Market research and data services provider Research and Markets, Ireland, has announced the addition of Woodhead Publishing Ltd's new report ‘The Future of the Academic Journal’ to their offering. The report contains contributions from leading international figures from universities and publishers. It looks at a fast moving and vital area for academics and publishers.

The Future of the Academic Journal report examines current issues in journals publishing and looks at how the industry will develop over the next few years. With contributions from leading academics and industry professionals, the report provides an authoritative and balanced view of this fast-changing area.

There are a variety of views surrounding the future of journals and these are covered using a range of contributors. Online access is now taken for granted - 90 per cent of journals published are now available online, an increase from 75 per cent in 2003. This book looks at a range of key topics that are of vital importance to academics and publishers alike.

Research and Markets provides the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends. The company holds thousands of major research publications from most of the leading publishers, consultants and analysts. Earlier in May 2009, the company announced the addition of the ‘Publishing Addiction Science: A Guide for the Perplexed’ report to their offering. Written by an international group of addiction science journal editors and their colleagues, Publishing Addiction Science is a comprehensive guide for addiction scientists - especially novice researchers - facing the complex process of publishing in scholarly journals.

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Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has signed an agreement with the Society for Endocrinology and its subsidiary, BioScientifica Ltd. Under the deal, Portico will preserve the online collection of the five e-journals they publish, together with their predecessor titles. The UK-based Society has been publishing journals since 1939, and exists to advance scientific and clinical education and research in endocrinology for the public benefit. BioScientifica publishes journals on behalf of the European Society of Endocrinology and the Society for Reproduction and Fertility.

Through this agreement with Portico, the Society and BioScientifica seek to ensure that the online version of these journals will be preserved and available for future scholars, researchers, and students. The group has named Portico as a mechanism to fulfil post-cancellation access claims and has also agreed to make an annual financial contribution to Portico. With the inclusion of these e-journals, over 10,300 e-journals and 27,000 e-books from 82 publishers on behalf of 2,000 societies and associations have now been entrusted to the Portico archive.

Back in August, Portico announced a preservation deal with the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) Library (UTS Library) to preserve its online collection of 11 e-journals. Also in the same month, Portico was approached by several librarians to expand its preservation work with Open Access publishers. Portico already preserves nearly 350 Open Access titles from its current publisher participants. The service is seeking support from librarians to identify additional titles of greatest concern.

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NetBase, Inc., a US-based provider of research software solutions that enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research, has announced the launch of healthBase (healthbase.netbase.com), a semantic search tool. healthBase is projected as a public showcase of the company’s Content Intelligence platform, which can read sentences inside documents, linguistically understand the meaning and power breakthrough search and discovery solutions.

The product uses Content Intelligence technology to automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; and pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food. Like all NetBase-powered applications, healthBase enables users to get summarised answers and insights automatically from millions of online sources.

The company expects the product to demonstrate its technology by providing simple and comprehensive answers to health questions. Each question takes seconds to answer and is equivalent to someone manually reading thousands of documents. As no manual work is required to build the semantic index, healthBase can search on and find answers to tens of thousands of health conditions, diseases, treatments, medications, supplements, foods and even plants.

NetBase had launched Content Intelligence in April 2009, projecting it as a technology to harness billions of documents, linguistically understand sentences and automatically find answer to questions, not just lists of 'results.' The company had also announced that it had expanded its customer relationship with STM publisher Elsevier for several more years. The agreement was seen to validate NetBase's leadership position in helping large publishers such as Elsevier transform rich content into fully searchable insight applications that easily map to the workflow of today's fast-paced knowledge worker.

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Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that the American Psychological Association has accepted two BioMed Central journals for inclusion in its abstracting database PsycINFO. The journals accepted for inclusion are: BMC Neurology and International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition & Physical Activity.

BMC Neurology is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of the prevention, diagnosis and management of neurological disorders, as well as related molecular genetics, pathophysiology, and epidemiology. The journal is also included in a wide range of other indexing services including PubMed, MEDLINE, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Current Contents, Thomson Reuters and Google Scholar.

International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition & Physical Activity is the official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. The journal publishes articles focusing on the behavioral features of diet and physical activity.

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.

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Construction cost information and reference data publisher RSMeans, a division of Reed Construction Data, has released the third edition of the RSMeans Estimating Handbook, a reference guide for construction estimating and cost analysis.

