditions including asthma, pain, hypertension, renal anaemia, migraine, diabetes and various types of cancer. In addition to disease knowledge centres, EPG Online includes a database of drugs (searchable by name and indication), clinical trials, guideline information and original medical news articles.

Software vendor Microsoft Corp, US, and Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, have announced the release of a semantic Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007. The web tool is projected to enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study. The add-in was announced before an industry panel at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009).

The tool is expected to make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a web boost to scientific discovery.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through the creation of a database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.

Microsoft’s earlier collaboration with Creative Commons includes the June 2006 release of the Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2003. It is a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications. Another collaborative move was the July 2008 release of a similar add-in for Office 2007 as part of Microsoft’s Scholarly Communication life cycle of tools. Updates to both add-ins were also released during the O’Reilly conference.

STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced that it will publish the Journal of Computing in Higher Education: Research and Integration of Instructional Technology, starting April 2009. Founded in 1989 by the New England Regional Computing Program, the journal focuses on the established field of instructional technology in higher education. Gary R. Morrison of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, will serve as the new editor-in-chief of the journal.

The Journal of Computing in Higher Education publishes original research, literature reviews, implementation and adoption studies, and theoretical, conceptual, and policy papers. It provides a venue for exploring instructional technology in a rigorous and scholarly manner. The journal publishes research papers from a wide range of disciplines in higher education that reflect different research, theoretical, and application perspectives concerning computing and technology integration in higher education. Articles dealing with a broad spectrum of topics are considered.

The Journal of Computing in Higher Education will be available in print and on Springer’s online platform www.springerlink.com. All articles will be published online via Online First before they appear in print, thereby ensuring rapid dissemination of research results. In addition, all authors, via the Springer Open Choice program, have the option of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model. The journal will be published three times a year.

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters, US, has released a white paper titled ‘The Five Myths of Generic Competition.’ The whitepaper highlights what originator pharmaceutical and biotech companies can do to improve their forecasting of the likely timing, source and intensity of competition from generic drugs.

The findings in the white paper are based on an independent survey of commercial professionals in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The research, conducted by Thomson Reuters during May and June 2008, highlights a number of prevailing attitudes among commercial professionals. In analysing the study findings, Thomson Reuters offers guidance on when and how best to improve competitive intelligence processes by focusing on more effective sources of long-range signals; and by providing brand teams with the resources and tools necessary to better understand generic competition.

The white paper comes as part of Pharma Matters, a quarterly report series from Thomson Reuters. Pharma Matters covers various aspects of the pharmaceutical pipeline, leveraging strategic intelligence and competitive analysis from Newport Vision Premium, Thomson Pharma and the Thomson Messaging Mapping System.

Publishing sales resource provider Burgundy Information Services Ltd., UK, has announced that it will be showcasing a variety of products at the forthcoming UKSG Conference and Exhibition. The event, to be held from March 30 - April 1, in Torquay, UK, is projected as a key conference in the library calendar. The company has invited six of its publisher clients and contacts to exhibit their products at its booth at the conference.

The Burgundy team will spend the weeks leading up to the conference urging librarians to visit the Burgundy booths 27&28 for publisher meetings, trials and product demonstrations. Publishers who will be available for meetings include CINDAS LLC; Morgan & Claypool Publishers; Reviews.com; RMIT Publishing; journal Science; and SPIE Digital Library.

Other Burgundy Publishers will also be present at the conference at their own booths. These include Alexander Street Press, Cambridge University Press, Future Science Group, ebrary and the Institution of Civil Engineers.

The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has announced a three-year contract with The Charlesworth Group and the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL), a consortia headed by the Chinese Ministry of Education. With this move, the Society seeks to increase international exposure to its journals Radiology and RadioGraphics.

The deal allows access to RSNA online journal and database content by NSTL's ends users, more than 500 Chinese academic institutions. The three-year renewable agency agreement combines a comprehensive marketing plan, sales support, targeted subscription marketing, translated materials, and a Chinese-language Website in an effort to spread the word about the Society’s leading radiology journals.

