The Elsevier Foundation is seeking new grant proposals for its 2009 Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries and New Scholars programs. Sponsored by STM publisher Elsevier, the new Foundation proposals are due by August 1, 2009. The grants for the two programmes will be awarded in December 2009 and provide one, two and three year awards between $5,000 to $50,000 per year.

The Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries programme supports the efforts of libraries in developing countries to improve their ability to put scientific, technical and medical information to work for those who need it. Past projects have included expanding library information resources through digitisation and knowledge preservation; training and education programmes for librarians and researchers; developed-developing world partnerships to provide longer term technical assistance and training.

The New Scholars programme supports academic and research communities in creating model programmes to help scholars in the early stages of their careers balance childcare and family responsibilities with demanding academic careers in science, health and technology. Grants awarded in 2007-08 have promoted institutional research, advocacy, and policy development to retain, recruit and develop women in science, as well as enabling researchers to attend conferences critical to their careers, by assisting with childcare, mentorship and networking.

Active since 2002, the Elsevier Foundation provides grants to institutions worldwide, with a focus on supporting the world’s libraries and scholars in the early stages of their careers. Since its inception, the Foundation has awarded more than 50 grants worth over a million dollars to non-profit organisations working in these fields.

Content enhancement and knowledge services company Scope e-Knowledge Center, India, a Quatrro Group Company, has announced that the company has been selected to perform a mission critical project for medical terminology mapping from Zynx Health Inc., US. Zynx Health is a health information provider and a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. It publishes evidence-based clinical decision support to improve quality across the continuum of care — from inpatient physician, nursing, and interdisciplinary content to outpatient decision support.

Scope offers a wide range of services to health information providers specialising in both clinical workflow content and patient education and also provides niche services such as medical indexing and image indexing. The company’s key offerings in this domain include authoring and updating medical content, abstracting medical literature, indexing of medical images, medical coding, developing and enhancing taxonomies and thesauri for different medical specialties, content mining and knowledge discovery for medical concepts and updating drug databases.

Scope e-Knowledge Center is a globally recognised creator of medical content for organisations across the world. Scope’s medical content team has rich experience in creating or enhancing content to suit different target audiences.

Acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2004, Zynx offers a suite of online solutions that help clinicians treat their patients based on the best available evidence from systematic research. The Zynx team of physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals rigorously review the latest peer-reviewed literature to develop clinically relevant summaries and distill evidence-based best practices.

The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) recently published a draft report on the provision of usage data and manuscript deposit procedures for publishers and repository managers. The report is now available online at http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/. PEER, a joint initiative of publishers, repositories and the research community, aims to investigate the effects of large-scale deposit (‘Green Open Access’) on user access, author visibility, journal viability and the broader European research environment. The project will run until 2011, during which time over 50,000 European stage-2 (accepted) manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving.

The draft report sets out to establish a workflow for depositing stage-2 outputs in, and harvesting logfiles from, designated repositories to facilitate the research required for PEER. To ensure that sufficient content is made available as a research sample to validate the research process, participating publishers have agreed to collectively deposit 50 percent of the outputs on behalf of the authors. For the other 50 percent, publishers will invite the authors to self-archive their current manuscripts, and any previous manuscripts from participating journals. In addition to workflow, the report identifies the preferred file formats for full text and metadata to be deposited by participating publishers as well as the preferred and mandatory metadata elements.

Issues of relevance to repositories are also addressed, including the proposal to unify the ingestion services either based on format used or protocols such as OAI-PMH or SWORD, as well as procedures for the provision of usage data.

An updated version of the draft report will be made available by PEER later this year.

PEER is supported by the EC eContentplus programme. Partners include the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, INRIA, SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld.

Specialty healthcare solutions provider APS Healthcare and business information company Thomson Reuters, US, have been selected by the New York State Department of Health to manage the state's Medicaid clinical best practice utilisation review programme.

The programme examines how Medicaid patients utilise medical services and explores patterns of potentially unnecessary care and opportunities for improving patient safety or quality of care. The results of sophisticated analytics will be provided to physicians and clinics to enhance the opportunity to improve clinical outcomes through increased knowledge of patients' adherence to treatment or, in some cases, patients overuse of treatment services.

The project leverages the clinical and behaviour change expertise of APS Healthcare and the unique analytic and predictive modeling capabilities of the Medstat Advantage Suite application from Thomson Reuters to identify patient safety issues and flag healthcare services that are duplicative or outside evidenced-based practice guidelines. It will give New York State practitioners prioritised, actionable information they can use to improve health outcomes for Medicaid members.