The expanded third edition of the handbook is seen to cover the full spectrum of technical data required to estimate costs for major construction projects. It also covers construction specialties including green building, metal decking, plastic pipe and demolition items, and provides resources including updated city cost indexes, historic cost indexes and a reorganisation to the newest CSI MasterFormat classification system.

The resource is expected to cater to everyone in the industry, from experienced construction professionals down to students learning the basics of cost estimating. It includes information on sizing, productivity, equipment requirements, code-mandated specifications, design standards and engineering factors – all organised according to the latest CSI MasterFormat classification system.

The RSMeans Estimating Handbook seeks to help construction professionals evaluate architectural plans and specifications; prepare accurate quantity takeoffs; compare design alternatives and costs; perform value engineering; double-check estimates and quotes; and estimate change orders.

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M|C Holding Corporation, owner of M|C Communications, a provider of medical education solutions for healthcare professionals under the Pri-Med brand, has announced the appointment of Frank F. Britt as President and Chief Executive Officer. The Pri-Med network of live meetings and digital forums is a leading source of education and information for its community of over 200,000 clinicians.

Britt, who previously held the position of M|C Communications' General Manager of US Operations since June 2007, was named President & Chief Executive Officer of M|C Holding Corp. effective August 1, 2009. Prior to joining M|C Communications, Britt helped build and lead several tier-one solutions-based business services firms in the technology, industrial, and consumer services industries. He has held a variety of executive level positions with IBM Global Services, Mainspring (acquired by IBM), Accenture and Arthur D. Little.

As President & Chief Executive Officer, Britt will be responsible for managing the overall day-to-day operations of the company with the executive team.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc.’s book-scanning project has been criticised by a group of authors, publishers and the governments of France and Germany, it has been reported. According to them, the plan would give Google too much control over out-of-print books.

The complaints were raised at a EU hearing in Brussels that is reviewing how a $125 million settlement between Google and US publishers will affect the EU. A group that represents Google rivals including Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. has alleged that the deal would create a cartel involving thousands of publishers.

Google is currently working with Oxford University’s library and six others in Europe to scan out-of-print books that are no longer copyright protected. The project, which began in 2004 with books from Harvard University, the New York Public Library and other sources, has digitised over 10 million books. According to Google, the agreement will ‘bring back to life’ millions of books that are moldering on library shelves and will create a new market for out-of-print books.

Germany has called the electronic copying of books without the consent of copyright owners as unacceptable and has asked European regulators to look into how the settlement affects EU rights. German publishers are concerned that their books, which are still commercially available in Europe, would be considered “out of print” if they are not sold in the US. While Germany submitted its objections on August 31, France recently presented objections over the deal to the US court ahead of the October 7 hearing.

The US settlement, which is yet to be approved by a judge, covers orphan works - titles for which no one can be identified to give permission for digital use.

In 2005, Google had been sued by authors and publishers who said their copyrights would be violated by scanning books and making them available online. In October 2008, the company agreed to settle two copyright lawsuits with authors and publishers over its book-scanning service, which could make it the primary source for millions of out-of- print books.

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Online publishing newsletter Publishing Perspectives has released the results of a survey, conducted among publishing and ad execs in the US, discussing the issue of declining marketing budgets. The survey revealed that one stable area of the marketing spend is on ‘co-op,’ or the cash paid to retailers for a premium in-store display, such as on tables, end caps or in windows. The co-op marketing channel can cost tens of thousands of dollars per week, per title, for premium placement within a single national retail chain. However, most publishers vouch for its effectiveness.

It has also been observed that the online medium is a highly effective means of marketing books. Amidst tight budgets, marketing money is largely being directed toward online ads and campaigns, efforts that are becoming increasingly prevalent, even for high profile titles. In particular, publishers are finding online campaigns especially effective at generating pre-pub publicity for titles. Still, for many marketing executives raised on traditional print and television media, online marketing can still be perceived as a compromise. It may be viewed as something done as an inexpensive alternative to more costly print and television campaigns — a perception that remains difficult to change.