RSNA is an association of more than 42,000 radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists committed to excellence in patient care through education and research. Starting in June 2008, RSNA began a close evaluation by embarking on a three-month free trial for Chinese academic institutions through the The Charlesworth Group. The trial gauged interest in online journal content among Chinese scholars. The trial proved that a contract with Charlesworth and NSTL would provide RSNA with access to this emerging market, create strong online brand recognition, and promote online Chinese usage.

Information services provider McGraw-Hill Companies, US, has announced the appointment of Charles L. Teschner, Jr. as executive vice president for Global Strategy effective March 23, 2009. Teschner succeeds Peter C. Davis, who recently began serving as president of McGraw-Hill Education.

In his new role, Teschner will lead the development of business strategies that help the Corporation to achieve its long-term objectives for business growth and global expansion. Working with senior leaders across the enterprise, he will play a central role in managing the company's portfolio of businesses, strengthening its efforts to enter new markets and developing new business capabilities.

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.

Digital Media Services Company LibreDigital Inc, US, has announced key executive appointments to support the growing demand for the company’s Digital Media solutions and services. New additions to the LibreDigital management team include Bob Carlton, Vice President of Marketing; Sean Ramsey, Director of Product Marketing; Roger Tarras, Director of Sales; John Hale, Sales Manager for the EU countries; and George Chedzhemov as Director of Services.

In their primary roles, the new executives will help LibreDigital expand the solutions offered to publishers while providing services to help customers exceed their business objectives.

LibreDigital develops market-leading interactive digital publishing solutions used by many of the world’s top publishers to maximize new digital channels including, eBooks, eInk, online and mobile, to market and sell content.

ScienceBlogs.com, part of science media company Seed Media Group, US, has announced the launch of its latest international site, ScienceBlogs Brazil (scienceblogs.com.br). ScienceBlogs.com is claimed to be the largest blogging network dedicated to science.

ScienceBlogs Brazil seeks to bring together original and influential voices within the Brazilian science community, some of whom have already won accolades for their blogging. Edited from São Paulo by Carlos Hotta and Atila Iamarino, ScienceBlogs Brazil launches with 23 Portuguese-language blogs on topics ranging from genetics to the environment.

With its growing science community and emphasis on science as a cornerstone of economic growth, Brazil is emerging as a vital player in global science culture. The country is the fifth most populous in the world and has over 67 million Internet users. ScienceBlogs publishes more than 130 blogs around the world spanning all areas of science and all intersections of science and society.

ASM Press, the publishing arm of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), US, has announced the latest edition of Clinical Virology, an essential reference volume in one of the most rapidly changing fields of clinical medicine. Covering novel viruses, pathogenesis, epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, Clinical Virology informs scientists and health care professionals about all the medically relevant aspects of this rapidly evolving field.

The new third edition of Clinical Virology has been extensively revised and updated to incorporate the latest developments and relevant research. This essential reference is divided into two major sections. The first addresses infections and syndromes related to particular organ systems, as well as the fundamentals of modern medical virology, including immune responses and vaccinology, diagnostics, antivirals, and the nascent field of gene therapy. The second provides agent-specific chapters that detail the virology, epidemiology, pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, laboratory diagnosis, and prevention and treatment of important viral pathogens.

The senior authors for individual chapters were chosen because of their internationally recognised expertise and active involvement in their respective fields. In addition, common templates for the syndrome-specific and separately for the agent-specific chapters allow the reader to readily access material. Since publication of the second edition in 2002, all of the chapters have been extensively revised to incorporate new information and relevant citations. In addition, the rapidly expanding field of antiviral drugs demanded dividing the subject into two chapters.

Information provider Thomson Reuters, US, has announced that Shands HealthCare has selected its Micromedex CareNotes System as a key component of its ongoing effort to improve patient education. Shands is a not-for-profit healthcare system affiliated with the University of Florida and its Health Science Center campuses in Gainesville and Jacksonville. It includes eight Shands hospitals and two home health agencies.

Carenotes provides more than 6,000 customisable documents covering general care, pre- and after- care, inpatient care, drug notes and hospital discharge instructions. The documents are available in English and Spanish and are written for a sixth- to eighth-grade reading level.

