STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the acquisition of Mendeley, a London-based company that operates a global research management and collaboration platform. Researchers worldwide use Mendeley's desktop and cloud-based tools to manage and annotate documents, create citations and bibliographies, collaborate on research projects and network with fellow academics.

Launched in late 2008, Mendeley was the brainchild of three PhD students wanting an easier way to manage their research papers and collaborate with colleagues overseas. They developed a desktop app that could automatically extract metadata and keywords from PDFs, thus turning loose collections of PDFs into structured, searchable research paper databases that were synchronised to the cloud.

To welcome Mendeley's individual users, Elsevier is increasing the product's Freemium offer. The free storage level has expanded from 1 gigabyte to 2, and the amount of storage provided in the premium levels has expanded as well. For institutions, the Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) will continue to be available. MIE is a tool that helps universities analyse research activity in real time, complementing the traditional Impact Factor system of academic citations. It also enables librarians to extract more value from resources by optimising their subscriptions and providing a better service to their researchers by tracking which journals are being read by faculty and students.

This union extends a history of collaboration between the two companies that began in 2009. For instance, Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley's Science Online London conferences on Open Science.

Scientific American Mind has launched a new destination for mind-and-brain-themed blogs, blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind. The Scientific American Mind blogs will concentrate on psychology, neuroscience, and related fields. Six new blogs will join the 11 existing mind-and-brain blogs on the Scientific American Mind Network. All of the Scientific American Mind blogs will also be featured on the Scientific American Blog Network.

Scientific American blog editor Bora Zivkovic will curate the Scientific American Mind blogs along with Scientific American Mind Managing Editor Sandra Upson and Editor Ingrid Wickelgren.

The introduction of Scientific American Mind blog destination is another point of growth for Scientific American's digital offerings. In July 2011, Scientific American launched the Scientific American blog network to unite editorial, independent and group blogs under the magazine's banner. The blog network provides a platform for people in the science community to exchange ideas and interact with SA readers. It started at 47 blogs and has grown to 56.

Scientific American Mind has also launched a new home page, mind.scientificamerican.com, which hosts print and online articles, as well as multimedia, in one convenient location.

Science magazine Scientific American and InnoCentive, Inc., the global leader in open innovation, crowdsourcing, and prize competitions, have announced the launch of the Scientific American Open Innovation Pavilion, jointly hosted on www.innocentive.com/pavilion/scientific-american and www.scientificamerican.com/openinnovation. The online hub to foster scientific collaboration and open innovation is the result of a partnership between InnoCentive, Inc. and Scientific American.

The Scientific American Open Innovation Pavilion launches with four Challenges selected to appeal to problem solvers unique to both the InnoCentive and Scientific American audiences. These include: Algorithm for Matching Latent Fingerprints: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932941; Design of Student-centric Websites for Open-Enrollment Colleges and Institutions: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933168; Breakthrough Health Tech Modifications – Consumer Technology that Improves Health: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933294; and Support Plate Replacement for Humanitarian Air Drops: https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9932740.

Commercial organisations, government agencies, and non-profits (known as 'Seekers') are able to post 'Challenges' on the Scientific American Open Innovation Pavilion. These 'Challenges' are well-articulated descriptions of scientific and technical problems that require innovative solutions. The Scientific American Open Innovation Pavilion provides these 'Seekers' with unprecedented access to a global pool of problem solvers, including InnoCentive's existing 285,000-person-strong solver network and Scientific American's audience of five million monthly visitors to ScientificAmerican.com.

The Scientific American Open Innovation pavilion marks the growth of InnoCentive's collaboration with Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Scientific American's parent organisation. In June 2009, InnoCentive and NPG launched the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion, which is hosted on InnoCentive.com and nature.com, www.nature.com/openinnovation.

The Scientific American Open Innovation Pavilion is one of several Scientific American initiatives that center on solving real life science challenges. Since May 2011, the magazine has actively promoted citizen science projects at http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science. In 2012, Scientific American launched the Science in Action Award, powered by the Google Science Fair, which recognises a project by young scientists that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a community.

Research collaboration startup Mendeley has announced the release of the open standards CSL Editor, produced in collaboration with Columbia University Libraries and supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The product is projected as the first true 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' citation style editor for open source CSL citation styles.