A recent study by Kelley Gallagher, Vice President of Publishing Services at RR Bowker, substantiates the need for online marketing in the current scenario. The study’s results were presented in May 2009 at the Book Industry Study Group’s Sixth Annual Making Information Pay conference. Gallagher’s research revealed that of 30,000 consumers who were asked in what medium they were first made aware of a new book, 54.1% cited online/internet advertising, while only 21.2% said TV, radio, and newspaper magazine advertising.

With the recent economic downturn, book advertising is seen to be on the decline. The majority of US publishers have cut their marketing budgets by 50-70 percent over the past year. While some ad prices have been depressed, prices have not dropped far enough to make them a viable way to advertise most books.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that nearly 250 health sciences titles published and/or publishing in 2009 and 2010 will be launched in October. These new eBook collections cover clinical content in clinical medicine, veterinary medicine, and health professions. Elsevier will make these titles available electronically through ScienceDirect, its online scientific research platform. These new eBook collections follow the May release of titles published from 2000 to 2008, bringing the total Health Sciences eBooks on ScienceDirect to more than 870 titles.

Elsevier’s Health Sciences books are published under the imprints W.B. Saunders, Mosby, Churchill Livingstone, and Hanley & Belfus, publishers with a rich medical and health science publishing heritage dating back to 1688. The inclusion of these books on ScienceDirect will allow even more researchers across the world to access these valuable content resources.

Until May of this year, Elsevier’s medical and health sciences book titles had only been available through MD Consult for clinical practitioners and medical education; Evolve eBooks for health professions education; and Veterinary Consult for veterinary medicine education. The thousands of authors represented in the Elsevier medical and health sciences collections on ScienceDirect can now enjoy greater market visibility, increasing the potential for research collaboration and recognition.

The addition of the Elsevier Health Sciences 2009 and 2010 eBook Collections follows the successful launch of over 600 Health Sciences titles published from 2000 to 2008. These titles further contribute to the evolution of the ScienceDirect platform into a comprehensive and complete source of global scientific knowledge.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced the launch of a new book series on Green Chemistry. Green Chemistry is one of the rapidly growing concepts in modern chemistry. Through national awards and funding programmes, national and international course, networks and conferences, and a dedicated RSC journal, Green Chemistry is now widely recognised as being important in all of the chemical sciences and technologies, and in industry as well as in education and research.

The RSC Green Chemistry book series is a unique venture aimed at providing high level research books at the cutting edge of Green Chemistry. The books are projected to be a valuable resource for industrialists, researchers and academics worldwide as well as others interested in the practical means that are being used to reduce the environmental impact of chemical processes and products. Topics covered will include green chemistry metrics; chemicals from biomass; greener pharmaceutical products; alternative energy sources; green chemistry in water; intensive chemical processing; catalyst heterogenisation; organic synthesis using green chemistry methods; green chemistry using biological systems; solvent-free synthesis; and more.

Professor James Clark of University of York Heslington and Professor George Kraus of Department of Chemistry Iowa State University will serve as the series editors.

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The newly formed UK Library and Information Science Research Coalition has announced the appointment of Dr Hazel Hall to provide strategic leadership.

The remit of the Coalition is to facilitate a co-ordinated and strategic approach to Library and Information Science (LIS) Research across the UK. It was founded in March this year by the British Library (BL), the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the Research Information Network (RIN). Dr Hall is the Coalition’s first appointment.

The Coalition aims to bring together information about LIS research opportunities and results; encourage dialogue between research funders; promote LIS practitioner research and the translation of research outcomes into practice; articulate a strategic approach to LIS research; and promote the development of research capacity in LIS. It will provide a formal structure to improve access to LIS research, and maximise its relevance and impact. The Coalition is governed by a Board of Directors comprising a representative of each member organisation.

Dr Hall currently serves on the editorial boards of two major LIS journals (Library and Information Science Research and the Journal of Information Science). She is also on the Executive Committee of the Online Information conference, the largest annual information industry conference and exhibition. She is an Associate Consultant at TFPL, a London-based specialist professional services company focusing on knowledge, information, library, records and web and content management.

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Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced the appointment of Bev Acreman as Commercial Director. Acreman comes to BioMed Central from Taylor & Francis, where she has played a significant role in growing the company to its present position as a major player in STM publishing.