Under the agreement, APS will be responsible for reviewing fee-for-service Medicaid claims to identify practice patterns that may not conform to physician-developed evidence-based standards, provide information about documented best practices that improve outcomes (e.g., dilated eye exams for diabetic patients), and involve clinician peers who will collaborate with the provider community before, during and after implementation of this initiative.

Thomson Reuters will deploy its Medstat Advantage Suite solution, which combines a customised repository of healthcare data with a comprehensive set of analytic tools. The system generates intelligence and benchmarks that governmental agencies use to analyse and manage the cost and quality of healthcare delivered to their beneficiaries.

The project, scheduled to start by early summer 2009, will review the healthcare services delivered to 3 million New York fee-for-service Medicaid recipients.

The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced that it recently hosted a webcast for Oberlin Group liberal arts colleges about Harvard University’s open access (OA) policy. A number of Oberlin Group colleges are in various stages of discussing faculty OA policies similar to those that have been adopted at Harvard, MIT and the Stanford University School of Education. The webcast served to reinforce these ongoing conversations by answering key questions from librarians and faculty members. Both Trinity University and Oberlin College are now in advanced stages of policy development.

The webcast featured Stuart Shieber, Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and director of the university’s new office of scholarly communication. Prof. Shieber was the chief architect of the OA policy passed by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in February 2008, and has been instrumental in the passage of similar policies by the Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government.

Twenty-six liberal arts colleges from all parts of the US participated in the webcast, which was coordinated by Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University; Ray English, Director of Libraries at Oberlin College; and SPARC staff. The audience included both librarians and faculty at the participating schools.

In his webcast presentation, Prof. Shieber outlined the reasons for Harvard’s adoption of its OA policy, including in particular the history of scholarly journal price increases and resulting problems in access to research literature. He described the details of the Harvard FAS policy, including the university licence under which faculty grant the university blanket permission to exercise copyright on their articles for noncommercial purposes; the waiver provision that allows faculty to opt out of the policy for any specific article; and the processes of submitting metadata and depositing articles in Harvard’s new institutional repository so that they may be made openly accessible.

Prof. Shieber also described the process leading to Harvard’s policy as well as the institution’s long-term commitment to encourage Harvard authors to publish in OA journals by providing support for their authors’ fees. A question-and-answer session followed his presentation.

Anaheim University, a US-based institution which pioneered online education in the mid-nineties, has now committed to being paperless by 2010. This directive has caused Anaheim to push publishers to produce e-books, as well as adopt technical innovations such as the Sony book reader that allow the entire university's curriculum of textbooks to be stored in a portable palm-sized electronic reader.

The Anaheim University President Dr. William Hartley signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment in February 2009. The ACUPCC is a highly visible effort organising U.S. college and university presidents and chancellors to address global warming by minimising global warming emissions and providing education in an effort to achieve climate neutrality.

According to a University representative, Anaheim's students have submitted assignments electronically and accessed online library resources since 1998. This year the university switched from paper to e-catalogues, and digital publishing has replaced the submission of multiple copies of bound theses. The university is expecting to convert all administrative procedures into digital format by 2010.

STM publisher Springer, Germany has announced that two Springer plant science journals - Journal of Plant Research and Plant Ecology – have been included in the 100 most influential journals in biology and medicine over the last 100 years. The journals were described by the SLA as ‘important to the plant science community worldwide and to the librarians who serve them.’

In 2009, the members of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) celebrated the 100th anniversary of their professional group. In conjunction with this centennial, the BioMedical and Life Sciences Division of the SLA conducted a poll to identify the 100 most influential journals in biology and medicine over the last 100 years.

The Journal of Plant Research is an international publication that gathers and disseminates fundamental knowledge in all areas of plant sciences. The journal presents research articles that contribute to the understanding of plants, as well as shorter communications reporting significant new findings, technical notes on new methodology and review articles.

Plant Ecology publishes original scientific papers on the ecology of vascular plants and bryophytes in terrestrial, aquatic and wetland ecosystems. The journal includes studies on any aspect of plant population as well as papers on physiological, community, ecosystem, landscape and theoretical ecology. Plant Ecology also presents symposium proceedings, review articles and book reviews.

Publishing solutions provider The Charlesworth Group, UK, has announced that 14 international publishers will benefit from additional gross annual revenue worth over $1 million through deals negotiated by The Charlesworth Group in China. For the seventh consecutive year Charlesworth has successfully negotiated individual contracts between the publishers and the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL), a consortia headed by the Chinese Ministry of Education. These agreements provide valuable new income from this emerging market, create strong online brand recognition and promote online usage of the subscribed content by the Chinese.

Working as local agents in China, Charlesworth expands the reach of society and university scholarly publishers by providing access to their online journal and database content to NSTL’s end users, which total around 550 Chinese academic institutions, research institutes, and government departments.