It has been observed that most academic journals insist that papers submitted to them conform to the journal's own, idiosyncratic citation style. This has led to a proliferation of thousands of different citation styles, often with only minuscule differences in the placement of commas, or the use of quotation marks and italics. To support their users in this arduous task, reference management tools like Mendeley ship with 2,789 different citation styles which can be used when formatting a bibliography in Word or Open Office.

However, it turns out that 2,789 was still not enough: being able to edit and create new citation styles easily was the top-ranked feature request by a wide margin on Mendeley's user feedback board. Users frequently lamented that the one particular style they needed was not covered, or that they were unable to switch from tools such as EndNote or RefWorks as long as a particular style was lacking. The citation styles in EndNote or RefWorks are built in a closed, proprietary format, which prevents their re-use in other referencing tools. In response, scholars have created the open source CSL (Citation Style Language) standard, which has since been implemented in tools like Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, Docear, and Qiqqa.

The main drawback of CSL styles, however, was that editing them required a knowledge of XML code, making it impossible for most researchers to adapt citation styles to their needs. Mendeley's new WYSIWYG citation style editor allows anyone to click on any element of a citation they would like to change, and then format the output with a few simple clicks. The output is saved in CSL-standard compliant XML and can thus be used in any other reference management tool. If a researcher does not know the name of the citation style they need, they can simply type in an example, and the Mendeley CSL Editor will suggest matching styles.

Mendeley, a UK-based startup, has announced that Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets (MIE), the web-based research analytics dashboard and social collaboration platform, has expanded its reach into the Asia–Pacific market. The platform is being rolled out at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus. This foreign campus of the University of Nottingham in the UK joins other institutions in the region, including Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council (AFFRC) of Japan, in adopting the platform.

The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus library has a large international student base, necessitating a great degree of flexibility in the tools they use to conduct and manage their research. All libraries signing up for the MIE can roll out premium versions of Mendeley's end-user platform to all researchers across their institution. MIE's cloud-based solution has opened up new possibilities for the Campus' end users to work and collaborate remotely, an important factor for the University.

From the library point of view, keeping track of reading and publication trends among this diverse group was a huge bonus to the library. The insights provided by the tool will give the library a more central role in the research workflow undertaken across their institution and greater visibility of end-user behaviour and how to refine the library collection to meet their changing needs.

During the implementation stage, Swets and Mendeley worked with the library to build a customised citation style that, although based on the Harvard system, was unique to this institution. The possibilities for further growth in the tool's analytics capabilities and benchmarking are revealed as layers will be added to what is based on the one of the largest citation databases in existence.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has launched a Web content collecting initiative. The Library is selecting Web content as part of its mission to collect, preserve, and make accessible the scholarly biomedical literature as well as resources that illustrate a diversity of philosophical and cultural perspectives not found in the technical literature.

New forms of publication on the Web, such as blogs authored by doctors and patients, illuminate healthcare thought and practice in the 21st century. In launching this initiative, the Library is capturing and providing a unique resource for future scholarship.

The Library's inaugural collection of Web content is 'Health and Medicine Blogs,' presenting the perspectives of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators and other individuals in healthcare fields. The collection also includes patients chronicling their experiences with conditions such as cancer, diabetes and arthritis. The site currently contains 12 blogs, including KevinMD.com, "social media's leading physician voice"; Not Running a Hospital, a blog by a former CEO of a large Boston hospital; e-patient Dave, a cancer survivor and leader in the participatory medicine movement; and Wheelchair Kamikaze, who writes about his personal experience living with multiple sclerosis (MS). The collection can be accessed from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/webcollecting.

Guided by the NLM Collection Development Manual and other strategic collecting efforts, NLM will continue to expand its capacity to collect Web content. With this initiative NLM has taken a major new step in its mission to collect pertinent healthcare information of today for the benefit of research in the future. Increasingly, that information is found on the Web, which is a rapidly changing environment where valuable and interesting materials can surface and then quickly disappear. The Library is working to ensure it can effectively collect new material in a Web environment, and guarantee the material's permanence and availability to current and future patrons.

In launching this initiative, NLM joins many other national, state and public libraries and archives that have acknowledged the importance of preserving Web content for future generations. In addition to the Internet Archive, which has been broadly archiving the Web since 1996, dozens of libraries and cultural heritage institutions have been engaged in thematic or event-based collecting. This community has contributed to the development and use of common tools, techniques, and standards that enable the creation of Web archives. NLM has benefitted from this work and from local partners such as the Library of Congress, which is actively engaged in collecting and preserving Web content.