With the proven success of the open access publishing model, BioMed Central is experiencing rapid growth in manuscript submissions, has many exciting new products in development and sees many opportunities for exciting partnerships and relationships with academic institutions, libraries and societies. In her new role, Acreman will use her wide experience of STM publishing to ensure that BioMed Central continues to lead the way in delivering excellent service to authors, readers and institutional customers. Her extensive previous involvement with learned society journal publishing will be a major asset as BioMed Central continues to develop its own rapidly expanding society publishing programme.

BioMed Central is an STM publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media.

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Incisive Media, the UK-based organiser of the Online Information 2009 conference, has announced that the event will feature three opening keynote sessions. The keynote sessions will be dedicated to each of the conference tracks taking place from December 1 – 3, 2009, at Olympia, Conference Centre London. Each track will be keynoted by expert speakers.

‘Information + Conversation = Collaboration + Innovation’ is the common theme of the 2009 event and the three diverse tracks with dedicated keynotes will seek to deliver vital and thought provoking sessions. The opening keynote will be delivered by Dame Wendy Hall and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, both part of the Semantic Web movement. The second day will be keynoted by Blaise Cronin, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. On the last day social media expert Charlene Li, Co-author of Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, will explore how organisations need to transform themselves to harness the ever changing social web. All of these opening keynote sessions will seek to give an insight into the three strong conference programme tracks set to showcase innovation and signpost emerging trends for 2010.

Online Information’s closing keynote panel will take a look at how cloud computing is driving the evolution of the web. Moderated by Stephen Arnold, President of Arnold Information Technologies, the panellists include - Charlie Hull, Lemur Consulting, UK; and Nicolas Maquaire, President and CEO, EntropySoft, France.

According to the organisers, the conference regularly attracts over 800 delegates from across 40 countries. The conference format is made flexible so that delegates can tailor their own personal experience of the event. The topics from the three different tracks can be individually mixed and matched, there are in-depth pre-conference workshops and a dedicated conference social network to facilitate meetings with industry peers from across the globe. Delegates also receive automatic free entry to the Online Information and IMS 2009 exhibitions which run alongside the conference.

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American Institute of Physics (AIP) and knowledge discovery software developer Collexis Holdings, Inc., US, have announced the launch of a new web-based tool for the physics community - AIP UniPHY. The new networking site can be viewed at http://www.aipuniphy.org.

AIP UniPHY is a scientific networking site for physical scientists. It allows them to search for collaborators, see what competitors are up to, communicate with colleagues, and exhibit their own latest work. Unlike other social networking sites that rely upon outside users to join and populate their databases with a galaxy of linked information, AIP UniPHY comes pre-populated with the profiles of hundreds of thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries, all interconnected by virtue of their publication histories.

Any scientist who has published at least three articles over the past ten years in one of the more than 100 journals in the Searchable Physics Information Notices (SPIN) database (http://scitation.aip.org/jhtml/scitation/spincodens.jsp) has a profile on AIP UniPHY. Each profile is connected to a network of other profiles that belong to a person's co-authors on any paper. And each profile is also connected to all the co-authors of any co-authors — whether that profile belongs to a graduate student, post-doc, professor, Nobel laureate, or the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

On the existing site, users can look at other authors publishing records, view lists of co-authors, and browse for collaborations by research category. The site will evolve over the coming months to include many additional collaborative features, data sources, and social networking functions.

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The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have submitted a supplemental filing with the US District Court that is overseeing the proposed Google Book Search settlement. The purpose of the supplemental filing is to address developments that have occurred since the groups submitted their filing on May 4.

While the library associations’ position has not changed since their initial filing, the groups believe that recent activity should be brought to the court’s attention. These include an amended agreement reached between Google and the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Google’s recent public statement regarding privacy; and the library associations’ communication with the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). In their supplemental filing, the associations call upon the court to address concerns with pricing review, to direct Google to provide more detail on privacy issues, and to broaden representation on the Books Rights Registry.

Both the filings emphasise that vigorous oversight by the court is needed to ensure the proposed Google settlement does not erode core library values, such as equity of access to information, patron privacy and intellectual freedom. Google plans to sign the settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.

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Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, has announced that it recently recorded the 50 millionth substance in CAS REGISTRY. The CAS REGISTRY claims to be the most comprehensive and high-quality compendium of publicly disclosed chemical information. This milestone comes only 9 months after CAS registered its 40 millionth substance. The recently registered substance is a novel arylmethylidene heterocycle with analgesic properties.