Shands will use CareNotes to provide patients with easy-to-understand information about all aspects of their care and health — and to meet patient education guidelines of the Joint Commission and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. It reportedly opted for CareNotes over other vendors because of the breadth of content and the specialty topics that are included, such as transplants.

STM and business publisher Inderscience, Switzerland, has published the first issues of four new titles. The journals are: International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing; International Journal of Immunological Studies; International Journal of Power and Energy Conversion; and International Journal of Strategic Business Alliances.

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing fosters discussion on the organisational processes surrounding the concepts of opportunity, growth and value creation. Edited by Dr. Terrence E. Brown, Scandinavian International Management Institute, and Prof. Dr. Sascha Kraus, University of Liechtenstein, the journal reflects the concept of entrepreneurship as not being limited to new ventures and start-ups, but as the concentration of opportunity, growth and value creation regardless of company size, age or kind. A free download of the papers from this first issue is available at http://www.inderscience.com/sample.php?id=123.

International Journal of Immunological Studies publishes a broad range of original experimental and theoretical papers on all aspects of immunology. It is the flagship journal of the Frontiers in Immunology Research Network. A free download of the papers from this first issue is available at http://www.inderscience.com/sample.php?id=257.

International Journal of Power and Energy Conversion highlights the latest trends in research in the field of power generation, transmission and distribution, reflecting the significant challenges in the power sector, such as the proliferation of power electronic devices, especially in deregulated/restructured power markets. A free download of the papers from this first issue is available at http://www.inderscience.com/sample.php?id=312.

International Journal of Strategic Business Alliances focuses on inter-firm collaboration in a variety of forms in various industries in both national and international environments. It promotes our understanding patterns and strategies of such ventures in the competitive global marketplace. A free download of the papers from this first issue is available at http://www.inderscience.com/sample.php?id=303.

Data solutions provider DataSalon Ltd., UK, has announced a strategic partnership with Ringgold for enhanced analysis of publishers’ customer data. Ringgold creates and maintains a hierarchic database of identifiers for institutions to support publishers and other parties in the delivery of e-content within the information supply chain.

Under the deal, Ringgold and DataSalon will combine the former’s Identify database and the latter’s MasterVision platform to provide publishers with a complete solution. The combined solution can be used by clients for the analysis of their existing customer base and for targeting the most appropriate new sales prospects.

MasterVision is a web-based system which cleans and integrates every source of customer information held by a publisher (including subscribers, authors, alerts and e-commerce), creating a complete ‘single customer view’ for each contact. The system combines user-friendly search and segmentation tools with visual reports, charts and maps, including detailed management dashboards.

In combining the data of Identify with MasterVision’s powerful search and analysis tools, publishers can expect to explore and maximise the value of existing customers and target new prospects more flexibly than ever before. Customer segments can be visualised in many ways, including as hotspot maps of the World, USA and UK; as pie charts detailing the breakdown of customers’ sectors and specialties; or as bar charts tracking signups or lapses over time. In addition, MasterVision can link thousands of individual contacts, authors or subscribers to their parent institutions using Identify to match up their e-mail domains.

Ringgold and DataSalon are already working together closely for several major publishers, including Oxford University Press in the UK and the American Medical Association in the US. Following this strategic partnership, the two will more closely integrate their services, including additional customisations of MasterVision to take advantage of the hierarchical data within Identify as it details the parent/child relationships between organisations.

RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, has been selected as a finalist in the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) 24th annual CODiE awards in the Best Content Management Solution category. RSuite is a content management system built for book, journal, newsletter, magazine, online, technical, and other publishers. Thousands of users perform complex editorial tasks and collaborative workflow routines, harnessing the power of RSuite to drive content creation, management, enrichment, transformation, and delivery.

The CODiE Awards hold the distinction of being the only peer-recognition awards programme of its kind in the industry. The Awards were established in 1986 so that pioneers of the software industry could evaluate and honor each other's work.

RSuite is a browser-based content management system that facilitates the creation, management, re-use, and distribution of XML, media files, and other document formats (Word, PDF, InDesign, etc). Powered by MarkLogic Server, RSuite provides native support for XML content storage services, full text search in combination with XQuery, a full suite of editorial capabilities for XML and other content formats, content re-use at many levels, and editorial workflow tools. It received the 2008 Mark Logic Innovation Award, was named a 2007 finalist for the SIIA CODiE awards in the Best Content Management Solution category.