In a similar move, the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) announced a three-year contract with The Charlesworth Group and the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) in March 2009. With this agreement, the Society seeks to increase international exposure to its journals Radiology and RadioGraphics.

Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, US, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon unified discovery service. Also participating are new content providers, including engineering society IEEE; IT publisher IGI-Global; scholarly publisher Brill; and two Australian presses that expand the service’s local coverage. The Summon service’s contributors, which include the content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service’s July launch.

Announced in January, the Summon unified discovery service is seen to have captured the attention of both librarians and publishers for its creation of Google-like searching of the full breadth of content found in library collections. These range books and videos to e-resources at the article level. The service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users - a simple, obvious starting point for searches.

The Summon service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library’s content investment. Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon service with its VuFind next-generation catalogue, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service.

The Summon service bypasses federated search in favour of a single search against pre-harvested content enabling fast results, in true relevancy-ranked order. Publishers can use the service for this ability to surface content in the right context at the right time for the right user.

The Summon unified discovery service creates a library-branded search box that eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for library research, making collections simple to use. It is projected as the result of Serials Solutions’ unique combination of assets and expertise, enabled by its growing list of content providers. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to integrate with existing library websites or campus systems with low impact on staff. To learn more about the Summon unified discovery service, visit http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon.

Knowledgespeak.com, a web-only publication of Scope e-Knowledge Center Pvt. Ltd, is now offering a translation widget, which will enable subscribers to access content in 29 different languages, including Chinese, Korean, German and French. The translation option is currently available in all pages of Knowledgespeak on the left side of the main menu bar.

Knowledgespeak has a subscriber base spanning 80 countries across the globe. With this move, the daily STM business intelligence resource seeks to enhance usability and information sharing. Other recent initiatives implemented in Knowledgespeak include a new Blogspeak page which includes blog posts relevant to the publishing industry, particularly STM publishing. Other social networking options such as ‘Digg This’ and ‘Delicious (Bookmark this)’ have also been added to each news article.

Knowledgespeak is the world's first online news service to report all the relevant developments within the STM publishing industry, on a daily basis. This is a free service that also offers additional resources including a calendar of events, articles, white papers and a directory of STM publishers.

The Association of Research Libraries has announced that the proceedings of the 2008 Library Assessment Conference, ‘Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment,’ are now freely available on the web and for purchase in print or on CD-ROM.

This second Library Assessment Conference, following the successful 2006 conference, brought together over 375 participants from libraries, information schools, associations, library systems, and vendors for four days of assessment presentations, poster sessions, discussions, and workshops. The proceedings contain more than 60 papers spanning assessment activities in libraries, information literacy, library as place, organisational culture, management information, using assessment data for change, assessment methods, reference evaluation, LibQUAL+, statistical data, program impact/evaluation, usability, e-metrics, and more.

A detailed overview of the proceedings content and the PDF version are available online at http://www.libraryassessment.org/. The third Library Assessment Conference will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, October 25–27, 2010.

e-content services and technology provider ebrary, US, has announced that it has been appointed by JISC Collections to supply e-book content and delivery platform for its multimillion-dollar e-books for Further Education (FE ) Project. Under the terms of the contract, negotiated in partnership with the company’s authorised distributor 2info, the JISC will fund a collection of over 3,000 multidisciplinary e-books from ebrary and use ebrary’s technology to deliver the content to over 440 Further Education colleges in the UK. Participating colleges may also supplement this collection by purchasing additional titles through a framework agreement.

E-books in the collection were selected by librarians and instructors from FE institutions for relevancy to the curriculum, including content of special interest to colleges in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The multidisciplinary database features titles from leading publishers such as Berg Publishing, Elsevier, Hodder Education, John Wiley & Sons, Pearson Education, Springer and Taylor & Francis.

Additionally, JISC Collections and ebrary will create five new collections, to be made available annually through 2014, of the top 100 e-books chosen by the FE community from ebrary’s growing catalogue of over 100,400 titles available for purchase. Participating colleges can pick and choose individual titles to develop a custom collection for its specific needs that will be delivered alongside the centrally funded core collection.

Online reference library Credo Reference, US, and electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, have announced a new custom linking agreement. Mutual customers will now be able to expand their searches and easily link from one resource into the other.

Credo can now offer custom linking results to related subjects in EBSCOhost. The linking agreement will allow Credo customers to start a search in Credo Reference and continue the same search into EBSCOhost. Similarly, EBSCOhost users can search for related subjects through Credo Reference.

Credo offers full text reference services for libraries and information centres with a collection of over 400 subject encyclopaedias and other reference works consisting of 3.1 million entries, all interconnected by millions of links. EBSCOhost claims to be the most-used research platform available and provides close to 300 databases comprising one of the largest collection of online databases.