REGISTRY is the only integrated comprehensive source of chemical information from a full range of patent and journal literature that is curated and quality controlled by scientists working around the world. For more than 100 years, CAS scientists and colleagues in several nations have meticulously analysed and indexed publicly disclosed global scientific information to build up the unique REGISTRY resource that provides not only chemical names, the unique CAS Registry Number, and vital literature references but also ancillary information such as experimental and predicted property data (boiling and melting points, etc.), commercial availability, preparation details, spectra, and regulatory information from international sources.

The 50 millionth substance (CAS Registry Number 1181081-51-5) was uncovered by CAS scientists from the Examples section of a nearly 200-page patent issued by the World Intellectual Property Organization on August 13, 2009. According to the patent, "Few therapeutics are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies for the treatment of neuropathic pain." To address this concern, a series of novel arylmethylidene heterocycles were synthesized, which included the most recent substance registered by CAS.

CAS REGISTRY is available to scientists through CAS' SciFinder, and its STN family of products. With these advanced search and analysis technologies, CAS helps scientists find reliable information that is vital to their research process.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced a new publishing partnership with the Canadian College of Health Service Executives (CCHSE). Under the deal, Elsevier will publish the College’s official journal, Healthcare Management Forum (HMF), beginning 2010. Kevin Mercer, District Manager of ParaMed Home Health Care, will serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. He will be supported by an eminent Editorial Board.

Healthcare Management Forum is projected as a trusted resource for innovative solutions and leading practices related to health leadership. Widely recognised for its high-quality contributions and rigorous review process, HMF serves the needs of a diverse and changing health leadership community by linking scholarly inquiry with new ways of thinking about professional practice.

Healthcare Management Forum publishes four times annually with issues appearing in April, July, October and December. Elsevier will begin publication with Volume 23 (2010). Several sections of front matter, the featured article and all abstracts will appear in English and French. The journal is currently indexed and abstracted in MEDLINE and PubMed.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris (Deutschland) GmbH has announced that the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has successfully gone live with its new Aleph integrated library system (ILS).

Aleph provides academic, research, and national libraries with the efficient, user-friendly tools and workflow support they need to meet the increasing requirements of the industry. Customisable components accommodate the requirements of institutions of all types and sizes, from single-branch libraries to the largest of consortia. Installed in scores of countries worldwide, Aleph offers full Unicode support, which enables both public and staff users to interface with the system in their preferred language.

Aleph, which was selected following an extensive and thorough RFP process including both national and international vendors, has replaced the University’s former LBS system.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism have announced the appointment of the new Editors of the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism (JCBFM). Dr. Ulrich Dirnagl and Dr. Martin Lauritzen take up their positions with immediate effect.

Dr Dirnagl is based at the Charite University Medicine Berlin where he holds the positions of Director of the Department of Experimental Neurology; Executive Director of the Center for Stroke Research; Co-Director of the Department of Neurology; Deputy Director of the Neuroscience Center; and program director of the International Master/MD-PhD Program 'Medical Neurosciences'. He takes up his position as Editor having previously served JCBFM as Deputy Editor.

Dr Lauritzen is Professor, Chief Physician and Chairman of the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at University of Copenhagen at Glostrup Hospital. He is the head of an experimental research group that studies the relationship between changes in neuronal function and brain circulation and metabolism. Prior to his role as Editor of JCBFM, Dr Lauritzen served on the journal's Editorial Board.

The JCBFM editors will be joined by two new Editorial Managers. Catherine Aubel will support Dr Dirnagl. Louise Juhl Bony will support Dr Lauritzen. Candace Berryman, who served as Editorial Manager during Dr Traystman's editorship, is stepping down.

Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism is published by NPG on behalf of the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism. The journal stands at the interface between basic and clinical neurovascular research, and features timely and relevant research highlighting experimental, theoretical, and clinical aspects of brain circulation, metabolism and imaging.

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The Publishing Research Consortium has released a study analysing the use of journals by the staff of high-tech small businesses (small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs) in the UK – with 250 employees or fewer. The study says that these staffers place a high value on, and make considerable use of, research articles and other academic and professional information. Their access to such information is good, and improving, although it could be even better. This study is projected as an important first step in improving understanding of how staffers in small businesses use journals and what can be done to achieve even greater access.