The NLM has already been archiving portions of its own Web domain considered to be of enduring value. With this new effort, the Library is now collecting Web content that others have created.

UBM Live and UBM Tech, the UBM businesses behind TFM&A and InformationWeek, have announced the launch of Big Data Republic, a community for those dealing with transforming their businesses with big data.

As the world experiences an unprecedented explosion in information, harnessing that data and making sense of it is one of the biggest challenges that business, government, healthcare, education, and most other sectors face over the coming decade.

Big Data Republic aims to 'transform your business with data' – helping all levels of business to understand this emerging field and turn it to their competitive advantage. The community will explore how big data can steer business strategy with expert articles, interactive data visualisation, and rich video content.

Supported by sponsorship from Dell, SAP and Information Builders from launch, Big Data Republic is published in partnership with UBM DeusM, the integrated marketing services arm of UBM, which has launched more than 35 online communities for B2B audiences in the past two years. These sites have received more than 65 awards.

UBM DeusM, the integrated marketing services arm of UBM, and UBM Electronics, the daily source of essential business and technical information for the design engineering and electronics industry's decision makers, have launched The Connecting Edge, a new online community devoted to inspiring and empowering engineers to design high-quality products.

Long-time technology journalist and former design and applications engineer Martin Rowe has been named Editor in Chief of The Connecting Edge. Rowe was most recently Senior Technical Editor of Test & Measurement World. His 20-year career at Test & Measurement World and years of experience in the engineering community gives him the technical know-how and journalistic background needed for this demanding task.

The new community-based Website will consist of blogs, message boards, live chats, whitepapers, and other educational resources to help readers address the joys and challenges of designing with electrical and fiber-optic connectors. The community will be supplemented by a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The Connecting Edge is published by UBM DeusM and UBM Electronics.

Business information provider UBM TechWeb, US, and UBM DeusM have announced the launch of Enterprise Conversation, a new online community for IT decision makers looking to derive the greatest value and innovation from their technology and infrastructure investments.

Enterprise Conversation will focus on connectivity, performance, reliability, and flexibility of enterprise IT assets. Through blogs, whitepapers, live chats, message board discussions, and more, the site will cover the latest best-practices and innovative uses associated with high-speed switching and routing, unified communications, BYOD, collaborative applications, network management, wireless networking, and security, among other topics.

Scott Ferguson was named editor in chief of the new online community. He has extensive experience writing about the enterprise from more than six years at the enterprise-focused publication eWeek.

The site is published by UBM TechWeb and UBM DeusM. Alcatel-Lucent is the exclusive sponsor.

ScienceAlerts.com, a social network featuring information in the basic and applied sciences of biology, agriculture, environment, forestry, geography and health, has added the Agriculture Sciences Category with over 72,000 articles from over 350 scientific agriculture publishing sources.

The members of ScienceAlerts monitor 5,718 journals and alert visitors in real-time through topic-specific site content and RSS feeds. Till now, 23,321 members have signed up and have actively contributed 1,064,854 posts to the site. The latest additions to the site are aggregated on the frontpage as well as in a Sciences RSS Feed. The new Agricultural Sciences category currently features 72,018 posts exclusively selected from 357 scientific health publishing sources.

The ScienceAlerts.com Agriculture Category covers the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms. It also provides an Agriculture RSS feed which is stated to be one of the best and most popular ways of staying up to date with the latest news in this science discipline. One of the latest articles features reintroduction of grazing management after deforestation of formerly abandoned grassland and its effect on early vegetation changes in the Western Carpathians (Slovakia).

ScienceAlerts.com's rigorous review process is said to ensure that only relevant content is featured on the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceAlerts.com is usually only minutes. The website includes a search feature to retrieve specific titles or keywords from its database. In addition, it suggests up to 10 related articles for each article selected.

UK-based start-up Mendeley has announced that the number of queries to its database from external applications has surpassed 100 million per month. More than 240 applications received for research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup and discovery - all of which have been developed in the past year - receive a constant flow of data from Mendeley.

The information fuelling this ecosystem has been crowdsourced by the scientific community itself, somewhat like Wikipedia. Using Mendeley's suite of document management and collaboration tools, in just three years its global community of 1.9 million researchers has created a shared database containing 65 million unique documents. This, according to recent studies, covers 97.2 to 99.5 percent of all research articles published. Commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents respectively, but access to their databases is licensed to universities for tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Mendeley's database is freely accessible under a Creative Commons licence, and it is reportedly the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data anywhere on the web, on mobile devices, or on the desktop. Moreover, because Mendeley's data is crowdsourced, it has a unique social layer, according to the company. Each document comes with anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. Mendeley's API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.