Academic publisher SAGE is set to launch the SAGE Reference Online Handbook Collection, a set of 80 of its highest rated handbooks, digitised and hosted on the SAGE Reference Online platform. The Handbook Collection was developed following extensive consultation with librarians about how researchers are actually using reference collections in today’s libraries.

Sold as a collection, the handbooks cover a range of subject areas across the social sciences. The Handbook Collection will be hosted on the SAGE Reference Online platform. Users will benefit from advanced searching and browsing capabilities, along with many options for displaying and utilising results.

SAGE will be previewing content from the new collection at the forthcoming UK Serials Group Conference.

EMpact Sales (EMpact), the publisher representation group of EBSCO Information Services, US, has announced an agreement with non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing, UK, to serve as sales agent. The agreement grants EMpact the rights to sell IOP’s print and electronic journals in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, Central America, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Aruba and the Caribbean, including the Bahamas.

The Institute of Physics has an extensive worldwide membership and is a leading communicator with all audiences from corporate specialists through government to the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of peer-reviewed research.

Through its affiliation with EBSCO Information Services, EMpact is projected as the ideal partner for publishers who wish to expand their sales efforts and promotion of their products to additional targeted territories across the globe. The EMpact team can develop an exclusive and strategic plan to broaden the exposure for publishers’ electronic products and content.

EMpact brings to the sales process an expanded team of experienced sales and marketing personnel, many of whom have been working with publishers and libraries for many years. With the support of 32 fully staffed offices in 23 countries worldwide, EMpact’s global reach makes it possible for content providers to take advantage of opportunities they might otherwise miss.

Medialab Solutions, a US-based provider of library software, has announced that the Harvard University Library is to implement AquaBrowser Library, its search and discovery platform, in spring 2009. Medialab is part of bibliographic information provider R. R. Bowker.

The Harvard University Library implementation will include faceted navigation, word cloud discovery, relevancy ranking, an integrated Authority File, real-time availability information for items, and integration with the ILS for patron services. The patron services include placing holds, making requests, viewing checkouts and renewing items.

AquaBrowser is projected as an original search and discovery system for libraries. Medialab Solutions is dedicated exclusively to developing AquaBrowser for providing visual and faceted search solutions for libraries. According to the company, AquaBrowser has over 500 customers worldwide, and can be found in thousands of libraries of all types and sizes around the world.

The AquaBrowser platform is exclusively represented by Serials Solutions in the academic market in North America.

Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that its journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making has recently hit the 250 publications landmark. The journal has known considerable developments since its launch back in 2001. It is attracting more submissions than ever before and publications have climbed by 50 percent in the last three years.

The 250th article, ‘The influence of context and process when implementing e-health’, by David Boddy and colleagues from the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, discusses factors that affect the implementation of e-health projects. The article emphasises that research to support the delivery of appropriate e-health projects can usefully draw on the experience of information systems in other sectors. The article has already been accessed over 500 times since its publication in January.

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in relation to the design, development, implementation, use, and evaluation of health information technologies and decision-making within the healthcare setting. The journal is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Current Contents, Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Google Scholar.

E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has entered into a long-term agreement with YBP Library Services, Inc., a provider of materials to academic libraries. The deal is to expand the distribution of Gale’s Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) e-book collection, Literature Criticism Online; and the CODiE-finalist Gale Directory Library.

YBP will distribute GVRL into the academic library market, where it claims to have a leadership position. GVRL is projected to offer nearly 3,000 reference sources from some 50 authoritative publishers on a stable, easy-to-use platform. Libraries have the flexibility to buy one e-book or multiple e-books; search across a single e-book or an entire e-book collection. The collection grows weekly and covers a wide variety of topics and subjects — ranging from current events to classics and from arts and humanities to small business management. Literature Criticism Online brings together 10 acclaimed literary series representing a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Gale Directory Library is an online collection of cross-searchable directories of companies, publishers and associations.