The full study, ‘Access by small and medium-sized UK enterprises to professional and academic information’, carried out by Mark Ware Consulting Ltd. for the Publishing Research Consortium, is available online at http://www.publishingresearch.net/SMEaccess.htm

According to the findings of the study, while 28 percent of the respondents in SMEs said that their journal access was ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, 56 percent said that it varied, and 17 said percent that it was ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. However, of those who considered information to be an important success factor for their organisation, 71 percent found access to research articles ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’, while 29 percent felt it was ‘fairly difficult’ or ‘very difficult’. Sixty percent felt that access was easier than five years ago. Despite this, more than half had experienced some recent difficulty in obtaining one or more articles, representing 10-20 percent of articles read annually. Although they use a wide range of access channels, they find current pay-per-view (PPV) arrangements costly and difficult, and ‘walk-in’ access at a local university inconvenient.

The study offers suggestions on what publishers can do to improve access for these users. It suggests that PPV access could be made cheaper and simpler, with more appropriate payment mechanisms for companies rather than individuals. Licences for higher education Institutions could be extended to provide online, rather than just walk-in, access (with appropriate safeguards) for local businesses. A comprehensive, centrally administered national licence could also be negotiated.

The Publishing Research Consortium is a group of associations and publishers that supports global research into scholarly communication in order to enable evidence-based discussion. It seeks to support work that is scientific and pro-scholarship, in order to promote an understanding of the role of publishing and its impact on research and teaching.

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British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced plans to extend its ‘New Ways of Reading’ display to encourage users to investigate new reading technology from the moment it is released. Under the initiative, the library is showcasing the Bloomsbury Library Online, a new service which allows readers to borrow e-books from their public libraries. Also, three new e-reader devices are on display. These include the COOL-ER reader and Sony’s ‘Pocket’ and ‘Touch’ Reader devices - not available in shops until September 10.

With the arrival of services such as the Bloomsbury Library Online - being showcased on the upper ground floor of the British Library from September 3 – readers will soon be able to view electronic content at their local library and remotely via Internet enabled devices. Run by Bloomsbury Publishing, this online service provides access to shelves of popular material by theme.

As well as demonstrating how content is being made available, the Library has added new hardware to its e-reader display. On August 26, Sony launched its two latest editions to the Sony Reader family at the Library. These allow users exclusive access to these two new models, now part of the display, before they are released in the shops on September 10. Easy to navigate with a single hand and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, the Reader Pocket Edition is claimed to be ideal for commuters. The new models from Sony are joined by the ultra-light, user friendly COOL-ER Reader, designed by small British firm Interead. Offered in a range of colours, Interead has created a dedicated e-bookshop for the devices to make the upload process as simple as possible and bring e-readers to the non-technologically inclined masses.

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The Harvard University Library has announced the launch of a University-wide, open-access repository, DASH — Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (http://dash.harvard.edu). More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.

Visitors to DASH can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. More than 1,500 items can be located in DASH currently, with the number increasing every week. The repository also houses a growing number of retrospective articles and papers. Contributors include Harvard President Drew Faust and University professors Robert Darnton, Peter Galison, Stanley Hoffman, Barry Mazur, Stephen Owen, Amartya Sen, Irwin Shapiro, Helen Vendler, and George Whitesides.

Still a beta, DASH is a joint project of the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the Office for Information Systems (OIS), both of which are strategic programs of the Harvard University Library. DASH is based on the open-source DSpace repository platform. Software customisations will continue throughout the coming academic year. The repository is also intended to serve as a local digital home for a wide and growing array of other scholarly content produced at the University. Non-faculty researchers and students are already afforded deposit privileges, and DASH will eventually have collection spaces for each of the 10 schools at Harvard.

Among the many features the DASH development team has added to its DSpace implementation is the ability to link directly from a faculty author's name in DASH search results to his or her entry in Profiles, a research social networking site developed by Harvard Catalyst. Profiles, which provides a comprehensive view of a researcher's publications and connections within the University research community, currently indexes faculty from the medical and public health schools. Its developers hope to expand it to include the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the near future.

DASH currently supports automated embargo lift dates, so that a work can be deposited "dark" and then automatically switch to open access once a publisher's self-archiving embargo has expired. Another noteworthy feature is DASH's PDF header page: when a user downloads a full-text item, DASH generates a header page for the document, giving its provenance and relevant terms of use.