Credo’s content is available through EBSCOhost CustomLinks, a library of linking resources that allows libraries to link to full-text databases, OPACS, ILL systems, free resources and search engines. EBSCO has a deep linking library and is also able to create a variety of different CustomLinks for use with EBSCOhost databases upon request. Credo Reference will provide access to EBSCOhost content through its Resource Links technology. Credo’s customers can provide links for their users to a wide range of resources, such as journal databases, OPACs, search engines and free resources.

The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre has announced that everyone in Canada with access to the Internet will now be able to view the full content of The Cochrane Library, an on-line resource that provides evaluations on health treatments.

The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre, in partnership with the Canadian Health Libraries Association, has successfully secured a national license to The Cochrane Library. The license provides a subscription for every Canadian with access to the Internet to benefit from the immense volume of health information found in The Cochrane Library. While this new access will help inform health consumers, healthcare providers will also benefit from this pilot project. Healthcare practitioners will save valuable time to research the best patient treatment options through easy access to this wealth of health information.

The Cochrane Library contains high quality health care information, including Systematic Reviews from The Cochrane Collaboration. These Reviews bring together research on the effects of health care and are considered the gold standard for determining the relative effectiveness of different interventions.

The Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org) is a UK registered international charity and claims to be the world's leading producer of systematic Reviews. It has been demonstrated that Cochrane Systematic Reviews are of comparable or better quality and are updated more often than the Reviews published in print journals.

Digital content services provider Ingram Digital, US, has announced that it has been selected by Berrett-Koehler, an independent publisher, to manage the conversion, storage and distribution of the publisher’s digital assets.

The new agreement is an expansion of Berrett-Koehler’s existing relationship with the Ingram content companies. Ingram Publisher Services, a full-service distributor for a roster of publishers, has been handling the physical distribution of Berrett-Koehler books since 2007. Ingram Digital’s CoreSource allows Berrett-Koehler to distribute content and metadata to different vendors simultaneously, operating at the scale of much larger publishers.

CoreSource is a digital asset management platform providing publishers a flexible and cost-effective solution for managing complex content logistics with various partners. Ingram Digital facilitates the digitisation and storage of a publisher’s assets in a range of formats including .epub, .pdf, .xml, cover images, multimedia files, digital audio books and print on demand files.

CoreSource enables publishers of all sizes to participate in the emerging digital marketplace, simultaneously distributing assets in the appropriate format with the appropriate metadata through multiple sales channels.

STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, and the American College of Cardiology has announced that JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging and JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions have been selected for coverage in MEDLINE. Maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is a premier bibliographic database containing approximately 13 million references to journal articles in life sciences.

JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging and JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions are published monthly in both print and online formats. In addition to original research, editorials, perspectives, and other content, both journals provide expanded online features such as, moving clinical images, video interviews, online discussion groups and more.

The American College of Cardiology is a 37,000-member nonprofit medical society and bestows the credential Fellow of the American College of Cardiology upon physicians who meet its stringent qualifications. The College provides professional education and operates national registries for the measurement and improvement of quality care.

Begell House Publishers, a US-based publisher of scholarly publications in science and engineering, has announced the launch of Thermopedia, (www.thermopedia.com), a new web-based research tool. The product serves as a guide to concepts and gateway to a number of journals and reference works in the field of heat and mass transfer, fluid flow and thermodynamics. Thermopedia’s video demonstrations and animated 3DMax images in selected works are expected to help illustrate specific concepts, enhancing the classroom experience for both faculty and students.

Beyond the fundamental topics, details of industrial processes and plants as well as equipment involving fluid mechanics and heat transfer are also included. Such extensive and wide coverage is projected to be appropriate for practitioners in general engineering (chemical, civil, mechanical, industrial); chemical process design and operation; environmental; power generation (conventional and nuclear) and energy use and conservation. Forward and backward links, an A-Z index and an advanced search engine that provides a view of the entire literature database via a “Map” feature (www.thermopedia.com/map) are seen to make navigating easy.

Thermopedia is based on the International Encyclopedia of Heat and Mass Transfer (IEHMT), published in 1997 and widely used by practitioners. The structure of IEHMT made it ideally suitable for its redesign as both a web-based product and a gateway to other resources, according to the publisher. Libraries have the option to take a 30-day free trial and four flexible subscription options are available. A number of enhancements are already planned such as eLectures – a series of PowerPoint based teaching tools, links to other publishers’ content and conversion of additional data into multimedia graphs.

Medical publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., US, has announced that it will provide complimentary online access to the bimonthly journal, Sustainability: The Journal of Record, for the remainder of the month of April. The journal is being made available in recognition of Earth Day 2009.

