The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has announced the launch of the ASME Digital Collection (formerly the ASME Digital Library) on SCM6, an online publishing platform from Silverchair Information Systems. It is expected that the platform will provide expanded accessibility and discoverability for ASME's e-books, journals and conference proceedings by leveraging the latest in semantic technology and a host of other features and functionality.

The Silverchair SCM6 platform is said to feature a wide range of applications and capabilities which includes new taxonomy, full text and taxonomic search capabilities, new topical collections and enhanced content display and tools. The other features include improved usability, information discovery and ease of reading, personalisation capabilities and optimised viewing.

ASME seeks to help the global engineering community develop solutions to real world challenges. Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical and medical publishers, professional societies and the federal government.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and Chinese engineering portal EEFOCUS have announced a partnership that will see the IET’s essential engineering intelligence made available to over 1 million researchers and academics throughout China. A sample selection of articles from the IET Digital Library will be available free of charge and researchers will also be able to access article abstracts from the IET Inspec bibliographic database. The move is part of the IET's mission to make engineering content available to as wide a global audience as possible.

Under the agreement EEFOCUS members will be able to access up to 30 IET Inspec abstracts per month, spanning a broad range of specialisms from across the technology and engineering fields. Access will also be given to up to 10 IET journal articles from the IET Digital Library translated into Mandarin and selected from relevant journals such as Wireless Sensor Systems, Radar, Sonar & Navigation and Computers & Digital Technologies.

EEFOCUS has over 1 million registered users and acts as an information portal for the electrical engineering community in China. It provides an important reference link to relevant books, journals and other materials and provides a forum where users can discuss industry topics. In partnership with the IET, it will add leading academic research to its offering.

The IET zone on EEFocus is due to go live in January 2013 and will be available via the EEFOCUS homepage - www.eefocus.com

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced reduced or frozen subscription prices for subscribers of the SPIE Digital Library. An additional 40,000 articles from 1962-1989 are also being added to the collection, at no additional cost to subscribers.

This is the fourth consecutive year that SPIE has frozen subscription prices for the SPIE Digital Library. With this move, the Society seeks to ensure affordable access to the largest and widely used collection of optics and photonics literature to the greatest number of researchers, and also meet its commitment to address the long-term budgetary pressures facing libraries.

The 40,000 conference proceedings and journal articles to be added to the SPIE Digital Library this summer will extend the digital collection to the beginning of the society's publishing programme which began in 1962. This much-requested and difficult-to-find older content includes pioneering and fundamental technical papers dating from 1962 through 1989.

In addition to its nine journals and over 8,000 conference proceedings volumes, the SPIE Digital Library includes the SPIE eBooks collection containing monographs, tutorial texts, and field guides published by the SPIE Press.

To support researchers in developing or low-income countries, SPIE participates in the eJDS programme of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, providing papers on demand to individual scientists, and the Information Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications PERii programme, providing access to libraries in developing nations at low or reduced rates.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced plans to further expand its digital offering with a significantly redeveloped and enhanced Digital Library.

The new Digital Library, developed on Publishing Technology’s pub2web platform, is designed to improve the speed and ease with which academic and corporate users can access the IET’s 3,000 eBook chapters and 185,000 journal articles, which stretch back to 1872. The redevelopment kick-starts the IET’s major digital strategy and is the first of a number of platform improvements to be announced over the coming months.

Launching later this summer, the Digital Library is part of the IET’s mission to facilitate access to essential engineering intelligence worldwide. All of the IET’s research content will be available on the new platform, including the IET’s newly announced open access journal which will contain articles from some of the world’s leading academics, free of charge. The platform will shortly incorporate access to IET.tv and its archive of 3,500 videos.

New features of the Digital Library will include easier navigation and quicker access to relevant content. It will also allow for greater discoverability, improved librarian and customer support and communication, plus increased authentication options for the user.

The SPIE Digital Library has announced that its Proceedings of SPIE has ranked among leading journals for the third quarter in a row, as one of the 50 most-used of 50,000 journals in the world.

The SPIE Proceedings, which comprise much of the SPIE Digital Library contents, rank among the top 50 most-used journals out of 50,000 analysed in the Ex Libris bX Journal Popularity Report. The report covers all the sciences and is based on the usage of millions of researchers from numerous institutions worldwide.

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 225,000 constituents from about 150 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional growth, and patent precedent.

Cambridge University has published, on a new digital library website, over 4,000 pages of Sir Isaac Newton's most important works. These include an original manuscript containing Newton's famous laws of motion. Also available online publicly is the scientist's own annotated copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

First published in July 1687, Principia not only contains the laws of motion but also Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant works in the history of science. The university library will upload almost the whole of its Newton collection available for anyone to view and download over the next few months.

Work on the Cambridge Digital Library began in 2010 with the Newton collection being photographed during last summer. Up to 200 pages were captured each day. Major conservation work had to be carried out on several manuscripts and notebooks before they could be digitised.