The most popular apps built on Mendeley's platform seek to fulfil academia's need for faster and more granular metrics of scientific impact: ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org display a researcher's or a labs' real-time impact on the academic community, while Mendeley itself recently announced the first sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions around the globe.

Hojoki pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. OpenSNP, winner of Mendeley's $10,001 Binary Battle prize, makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.

Information services provider Swets, Netherlands, and Mendeley, a UK-based startup, have announced that leading research universities and institutions around the world have signed up for the research productivity, collaboration and analytics tool developed by the companies.

Mendeley Institutional Edition, the new tool for libraries from Swets and Mendeley, has already been adopted by several leading universities and institutes around the world. These early adopters have taken advantage of the deep insights Mendeley Institutional Edition provides to librarians, including what articles their researchers have published and what the reach of that research is. A dashboard displays what content is being read and matches the results with the licensed content provided by the library. Students and researchers get the benefits of a social discovery service combined with a reference manager and collaboration platform.

The first institutions to adopt Mendeley Institutional Edition include VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; University of Pittsburgh, University of Nevada (Reno); Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Forestry and Fisheries Research Council of Japan; University of Western Ontario; and several other institutions in the San Francisco Bay area and the East Coast of the USA.

Mendeley Institutional Edition adds value to the researcher and librarian workflow. For researchers it provides a premium personal account to manage documents and bibliographies, as well as facilitating collaboration with other researchers across the world. For libraries, it provides an intuitive interface presenting new metrics on the reading, publishing and sharing behaviour of their users in real time, unlike traditional publisher usage statistics or the impact factor, which is delayed by up to 3 years.

ScienceIndex.com, a biotechnology and ecology sciences social network, has now included the two new categories of Biotechnology and Ecology under the field of Biological Sciences. While the Biotechnology section covers the utilisation of bacteria, yeasts and other biological substances for industrial and manufacturing processes, the Ecology section covers the relationships between organisms and their environments.

The users of the website monitor 163 scientific journals publishing in these two branches and submit the most recent and significant articles for inclusion in ScienceIndex.com. While the site currently contains a total of 1,704,435 posts, it features 23,027 articles in these two sections.

The Biota Category of the network covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, genetics and distribution. Its 10 sections include Agriculture, Anatomy, Biotechnology, Ecology, Environment, Forestry, Genetics, Microbiology, Physiology and Zoology.

The Biotechnology Section covers the utilisation of bacteria, yeasts and other biological substances for industrial and manufacturing processes. It currently contains 7,184 articles partly derived from 49 scientific journals. One of the latest additions in this section focuses on the antibacterial properties of nanoparticles.

The Ecology section covers the relationships between organisms and their environments. It currently contains 15,843 articles partly derived from 114 scientific journals.

The Mississippi Library Commission has joined the WebJunction Partner Program to provide library staff in Mississippi with access to training resources through WebJunction. The aim is to keep skills up-to-date and help libraries respond to current patron needs.

WebJunction-Mississippi is a new service for the professional development needs of Mississippi library staff, offering unlimited access to self-paced courses at no charge. It also offers free webinars and reading material produced and collected by WebJunction staff on topics of interest to libraries.

Access to WebJunction's on-demand library skills resources seek to support the professional development of Mississippi's library personnel so that they can provide their communities with the library services they need to thrive in the 21st century. WebJunction’s content is said to cover a wide variety of library-related topics, including technical services, management and administration, and front-line public services. Training resources are designed to be self-paced and to fit around busy schedules.

WebJunction-Mississippi and the Mississippi Library Commission's continuing education programme are supported in part by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Mississippi Library Commission.

ProQuest, an information company central to global research, has announced that it will combine the best of its popular development programmes for library schools to create a single, wide-ranging source that connects students and faculty with free resources designed to advance education and careers. The new Graduate Education Program (GEP) captures programmes from ProQuest and business units such as Dialog, and includes access to products and services, teaching tools, training and development opportunities, along with awards and internships, all packed into a social network that enables users to connect with one another.