The purview of this journal supports the Earth Day mission ‘to grow and diversify the environmental movement worldwide, and to mobilise it as the most effective vehicle for promoting a healthy, sustainable planet.’ Complimentary access is available online at www.liebertonline.com/sus.

Sustainability: The Journal of Record brings together educators, administrators, policy makers, economists, technologists, researchers, and executives at all levels of business that have a commitment to and a responsibility for advancing the efforts toward the preservation and sustainability of global resources. Coverage includes sustainability in higher education; implementing corporate sustainability programmes; integration of environmental, social, human, and economic goals; sustainable products, food, and agriculture; design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings; development of laws and policy; government and nonprofit initiatives; and new collaborations and opportunities.

The Journal provides the central forum for academic institutions, the business community, foundations, government agencies, and leaders of green-collar endeavours to learn about one another's progress and programmes and foster collaborations for attaining mutually supportive objectives.

Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has announced that it has added Sheila Corral, Erin McKean and Ray Lester to its corporate advisory board. The three latest Advisory Board members will each contribute their distinctive perspectives, providing input culled from years of work in their respective fields.

With the addition of Sheila Corral, Head of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, Credo's advisory board now has leading library science academics from both the US and the UK in its circle of advisers. University of Sheffield was recently recognised as having the top-rated library and information science programme in the UK.

Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik, is the first lexicographer to join Credo's advisory board. Her experience includes being editor of ‘Verbatim’ and, most recently, Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

With Ray Lester joining Credo's advisory board it will now include the two most influential reviewers of reference works in the English speaking world. Ray Lester is Editor in Chief of The New Walford: Guide to Reference Resources. The first volume of this multi-volume work reviewing the best reference sources on the market won a special commendation in 2005 from CILIP.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo's General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

Information services provider McGraw-Hill Companies, US, has announced plans to enhance certain corporate governance provisions. The company’s Chairman, President and CEO, Harold McGraw III, has recommended to the board that the company eliminate its classified board of directors and the requirements in the company’s certificate of incorporation for supermajority votes to approve certain corporate actions. This followed discussions with shareholders on the matters to be acted upon at the Annual Meeting of Shareholders slated for April 29, 2009.

At a recently held meeting, the board unanimously determined to recommend to shareholders at the 2010 Annual Meeting an amendment to the company’s Certificate of Incorporation to provide that all of the directors be elected at each Annual Meeting, thereby eliminating the classified structure which results in one-third of the directors being elected each year. Also, the board unanimously decided upon the elimination of supermajority votes required for various corporate actions.

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

Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, has announced the relaunch of Current Protocols.com, a website for scientists engaged in experimental research in the life sciences. The site is projected as an essential resource, bringing reliable, peer-reviewed Current Protocols content together with cutting-edge tools and user-generated content.

The new site will offer users the capability to upload personal protocols to share with the research community; access useful scientific tools and calculators; participate in troubleshooting forums; get expert advice on specific scientific questions related to protocols; read and comment on postings on the Editors blog ‘Beyond the Bench’; access peer-reviewed video protocols; and search or browse through all Current Protocol abstracts.

All content on the site is open access with full text articles remaining on Wiley-Blackwell's online publishing platform Wiley InterScience (http://interscience.wiley.com).

STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced an agreement with the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) to publish The Encyclopedia of Molecular Life Sciences. The 11-volume work will be published in print and electronically in 2012. Society members will have free access to the online edition in perpetuity.

The Encyclopedia of Molecular Life Sciences will focus on understanding biological phenomena at the level of molecules and their interactions that govern life processes. Volumes 1 to 4 will focus on genes and genomes, volumes 5 to 8 on protein structure and function, and volumes 9 and 10 on molecular aspects of cell structure and function. Volume 11 will explore unifying concepts and theory from biology, chemistry and physics that are essential for understanding the molecular life sciences and will also include sections on teaching perspectives and assessment tools.

The information provided in the first ten volumes of the encyclopaedia will be linked to key journal articles of primary literature and will offer an overview of the fundamental theories and foundational concepts that underpin the science. Each volume will consist of four major sections. In addition to volume editors, each section will have its own editor who is an established expert in the field. Contributions to the encyclopaedia will come from leading scientists and educators. The electronic version of the work will provide state-of-the-art functionality and navigation, including electronic supplementary material such as unlimited colour images, datasets, simulations, and video and audio features.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a white paper titled ‘We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables’. The paper examines the problems with current data discoverability and citations and the remedy in creating industry standards for bibliographic dataset metadata and linking.

Written by Toby Green, Head of Publishing at OECD and an expert in data publishing, the paper details the problems with user ability to locate and reference online data. Datasets are a significant part of the scholarly record and being published much more frequently but with widely inconsistent metadata, links and citations. The paper proposes bibliographic metadata standards that could be implemented to provide users and librarians with data that is as accessible and easy to find and catalogue as written works like journal articles and book chapters. By following existing scholarly metadata standards, datasets can easily utilise the existing discovery channels that are used by e-journals and e-books, including library systems, cross reference linking, publishing platforms and search engines.