The next phase of the project will see works by Charles Darwin and the archive of the Board of Longitude made available online.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is joining forces with international publishers to offer free access to the ACM Digital Library to help 15,000 Haitian students, researchers, and teachers continue their scholarly activities in computer science. ACM is part of an international effort to rebuild cultural and educational institutions following the destruction wrought by the January 2010 earthquake.

The project, initiated by the State University of Haiti (UEH) and Libraries Without Borders, has resulted in the creation of a digital campus scheduled to open September 28, in Port-au-Prince.

In the short run, the UEH Digital Library will offer simple, easy and immediate access to electronic information resources as part of a larger effort to address the destruction of 11 of the 12 State University libraries in the earthquake. The long-term objective is to establish a University reference library in Haiti, opening the way for quality research, and building sustainable higher education. ACM is one of 20 international publishers who are offering access to high-quality online resources and enabling development of information and communication technologies in Haitian universities.

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SPIE, an international society for optics and photonics, has announced that it is further reducing the prices of its SPIE Digital Library. The Society was among the first publishers to respond in 2009 to economic challenges besetting the research library community by reducing subscription prices.

SPIE is reducing current prices by 5 percent for 2012. SPIE implemented a 10 percent rollback in pricing for institutional subscriptions to the SPIE Digital Library in 2010 to help libraries contain costs, and sustained this by freezing prices in 2011.

SPIE has offered the price rollbacks while expanding services, features, and content for a growing number of companies, universities, and institutes. Looking forward, SPIE will continue adding new content to the library, and is planning a major new platform change and upgrade for launch next year.

This year, new functionality such as 'more-like-this' recommendations was added to the SPIE Digital Library, and the Society began publication of the new Journal of Photonics for Energy, which is freely available in 2011, and available by subscription starting in 2012. In 2010, SPIE added eBooks to the SPIE Digital Library, and launched its open-access journal SPIE Reviews.

The 5 percent price reduction applies to current and new subscriptions to the full SPIE Digital Library, which includes the Proceedings of SPIE and all SPIE Journals, and to topical segment subscriptions. It does not apply to consortia arrangements, for which customised discounts are already applied, however, 2012 prices for consortia will be frozen at 2011 rates. The price reduction does not apply to SPIE eBooks, specially discounted subscriptions or promotional packages, or to institutional subscriptions to journals purchased independently of the SPIE Digital Library.

The SPIE Digital Library claims to be the world's largest resource for optics and photonics research. The collection includes nearly 320,000 journal and proceedings articles published from 1990 to the present, with approximately 18,000 new articles added annually. Topics span the broad interdisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging, with applications across biomedicine, communications, energy, aerospace, defence, manufacturing, computing, sensors, entertainment, and electronics.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has released a new version of the ACM Digital Library. Building on the breadth and depth of this renowned repository of digital knowledge, the new site simplifies usability, extends connections, and expands content with a wide range of new tools and features. More than 1.5 million users have access to ACM's Digital Library, a readership representing individuals and institutions from over 190 countries worldwide, who download about 13-15 million full text resources annually.

New features in the ACM Digital Library (DL) enable users to browse efficiently by author, publication type, ACM Special Interest Group (SIG), and conference venue. The new DL also integrates extensive visualisation technology that captures details of the more than 150 international conferences and symposia associated with ACM. Among these advances are multidimensional geographic maps that display the expanding global nature of ACM events. The redesigned format also lists conferences alphabetically and chronologically, and links to access the published proceedings of each event as well as authors, acceptance rates, and downloads of presented papers, tables of content, abstracts, source material, and a history of the conference.

The site invites comments from readers and browsers to strengthen ties within the computing community. In-depth information about ACM Special Interest Groups and related conferences is also accessible through the new DL. In addition, DL content has been expanded to include citations for hundreds of information technology books from the best authors and publishers available.

The ACM Digital Library contains comprehensive full-text resources from ACM's vast collection of its own published journals, conference proceedings, magazines, and newsletters, and detailed bibliographic resources from other publishers, including data for every author and article in its archive. It houses ACM publications dating from the 1950s as well as coverage of other publishers starting in the mid-1980s. The DL captures more than three million pages in a visually enhanced format that makes this information conveniently accessible and easily searchable. The DL's new features and structure facilitate information dissemination and sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration for computing professionals, practitioners, researchers, and educators on a global scale.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) recently entered into an agreement to deliver APA online resources to member sites of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA). This new agreement expands access to a wealth of trade and scholarly psychology literature previously unavailable to VIVA institutions. It also includes access options for various combinations of databases from APA's full suite of premier resources for the behavioral sciences - PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES, and PsycEXTRA - all delivered on the APA PsycNET search platform.

In addition to these core databases, VIVA member institutions may also choose to purchase sets of eBooks from APA Books E-Collections. These full-text collections of APA book titles grouped by copyright year are also available on the APA PsycNET platform.