DASH has its roots in the February 2008 open-access vote in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In a unanimous decision, FAS adopted a policy stating that each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his/her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorise others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

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The American Psychological Association has announced that it will soon begin publishing the Asian American Journal of Psychology, the official publication of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA). The journal will be edited by Dr Frederick T.L. Leong, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Multicultural Psychology Research at Michigan State University.

The Asian American Journal of Psychology will be dedicated to research, practice, advocacy, education, and policy in Asian American psychology. It will publish empirical, theoretical, methodological and practice oriented articles covering topics relevant to Asian American individuals and communities.

Over the last decade, the membership of the AAPA has expressed a strong interest in having its own professional journal. The Asian American Journal of Psychology represents the fulfillment of this longtime goal. The Association is in the process of developing a full publishing programme for the journal and expects to begin publication in spring, 2010. It will begin soliciting articles in the near future.

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TechWeb, a division of United Business Media, has announced the Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco is bringing its Launch Pad program to the recently announced West Coast event happening November 2-5, 2009 in the Moscone North Convention Center. Launch Pad provides a public forum for companies to unveil new social tools intended to make businesses more agile, efficient and adaptable in today's enterprise. The first round of submissions is now open and interested parties can submit their Twitter pitch to #e2conflp.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference is looking for innovative applications that are in development and about to launch, or recently launched. The first round of submissions will be posted on Twitter. The next two rounds will consist of one- and three-minute video submissions which the E2 community will vote on. The four finalists will be announced in late October and will have the opportunity to give a five minute demonstration of their applications live on the keynote stage at the event. The winner will be chosen by conference attendees after the presentations.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. This annual conference and demo pavilion focuses on the tools and techniques that best leverage the technical, productive and social aspects of IT and workgroup environments to build a cohesive collaboration strategy and empower a connected workforce.

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The National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) has announced Dr. Maulik Joshi as the new Editor in Chief of its official journal - Journal for Healthcare Quality (JHQ). Dr. Joshi officially assumed the position of Editor in Chief of JHQ on August 1, 2009.

Reaching more than 5,000 health professionals, faculty, and students, the JHQ is published by Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. A bimonthly publication, the journal is a professional forum that continuously advances healthcare quality practice in diverse and changing environments. It claims to be the journal of choice for creative and scientific solutions in healthcare quality.

Dr. Joshi is president of the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) and senior vice-president for research at the American Hospital Association (AHA). Before joining HRET, he served as president and chief executive officer of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement and was previously a senior advisor for the office of the director at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

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The latest edition of blogspeak is now online. Featured are Kent Anderson (Learning from Books — Lessons for STM Publishers); John Blossom (Doubling Down on Print: Magazine Launches Uptick in A Crunched Economy); Michael Clarke (SSP IN — INteract, INspire, and Innovate); and Gideon Burton (Scholarly Communications must be Syndicated). 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 Here

The US’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the availability of funding information for grants and contracts through RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), a new search system on its Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT). RePORTER is expected to allow users to locate descriptions and funding details on NIH-funded projects along with research results that cite NIH support. It seeks to combine NIH project databases and funding records, PubMed abstracts, full-text articles from PubMed Central and information from the US Patent and Trademark Office with a robust search engine.

User-defined searches allow the public to refine, export and analyse results and provide insights into NIH spending, as well as research results across NIH-funded projects, institutions, investigators or scientific concepts. Searching for grants funded by the Recovery Act is seen to be made especially easy by a checkbox that limits searches to that area of interest. Plans for improvements in RePORTER include allowing users to personalise their experience. NIH seeks to provide users the ability to save favourite searches, set alerts for new grants, publications and patents, and even export the entire RePORTER database.

RePORTER is the latest tool on the RePORT website, NIH's online repository of reports, data and analyses of research-related funding. RePORT provides data on NIH's research-related grant and contract funding, including general reports and statistics, funding by research, condition and disease categories, and new data visualisation tools. Dynamic reports and geographic mapping tools are claimed to offer unparalleled access to information on NIH's Recovery Act grant funding on an individual project, state or national level.