The paper seeks to provide straightforward standards that publishers, librarians and data providers can implement to improve the accessibility and usage of important datasets. This applies both to the data that underlies scholarly works and data that is published in its own right.

The white paper can be accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/603233448430.

Digital content services provider Ingram Digital, US, has announced a new agreement with Kogan Page, Europe’s leading independent business book publisher.

Kogan Page currently works with Ingram Publisher Services, a full-service distributor for publishers of all sizes, to facilitate their print distribution strategy in the US. Through this expanded relationship, Kogan Page will now also leverage Ingram Digital’s cutting-edge solutions for digital content worldwide.

The Ingram content companies’ integrated capabilities allow publishers to take advantage of emerging opportunities to reach more readers and monetise their content. Publishers employ Ingram Digital’s CoreSource platform to store, manage, repurpose, distribute and deliver e-content including e-books, metadata and related images. With CoreSource functioning as an extension of their digital infrastructure, publishers can fully leverage existing assets by tapping into Ingram Digital’s full range of retail, education and library solutions.

The agreement with Kogan Page illustrates the great synergy that exists among the Ingram content companies. Ingram Publisher Services’ customers have at their disposal the full range of solutions offered by Ingram Digital at preferred pricing. The company is uniquely positioned to help publishers safely navigate a complex web of print and digital channels in order to tap into the widest possible customer base.

Online submission system provider Aries Systems Corporation, US, has announced a collaboration and distribution agreement with Chinese company Asia Pacific Medinfo. The move is in response to the growing interest in the company’s Editorial Manager peer-review system from Chinese publishers and authors.

Under the deal, Asia Pacific Medinfo will provide local support, training and configuration services with a focus on language localisation.

The Editorial Manager online submission system is used by more than 2,900 scholarly journals and processes tens of thousand of manuscripts per month. In March 2009, EMH Swiss Medical Publisher Ltd announced an agreement to deploy Aries’ Editorial Manager online peer-review system 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.

Also in the same month, the Sudanese Journal of Ophthalmology (SJO) selected the Editorial Manager peer-review system to enable authors, reviewers and editors to conveniently collaborate on research that will help address the ophthalmic problems of the region.

Nielsen Book, part of global information and media company Nielsen Company, US, has announced new developments and a significant expansion to its flagship books ordering service, BookData Online. The upgraded service will allow users to access one exclusive source of comprehensive and accurate book information with sales ranking alongside ordering tools; and functionality that provides a one-stop service for booksellers, libraries and publishers.

Effectively, subscribers to the service can search the Nielsen Book bibliographic database, and select and sort titles by BookScan sales ranking. Titles can be ordered and tools used to track these orders and to review order history. Real time supplier data from participating distributors allow booksellers to check price and availability information.

BookData Online will effectively replace the previous ordering service provided by BookNet Web as clients will be migrated to the new platform over the coming months. Both services are powered by BookNet TeleOrdering. The new service is seen to offer a substantial benefit to book buyers, who now have the opportunity of accessing all these functions in one service – login. BookNet TeleOrdering can then route all orders quickly and efficiently to 60,000 suppliers worldwide.

The enhancement to the service is projected to allow retailers to streamline their processes and decision making, and to improve customer service. BookData Online also allows booksellers to receive order acknowledgements from 17,000 suppliers, many of whom now provide this information via the BookNet Web Online Order Collection Service launched two years ago.

For acquisition and cataloguing, Nielsen Book allows librarians to search and rank by sales position to find the right selection. They can use this information to guide their purchasing decision based on which titles are selling and their sales position that week. Librarians can also download MARC records (direct to their desktop) in MARC21 or UKMARC to either fill gaps in their catalogue or a full file for complete catalogue records - from a single source.

Publishers can also use the service to check title records, pricing and information about forthcoming publications up to 12 months ahead, allowing them to plan their releases to achieve maximum sales and review coverage.

XML content server provider Mark Logic Corporation, US, has announced the appointment of Simon Atkinson as managing director of Mark Logic (UK) Limited, the company’s subsidiary in the UK. This appointment is seen to further strengthen the company’s management team and presence in the UK.

Atkinson joins Mark Logic with 20 years of experience in the software and services markets, including senior sales and general management roles. Prior to Mark Logic, Simon was international sales director for Elite, part of Thomson Reuters and a premier provider of financial and practice management systems to the legal industry and other professional services markets.