Since the signing of the agreement between APA and VIVA, APA has been facilitating the transition of VIVA member institutions to the APA PsycNET platform by hosting customised training sessions for the participating institutions' librarians. Ongoing support for both librarians and end-users will continue throughout the subscription period, enabling users to get the most out of the databases and the APA PsycNET platform.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) has announced the immediate availability of Online First Publication (OFP) for APA-published journal articles in the PsycARTICLES database. Articles accepted for publication will now be available in electronic format prior to the print publication, expediting access to the latest peer-reviewed research.

All PsycARTICLES institutional customers, individual APA PsycNET database package subscribers, and individual journal subscribers may now search these records as an added benefit. OFP records can be released within 30 days of acceptance and transfer into production, and are marked to indicate the posting status, allowing researchers to quickly and easily discover the latest literature. Online First will be the version of record; the articles have gone through the full production cycle except for assignment to an issue and pagination. After a journal issue's print publication, OFP records will be replaced with the published record to reflect the final status and bibliographic information.

Advance release of these articles is in line with APA's mission to expand the communication of 'psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives'. The initiative is also a major upgrade to PsycARTICLES, which claims to be the largest full-text journal database in psychology with nearly 150,000 articles from 1894 to the present. All APA-published journals are available electronically through PsycARTICLES.

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SPIE, an international society advancing light-based research, has announced that authors of papers accepted for the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) may choose from an expanded suite of open access options now including delayed open access publication. The latest SPIE journal open access option provides JBO authors, who pay standard voluntary page charges in full, with open access for their papers in the SPIE Digital Library beginning one year after publication.

Since September 2009, JBO articles identified as being funded by the US National Institutes of Health are deposited in the open access PubMed Central collection where the full text is available after one year. The service is provided by SPIE at no cost to the author.

SPIE publishes two fully open access journals - SPIE Letters virtual journal and SPIE Reviews. SPIE Letters virtual journal is a collection of letters from all SPIE research journals, in publication since 2006 with voluntary page charges. SPIE Reviews, which launched this year, does not ask for author payment. Both open access journals are published online at no cost to authors. Authors publishing in any of the other seven SPIE journals may ensure immediate open access publication of their papers by paying a per paper fee of $1,500.

New SPIE journal papers are published online in the SPIE Digital Library as they complete peer review and production. The SPIE Digital Library is hosted on the American Institute of Physics' Scitation platform with audio and video multimedia, flexible search, and extensive CrossRef linking features. The library claims to be the world's largest resource for optics and photonics research with about 296,000 journal and proceedings articles from 1990 to the present.

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The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has announced the availability of select ASME Press book titles from 1998 to the present in eBook format on its Digital Library. Starting July 1, ASME will offer, for the first time, 50 titles in eBook format. The Society will add another 50 titles by the end of 2010.

The ASME Digital Library is projected as an indispensable tool for mechanical engineers and engineers across a wide range of disciplines, as well as for scientists in allied fields. With the addition of eBooks, the site now unifies access to all of ASME's eBooks, journals, and conference publications through a single search interface.

ASME eBooks allow the consumer to browse and search thousands of chapter abstracts and excerpts online at no cost. Each eBook is fully searchable on its own or collectively with the ASME online journals and conference papers. eBooks will be available in a diverse range of subject areas including design and manufacturing, engineering management and pipeline engineering.

ASME eBooks are available either through a standard 12-month subscription for 2011 or through a one-time purchase which provides continuous access to all titles. Both options include new book titles as they become available and include all 2010 print publications.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the launch of the new ACM Digital Library Resource site at http://librarians.acm.org. The new site is expected to serve as a valuable tool for librarians, consortium administrators, subscription agents, and end users interested in learning more about the ACM Digital Library.

The new ACM Digital Library Resource site provides detailed information about ACM publications contained in the DL; features and functionality of the platform; subscription and pricing information for institutional subscribers; end user training and marketing materials; free trial information; and a growing list of other services for existing and new subscribers. According to ACM, it is investing heavily in the development of its cutting edge content delivery platform and scholarly publications. This site is expected to serve as an important resource to keep the library community informed of these developments.

As one of the world's leading technology associations, the ACM was one of the first publishers to launch a full-text database of scholarly literature (back in 1997) and make this database available to subscribers. Over a decade later, the ACM continues to develop, host, and maintain the Digital Library platform itself, which gives the Association the ability to customise the functionality of the platform specifically for the specialised needs of its users in the fields of computer science and information technology.

The ACM Digital Library consists of one of the world's largest databases of full-text articles on computing (over 280,000 articles dating back to 1954) and the field's largest bibliographic database (The ACM Guide to Computing Literature) with over 1,500,000 articles and 8,000,000 references with total DL usage in 2009 exceeding 13,750,000 full-text downloads.

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