RePORT is available at RePORT.nih.gov. The project search tool, RePORTER, is available through the RePORT site or by going directly to ProjectRePORTER.nih.gov.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that Scopus, its abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, in joint partnership with the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) and Commission on Higher Education (CHE) Thailand, will present the TRF-CHE Researcher Awards. The Awards recognise outstanding and exemplary new researchers and mid-career researchers who have received grants from TRF and CHE.

Recognising the critical importance of using clear and transparent indicators to evaluate outstanding research performance, Scopus citation data and Scopus H-index were used to provide the measurement of the applicants’ research performance, thereby determining their influence in the discipline.

The TRF-CHE Researcher Awards will be given out on two levels – Distinguished Researcher Award for recipients of mid-career researcher grants co-funded by TRF and CHE, and Distinguished Young Researcher Award for recipients of the New Researcher Grants that are co-funded by TRF and CHE or TRF alone. They will be presented in six major categories - Life Science, Health Sciences, Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Physical Sciences, Engineering and Multidisciplinary Technology and Humanities and Social Sciences. The awards will be given out at the 2009 TRF-CHE Annual Congress on October 15, 2009.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has released a new resource addressing health policy, an area seen to be of critical significance. Health Policy Reference Center provides extensive coverage of all aspects of health policy and related issues.

Designed to assist those involved in the creation, implementation, and study of health policy & the health care system, Health Policy Reference Center is projected as a vital tool for researching health policy issues. This collection is a valuable information source for corporate entities as well as for large hospitals and other medical facilities, particularly those with a large role and interest in community health. Academic institutions as well as governmental agencies & departments and government policymakers will also benefit from this research tool.

Health Policy Reference Center offers cover-to-cover content from more than 300 publications, including journals, monographs, magazines, and trade publications as well as government-produced content such as GAO (Government Accountability Office) reports. Many areas integral to health policy are covered. This includes healthcare access and delivery; healthcare administration; healthcare financing and economics; healthcare quality; healthcare reform; health services research; and public health.

Health Policy Reference Center is designed to provide users with quick and easy access to vital information, including complete full text with images, tables, charts, and other graphical content. The database also covers tens of thousands of additional highly relevant articles, selected from thousands of industry publications.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that ‘From Groundwork to Action’, the 2010 National Diversity in Libraries Conference (NDLC), will take place from July 14-16, 2010, in Princeton, New Jersey. The biennial NDLC seeks to serve as a regional meeting for library staff members to discuss diversity issues, especially issues common to the host region’s culture.

The 2010 NDLC Planning Committee has called for proposals for presentation at the conference. Conference presentations are sought in all areas of diversity including – but not limited to - workplace, user services and technology.

The deadline for submitting proposals is October 2, 2009. Those interested in participating in the event can consult the NDLC wiki for further information regarding presentation formats, selection criteria and submission guidelines.

ARL, a nonprofit organisation of 123 research libraries in North America, aims to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. It seeks to advance the goals of its member research libraries; provide leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities; foster the exchange of ideas and expertise; and shape a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organisations.

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The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) will launch a new organisation called JISC Advance later this week. JISC Advance will bring together eight established JISC services as part of JISC’s ongoing strategy to deliver world-class support to colleges and universities.

The organisation will be led by new managing director Guy Lambert and will co-ordinate JISC Digital Media, JISC infoNet, JISC Legal, JISCMail, JISC Netskills, JISC Procureweb, JISC TechDis and the JISC Regional Support Centre UK by centralising funding and business development opportunties. Guy, working with the JISC Advance team of service directors, will be talking to sector-wide organisations as well as individual universities and colleges to better understand their priorities and needs.

JISC Advance will launch at the Association for Learning Technology conference (ALT-C) at the University of Manchester on September 9, 2009.

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Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of technologies for R&D, has announced the opening of a new software research and development center in Bangalore, India. Developers at the new facility will collaborate with other Symyx sites on the company's core scientific information management software solutions, including the Symyx enterprise electronic lab notebook (ELN), data acquisition software, decision-support software and scientific information databases.

The company is partnering with Encora, Inc, a global provider of collaborative product development (CPD) services, to establish the R&D center in Bangalore. Encora plans to setup the Symyx R&D center, which will deploy 30-35 developers by the end of 2009, through its field-tested collaborative engagement model.

Symyx currently provides a suite of software, content, and technology to support R&D scientific information management. Symyx software gives scientists immediate access to personal, laboratory, enterprise, proprietary and third-party information across different projects and platforms.

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