Mark Logic Corporation provides information access and delivery solutions for publishers, government agencies, and other large enterprises. The company’s flagship product, MarkLogic Server, is an XML content platform that includes a unique set of capabilities to store, aggregate, enrich, search, navigate, and dynamically deliver content.

Genome Medicine, published by open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced the publication of its first research article. The article, covering work on systems medicine and informatics, reflects the journal’s aim to publish high-quality research across a wide range of topics relevant for medical researchers and clinicians.

The article, titled ‘A kernel-based integration of genome-wide data for clinical decision support’, reports work by Bart de Moor’s group at the University of Leuven and describes a novel algorithm that allows the integration of genome-wide data from different sources and leads to improved clinical outcome prediction from cancer data sets.

Genome Medicine publishes research articles in all areas of medicine studied from a genomic or post-genomic perspective. The journal also regularly publishes reviews, minireviews and commentaries that assess progress in the management of health and disease informed from genomic and post-genomic research, as well as the ethical, social and legal challenges associated with developments in this emerging field.

Genome Medicine is led by six renowned Section Editors and supported by an internationally recognised Editorial Board.

Academic and professional literature publisher Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., UK, recently announced a partnership with the Association of MBAs (AMBA). AMBA sets global standards for all MBA, DBA and MBM courses and accredits over 157 programmes in 71 countries. This agreement will benefit AMBA’s 9,000 members with access to trusted, high quality resources held on Emerald Management First.

Emerald provides content for AMBA that is accessible in a digestible format, making it easy for users to cut through the overload of information available on the Internet and target only essential, up-to-date resources.

Emerald publishes over 700 titles, comprising 200 journals, over 300 books and more than 200 book series as well as an extensive range of online products and services. The Emerald online collection of journals, abstracts and resources, Emerald Management Xtra, serves business schools and management departments world-wide. For managers in corporate and public organisations, Emerald Management First provides fast access to applied research, ideas, insights and interviews from the world's best management thinkers.

e-content services and technology provider ebrary, US, and Ambassador Books and Media, a premier provider of print and non-print materials to libraries of all types, has announced that more than 100,000 multi-disciplinary e-books and other titles from ebrary can now be purchased through OneSource, Ambassador’s proprietary online ordering system.

The selection continues to grow, with more than 4,200 added in the past month alone. An overview of the new selection is provided at http://www.ebrary.com/corp/acquirePurchaseNew.jsp.

Ambassador Books and Media is now celebrating its 36th anniversary as a premier provider of print and non-print materials to college, university, school, corporate, public, government and medical libraries throughout the world. Ambassador supplies the complete book and publication requirements of schools, libraries and other educational institutions in over thirty countries.

Through continuous and significant investment in personnel and technology, Ambassador is able to offer a comprehensive range of book and media services to libraries, with a recognised reputation for high order fulfillment, accuracy, reliability, experienced and professional customer service support, and state of the art automation capabilities and interfaces.

OneSource is Ambassador's proprietary, password protected software that offers clients access to a database of over 4 million book titles and over 1.5 million media titles; the capability to order, claim, cancel and verify shipping status online; receive MARC formatted order confirmations, generate order reports sorted by PO, Title, Author or ISBN; and view invoices and statements online to confirm account balances.

Health information services provider Healthline Networks, US, has announced two new decision-support platforms for online healthcare. These are Healthline TreatmentSearch, a treatment search application for the web; and Healthline DocSearch, a searchable doctor database featuring semantically-suggested specialists based on the consumer's health condition or symptoms.

These join Healthline SymptomSearch, Healthline DrugSearch and Healthline Learning Centers to inform patients and caregivers at every stage of the health condition: from symptoms and diagnoses, to doctors, treatments, drugs and costs. The integrated suite of Healthline Clinical Applications is now available on Healthline.com and will be licensed to select partners within Healthline Networks.

With most treatment information online embedded deep within articles on health websites, Healthline TreatmentSearch is claimed to be the first online application to surface a semantically-generated list of possible treatment options for a disease or condition. The application covers 4,500 treatments, including 1,200 medications and 3,300 medical, surgical and alternative therapies. Healthline Treatment Search results are ranked algorithmically, and sub-categorised into Diagnostic Tests; Medical Procedures; Surgical Procedures; Self Care; Alternative Procedures; Prescribed & Over-the-Counter; Medications; and Nutritional Supplements.

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced the creation of a new research tool that will harvest metadata from internal and external sources, creating a centralised pre-indexed service of significant size and speed. The tool, EBSCO Discovery Service, will provide libraries with a single entry point for research and launch users into the entire array of a library’s collection. The launch is expected by the end of the calendar year.