ProQuest's and Dialog's programmes have provided critical support to professional searchers as well as students and faculty in LIS programmes for many years. The ProQuest GEP is housed within a free social networking site called Discover More Corps. Once LIS faculty register for the GEP, they and their students can freely access the GEP’s spectrum of resources, which includes free access to renowned resources from ProQuest that enable students to learn, explore, and gain experience using industry-leading databases and technology before they encounter them on the job. For Library Schools, the free access saves precious budget dollars while boosting the real-world experience of their programmes.

The ProQuest GEP is currently available by contacting gep@proquest.com. It is part of ProQuest's commitment to advance and evolve professional librarianship around the world.

Various academic institutions in North America, Europe and Asia have signed up to Institutional Edition, a new data dashboard from Mendeley, a UK-based startup. The dashboard analyses the research activity and impact on the global research community in real time - down from the 3-5 year time lag of the "Impact Factor", the current gold standard for such evaluations.

This reportedly allows academic institutions to react faster to their faculty’s research needs and provide them with quicker, more personalised support during the research process. This in turn is seen to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

The Impact Factor, a measure of the number of citations an academic journal receives, is a pivotal metric of science: Academics have to publish in high-Impact Factor journals to receive promotions, tenure, or grant funding, and universities allocate their million-dollar library budgets to those same high-Impact Factor journals. This is despite the Impact Factor's many known flaws - the most limiting of which is that the citations it is based on take 3-5 years to accumulate.

The latest release of Mendeley's Institutional Edition, distributed by Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets, seeks to bring research impact measurement to real-time speed, while also providing more granular and social metrics of how academic research is consumed, discussed and annotated. It allows research institutions to see detailed analytics of the journals their academics are reading, the journals they are publishing in, and how many readers those publications have. This data is built on Mendeley's global research community of more than 1.8 million academics who are using the startup's tools for document management, discovery and collaboration.

In a bid to develop alternatives to the Impact Factor, new research metrics startups such as altmetric.com and total-impact.org have already turned to Mendeley's readership data, and several peer-reviewed studies have recently highlighted its positive correlation with the Impact Factor.

Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group, UK, has announced the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language blogging network for scientists and science communicators. Nature Network bloggers will be amongst the first to take up their new home on the Wordpress-based site.

SciLogs.com is hosted by Spektrum der Wissenschaft, part of Nature Publishing Group (NPG). The English language site joins the popular German language blogging network, SciLogs.de, and Dutch (SciLogs.be) and Spanish (SciLogs.es) sites, which together have more than 100 active bloggers.

More than 25 Nature Network blogs are making a new home on SciLogs.com. They have transferred their full archive with them, so that previous conversations are preserved for posterity. Redirects are in place so that links and search indexing continues to work seamlessly.

SciLogs.de has been hosting blogs since October 2007 and currently has around 350,000 page views per month. Blogs are written by active scientists and science communicators and include researchers at the Universities of Heidelberg, Bremen and the Max Planck Institute.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft is an international edition of Scientific American, which became part of NPG in 2009. Launched in July 2011, the Scientific American Blog Network, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com, brings together 15 blogs by Scientific American staff with 38 blogs from more than 40 independent bloggers.

Blogs written by Nature-branded journal editors and other NPG staff are now hosted at http://blogs.nature.com

ScienceAlerts.com, a Web 2.0 social network to discover and share scholarly content, has announced that the latest addition to this website is the Environmental Sciences Category. The new category currently features more than 27,000 articles selected from over 150 scientific environment publishing sources.

ScienceAlerts.com’s Environmental Sciences category will cover the external physical conditions affecting growth, development, and survival of organisms, and their management. It currently contains 27,323 stories selected from 154 scholarly environment sciences journals. This category also provides an Environmental Sciences RSS feed which claims to be one of the best and most popular ways of staying up to date with the latest news in this science discipline.

ScienceAlerts.com’s review process is partly automated and partly manual to rigorously ensure that only relevant content is featured on the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceAlerts.com is usually only minutes. ScienceAlerts.com includes a search feature to retrieve specific titles or keywords from its’ large database. In addition, it suggests up to ten related articles for each article selected.

General contractor EllisDon, Canada, and Reed Construction Data, the publisher of Daily Commercial News and Journal of Commerce, have joined forces to educate readers about the ins and outs of social media, specifically in the construction industry. Entitled 'Social Media Masterclass', EllisDon's Web and Social Media Manager Christine Zakrajsek authors the column that appears weekly in both of Reed's publications (available in digital, print and online formats).