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. In January 2009, it had announced full cataloging support for Oxford Scholarship Online’s e-book collections.

Information services provider McGraw-Hill Companies, US, has announced the appointment of Lawrence P. Neal as president of Platts. Part of the McGraw-Hill Companies, Platts is a leading global provider of energy and commodities information. Neal succeeds Victoria Chu Pao, who is leaving the Corporation later this month after a successful four-year tenure.

Neal joins a management team that has led the global growth of Platts in recent years. His market knowledge and leadership skills is expected to help Platts build on its record of innovation and independent analysis across the global energy and commodity markets.

Neal is currently executive managing director of Standard & Poor's Equity Research Group, a global provider of independent equity analysis and opinion. He joined the Corporation in 1998 as vice president of Wholesale Markets. For the past two years, he has served as Executive Managing Director of S&P Equity Research Services, where he led a revitalization of the business, established a clear strategic direction, and substantially improved the unit's financial performance. Prior to his current role, Neal led the Portfolio and Index Services business and held key positions as Managing Director of Sales & Service and positions in project management and marketing.

Information management company Infotrieve, Inc., US, has announced that software solution Content SCM has been selected as a finalist in the Best Online Science or Technology Service category of the 2009 CODiE Awards presented by the Software & Information Industry Association.

Content SCM is Infotrieve’s latest solution for automating document sourcing and delivery with a full array of rights management capabilities, copyright compliance auditing, with a complete view of content usage throughout the entire organisation – both licensed and pay-per-view content – built right in. The solution brings document delivery and rights management together in one seamless solution. Content SCM claims to be the only integrated information center solution that can deliver more than 50 percent of all published scientific, technical, and medical content in five minutes or less.

The CODiE 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.

Non-profit copyright licensing solution provider Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), US, has added more than 9 million rights to its licensing services for academic institutions. The company added more than 1 million rights for leading foreign and domestic books, scholarly journals, newspapers and magazines under its Annual Copyright License for Academic Institutions and photocopy rights for more than 8 million foreign works under its Pay-per-use service.

Since introducing the Annual Copyright License in the summer of 2007, CCC has worked with academic librarians, key rightsholders and organisations around the world to secure the necessary rights to a total of 1.5 million leading titles under the annual subscription service, and more rights are being added daily. Among the rightsholders to most recently join the program are Taylor and Francis Journals, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the University of Chicago Press, and Westminster John Knox Press.

The 8 million additional foreign works in CCC's Pay-per-use service are primarily books from Spain, Germany and France. These works are available to license for photocopy use in coursepacks, classroom handouts and interlibrary loan. CCC's Pay-per-use service, currently used by more than 1,000 colleges and universities, is available 24 x 7 at copyright.com.

TERI Press, the publishing arm of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India, recently organised an event, Pathways to Green Publishing: a stakeholders’ dialogue on ecological and sustainable publishing practices. The event emphasised on the role that the publishing industry can play in going green to save the environment. It brought together stakeholders involved in the process of publishing, including paper manufacturers and printers, on a common platform to discuss the environmental issues plaguing the publishing industry as a whole.

The highlight of the conference was the high level Business Leaders Forum, which saw CEOs from publishing conglomerates such as Pearson, Cengage and Elsevier, as well as printers like Thomson Digital and Gopsons. The discussion focused on the ecological issues facing the industry as a whole and their quest for sustainable solutions.

This year’s conference had two special sessions titled ‘Educational institutions as drivers of a greener tomorrow’ and ‘Author Speak’. Teachers and students from various schools participated in the conference to discuss the environmental initiatives that can be taken by educational institutions. The event also focused on ‘green business’, the economics of sustainability, and the role of the media in bringing about a change. The ‘Author Speak’ session saw renowned authors talking on best practices that the publishing industry can look into and also about the latest technologies available.

The conference is a culmination of a year-long series of workshops under the Green Publishers’ Guild in collaboration with the German Book Office, New Delhi. The first and second workshops addressed issues related to the publishing industry, such as the feasibility of using recycled paper and management of hazardous wastes in the printing industry. The second and third workshops addressed a wider audience with an emphasis on greening office buildings and educational infrastructure.