Powered by EBSCOhost technology, the new discovery service will enable users to search a wide-ranging collection of metadata and link quickly to the content to which they have rights. EBSCO Discovery Service will allow for ‘local’ access to the metadata associated with EBSCO Publishing’s leading databases, e-journals from more than 400 publishers, and additional resources from other partners, including OCLC, NewsBank, Readex and Alexander Street Press.

Due to the newly announced partnership with OCLC, local indexing of WorldCat will add rapid access to the metadata for 130 million books, videos and music CDs. Locally indexed content will also include news and information resources from NewsBank and the digital collections from its Readex division. Alexander Street Press is also participating, allowing access to its historical archive, music and video collections. New partnerships for additional locally indexed content will be announced in the near future.

In addition to the locally indexed content, libraries will have the ability to search the content of the over 300 databases on EBSCOhost, as well as databases on remote services through EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS). EHIS is a federated search service that is based on the EBSCOhost platform and expected for release in June 2009.

The Research Information Network (RIN) has published a new briefing note, Scholarly books and journals at risk: responding to the challenges of a changing economy. The briefing note warns that if libraries are forced to make budget cuts on their journals and books subscriptions, then the UK's ability to support world class research and teaching could be put into jeopardy.

The recent dramatic fall in the value of sterling is projected to have seriously damaged university library purchasing budgets, putting scholarly books and journals at risk. This briefing note aims to inform and motivate universities, funding bodies, researchers, librarians and publishers, to work together to find creative, practical and sustainable solutions to this serious and unforeseen challenge to the vitality of the UK's research base.

University staff and students depend on good access to scholarly publications. A key function of libraries is to broker the acquisition of books and journals on behalf of universities, and libraries must ensure that their purchasing decisions represent the best value for their institution. The current budgetary challenges could do fundamental damage to research and scholarship, and compromise universities' capacity to pursue their core business - therefore these challenges will affect far more than just the library.

Through this briefing note, RIN calls on all the key stakeholder groups to work together to find solutions to ensure that the scholarly publications link in the chain from genius to wealth creation is not damaged beyond repair.

The briefing note is available online at www.rin.ac.uk/scholarly-journals-books-risk.

Medical publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., US, has announced the launch of a new, peer-reviewed online journal, Ecopsychology. Thomas Joseph Doherty, PsyD, Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR), is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, the inaugural issue of which is currently available for free online at www.liebertpub.com/eco.

Ecopsychology seeks to explore the psychology of human-nature relationships and understanding the multidimensional links between humankind and its natural environment. The journal will play an important role in the field of mental health and well being for children and adults of all ages.

Included in the inaugural issue is an interview with Robert Greenway, Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, CA), who discusses the development of his wilderness expedition program at the university and explores the development of an authentic language of human-nature relationships. Martin Jordan probes the link between how humans react to intimacy or early interpersonal attachments and their later relationship with nature.

E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, is offering free resources on its completely updated Environmental Resource website (http://www.galeschools.com/environment/) in celebration of Earth Day. Users can browse the activities page (http://www.galeschools.com/environment/activities.htm) to learn more about endangered species, biomes, tips on ‘going green,’ lesson plans and more, or download a free bookmark, poster or screensaver.

Tools and resources are available at http://www.galeschools.com/environment/tools.htm and include a parent’s and teacher’s guide, fun scientific projects at ‘Experiment Central,’ and details on environmental ethics.

Also accessible from the Environmental Resource website is a preview of Gale's new online resource GREENR (Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources), due to release in June; and Global Issues in Context, providing the latest information on hot topics such as climate change, nuclear and renewable energy and recycling.

Publisher Reed Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the appointment of Anthony Habgood as chairman, effective June 1, 200. This is subject to his appointment as a member of the supervisory board of Reed Elsevier NV at an extraordinary shareholders' meeting to be held in May. He will succeed Jan Hommen.

As announced in January 2009, Hommen stepped down from Reed Elsevier at the conclusion of the Annual General Meetings on April 21 and 22. David Reid, senior independent director, will be acting chairman until Habgood takes up his position.

Habgood will resign from his positions at Bunzl plc and SVG Capital plc, of which he is chairman and a non-executive director respectively, by July 1, 2009. He will remain as chairman of Whitbread plc.

The Fifth edition of blogspeak is now online. Featured are Liz Wager (If comment is cheap why is peer review so expensive?); Ryan Paul (Wikipedians to vote on Creative Commons license adoption); Nicole Harris (Where is the I in Open Content?); Christian Zimmermann (Tips for authors to improve their RePEc ranking); and Nate Anderson (Journalism Online: time to start paying for online news). A service of Knowledgespeak.com, Blogspeak includes blog posts relevant to the publishing industry, particularly STM publishing. Subscribers are invited to participate in the latest edition of blogspeak at http://www.knowledgespeak.com/
Blog/Blog_Index_More.asp?MID=1#41.