The "Social Media Masterclass" series are available weekly in Daily Commercial News and Journal of Commerce starting May 16, 2012.

Reed Construction Data Canada, a division of Reed Business Information and a member of Reed Elsevier Group plc, is a provider of construction information solutions and industry news through a diverse portfolio of products and services. It offers its customers construction project leads, building product information, construction cost tools, market analytics and construction news through a suite of online, digital and print references.

ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network, has announced that it has added two new categories - Pharmacology and Psychiatry. While the Pharmacology category covers composition, uses, and effects of drugs, the Psychiatry category covers the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental and emotional disorders.

ScienceIndex.com's Health Category covers the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms. Its eighteen subsections include Audiology, Dentistry, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Healthcare, Immunology, Medicine, Neurology, Nutrition, Oncology, Pathology, Pharmacology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Radiology, Rheumatology, and Surgery. Users can receive alerts if new content has been posted in this category by subscribing to ScienceIndex.com's Health RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Pharmacology category covers composition, uses, and effects of drugs. It currently contains 29,615 articles partly derived from 154 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Pharmacology Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Psychiatry category covers the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental and emotional disorders. It currently contains 7,772 articles partly derived from 63 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Psychiatry Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com currently contains over 1.46 million stories distributed among 75 categories. 76,341 users monitor nearly 8,400 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days. ScienceIndex.com provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to ten closely related articles for a search and every selected story.

ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network, has announced that it has added two new categories - Neurology and Nutrition. While the Neurology category covers the nervous system and its disorders, the Nutrition category covers nourishment, including nutrients that organisms must obtain from their environment to maintain health.

ScienceIndex.com's Health Sciences Category covers the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms. Its eighteen sub-sections include Audiology, Dentistry, Dermatology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology, Healthcare, Immunology, Medicine, Neurology, Nutrition, Oncology, Pathology, Pharmacology, Psychiatry, Psychology, Radiology, Rheumatology, and Surgery. Users can receive alerts if new content has been posted in this category by subscribing to ScienceIndex.com's Health RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Neurology category covers the nervous system and its disorders. It currently contains 40,521 articles partly derived from 147 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Neurology Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Nutrition category covers nourishment, including nutrients that organisms must obtain from their environment to maintain health. It currently contains 2,356 articles partly derived from 17 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Nutrition Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com currently contains nearly 1.46 million stories distributed among 75 categories. 76,185 users monitor nearly 8,400 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days. ScienceIndex.com provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to ten closely related articles for a search and also for a selected story.

ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network, has announced that it has added two new categories - Industrial Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Sciences. While the Industrial Engineering category covers the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, and equipment, the Mechanical Engineering category covers design, production, and use of machines and tools for generation and application of heat and mechanical power.

ScienceIndex.com's Industrial Engineering Sciences category covers the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, and equipment. It currently contains 12,200 articles partly derived from nearly 100 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through an Industrial Engineering Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Mechanical Engineering Sciences category covers design, production, and use of machines and tools for generation and application of heat and mechanical power. It currently contains nearly 13,000 articles partly derived from almost 60 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Mechanical Engineering Sciences RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com currently contains over 1.44 million stories distributed among 75 categories. 75,777 users monitor nearly 8,400 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. They share about 2,500 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days.

ScienceAlerts.com, a Web 2.0 social network to discover and share scholarly content, has announced that the latest addition to this natural sciences website is the Biological Sciences Category. The new Biological Sciences category currently features 520,658 stories largely derived from 984 scientific biology publishing sources.

ScienceAlerts.com's Biological Sciences Category covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, genetics, and distribution. This category also provides a Biological Sciences RSS feed to stay up to date with the latest research in this science discipline. One of the latest articles presents the interrelationship of mycophagous small mammals and ectomycorrhizal fungi in primeval, disturbed and managed Central European mountainous forests.

Besides the Biological Sciences category, ScienceAlerts.com contains an Agricultural Sciences Category which the cultivation and production of crops, raising of livestock, and post-harvest processing of natural products. ScienceAlerts.com's Environmental Sciences Category covers the external physical conditions affecting growth, development, and survival of organisms, and their management while it's Forestry Sciences Category presents the cultivation, maintenance, and development of forests. ScienceAlerts.com's Geographical Sciences Category covers the physical characteristics of the earth including its surface features, and the distribution of life on earth, and that of the Health Sciences aggregates the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms.