The ‘Green Publishers’ Guild is a membership-based body of stakeholders from the paper, printing and publishing industries as well as corporate houses, government institutions, media, and educational and knowledge-based institutions.

Health information provider MEDai, Inc., US, part of STM publisher Elsevier, has announced that several of its clients will be presenting the benefits and successes they have realised from utilising MEDai's suite of predictive analytic solutions. The presentations will take place during World Research Group's 6th Annual New Innovations & Applications in Predictive Modeling Conference in Las Vegas, March 25-26, 2009. These presentations are expected to provide insight on how payors can maximise and improve resource allocation, improve the impact of care management efforts, and more effectively engage members and physicians in the healthcare delivery process.

MEDai's suite of predictive analytic solutions is designed to meet the needs of multiple constituents. Novant Health, a client, will share how MEDai's predictive solutions can be applied in the outpatient care environment. These solutions allow physicians to access health plan data in real-time for support in evaluating and managing high-risk patients within their practices and in acute care settings. Another client, Sentara Healthcare, will share how it has successfully identified its employer clients' pain points and provided specific reporting and analysis to improve the overall health plan-employer communication process. Finally, during a three-hour workshop, several other clients will team together to discuss demonstrable return-on-investment realised through the use of this technology, and innovative concepts to help employers and health plans gain control over rising health plan benefit costs.

MEDai offers solutions for the improvement of healthcare delivery. Its solutions include severity adjustment (determining the severity of a disease and its effect on the patient’s outcome through the analysis of relevant data), benchmarking and evidence-based care processes. Payors and care management organisations use MEDai to predict patients at risk, identify cost drivers for high-risk populations, forecast future health plan costs, evaluate patient patterns over time and improve outcomes.

E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has announced the June 2009 launch of a new electronic resource, GREENR (Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources). A one-stop site, GREENR will provide authoritative reference content in the area of the environment, energy and natural resources.

GREENR focuses on the academic study of sustainability and the environment. Both interactive and current, the resource will allow users to navigate issue, organisation and country portals. It will provide news, background information, video, unique commentaries, primary source documents and statistics in highly accessible, visually appealing research areas, covering relevant categories including energy systems, healthcare, food, climate change, population and economic development.

This e-source also offers interactive maps, allowing users to browse by country or topic; opportunities for forums, networking and facilitating open discussion, allowing students and teachers to participate in general forums or those designed for specific classes; contextual multimedia, customisable journals and news, refereed case studies; localization to highlight community resources, allowing libraries to advertise their assets as well as upcoming local events; and Web 2.0 tools to facilitate content portability and community building.

GREENR is designed to support research in academic institutions. The resource addresses the growing needs of undergraduate students doing research in the area of the environment, energy and natural resources. Offering in-depth analysis, GREENR arms information seekers with the knowledge and skills needed to understand and succeed in an ever-changing world.

Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, and Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR) have signed an agreement to offer libraries, archives, and other information organisations foundation training and consulting services in the field of digital preservation. The training will include an overview of digital preservation as well as courses on policy and planning for digital preservation, and risk assessment planning and implementation.

These courses, available online and in a classroom format, will provide libraries with a foundation for implementing a digital preservation system such as the Ex Libris Rosetta. Supplementary consulting services to meet the specific needs of each organisation will also be offered.

The Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system provides libraries and archives around the world with a solution to support their task of collecting and preserving cumulative knowledge in digital format for the use of today’s scholars and generations to come. The system is based on industry standards and best practices and supports the acquisition, validation, ingestion, storage, management, preservation, accessibility, and dissemination of all types of digital objects.

Open access publisher BioMed Central, US, has announced that nine of its journals have recently been accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters and are set to receive their first Impact Factors in June 2009 and June 2011.

The journals Diagnostic Pathology; Implementation Science; Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery; and Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy will receive their first Impact Factor in June 2009. Journals that will receive their first Impact Factor in June 2011 include BMC Biochemistry; BMC Cardiovascular Disorders; BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine; BMC Pediatrics; and Human Resources for Health.

These journals bring to a total of 83 BioMed Central journals that are now indexed in Thomson Reuters.