ScienceAlerts.com's review process is partly automated and partly manual to rigorously ensure that only relevant content is featured on the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceAlerts.com is usually only minutes. ScienceAlerts.com includes a search feature to retrieve specific titles or keywords from its' large database. In addition, it suggests up to ten related articles for each article selected.

ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network, has announced that it has added two new categories - Civil Engineering and Communication Sciences. The Civil Engineering category covers design and construction of public works, including bridges, dams, and other large facilities, and the Communication Engineering category covers the technologies for transmitting messages.

ScienceIndex.com's Civil Engineering Sciences category covers the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems. It currently contains over 6,100 articles partly derived from more than 40 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Civil Engineering Sciences RSS feed. One of the latest additions covers a multi-region boundary element analysis for coupled thermal-fracturing processes in geomaterials and describes a boundary element code development on coupled thermal–mechanical processes of rock fracture propagation.

ScienceIndex.com's Communication Engineering Sciences category covers the technologies for transmitting messages. It currently contains nearly 5,000 articles partly derived from 30 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Communication Engineering Sciences RSS feed. One recently included article in this category presents broadband cloaking with transmission-line networks and metamaterial.

The ScienceIndex.com site covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society. It currently contains nearly 1.43 million stories distributed among 75 categories. 75,553 users monitor nearly 8,400 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. They share about 2,500 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days. ScienceIndex.com provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to ten closely related articles for a search and also for a selected story. Other features include a "Life Traffic Feed", a "Top Content" sidebar, Google Translate functionality, and RSS feeds for every category.

Sixteen leading scientists based in Japan were recognised for their influential contribution to global research on seven emerging research areas (known as research fronts) during the third Thomson Reuters Japan Research Day & Research Front Awards 2012 presentation ceremony held at Akasaka Business Tower in Tokyo. Business information provider Thomson Reuters honored these scientists from Japan as being at the forefront of seven research fronts spanning chemistry, geosciences, materials science and plant sciences.

The 16 awardees were presented with the accolade after their research was analysed using Thomson Reuters Research Front Methodology to assess their level of influence on specific scientific fields and Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge data. Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. Leo Esaki, president of Yokohama College of Pharmacy and chairman of the Science & Technology Promotion Foundation of Ibaraki, was the keynote speaker at the award presentation.

Research Front Methodology looks at patterns of intense communication between scientists and is based on the top 1 percent of the most highly cited research papers in each of 22 disciplines in Essential Science Indicators (ESI) from Thomson Reuters.

Research Front Methodology has been employed by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) since 2004. NISTEP continues to monitor emerging scientific areas and technology fields using this methodology with their Science Map (NISTEP Report) report. The same methodology was also used by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) on their new R&D portal site, J-GLOBAL foresight in December 2011.

The Awards ceremony is part of a series of Asia Pacific Research Days hosted by Thomson Reuters. These events recognise research excellence in countries and regions demonstrating they are leading the world through innovation in their respective fields. Japan held its first two research days in 2004 and 2007. Similar events have also been held in Australia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and India.

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ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network, has announced that it has added two new categories - Economics and Finance. While the Economics category covers the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, the Finance category covers management of money, banking, investments, credit, and other assets.

ScienceIndex.com's Business Sciences Category covers commercial, industrial, and professional occupation. Its seven subsections include Accounting, Administration, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, and Nonprofits.

ScienceIndex.com's Economics Sciences Category covers the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. It currently contains over 16,100 articles partly derived from over 200 scientific journals. One of the latest additions covers factor shares, business cycles and the distributive loop and investigates how factor shares vary over the business cycle and how their movements fit into Kaleckian analysis.

ScienceIndex.com's Finance Sciences category covers the management of money, banking, investments, credit, and other assets. It currently contains nearly 5,400 articles partly derived from 75 scientific journals. One recently included article in this category asks whether the diversification potential of securitised real estate varies over time and whether investors should care.

ScienceIndex.com currently contains over 1.37 million stories distributed among 75 categories. 75,248 users monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. They share circa 2,500 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days. ScienceIndex.com provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to ten closely related articles for a search and also for a selected story.

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e-content business service solutions provider Infotrieve, Inc., US, has announced a new release of its cloud-based Mobile Library, updated with an improved search function, additional features for Personal and Shared Libraries and general user interface enhancements. This new release also integrates the Mobile Library with Infotrieve's BRAVO, a web-based aggregation platform that simplifies bulk ordering of reprints and eprints.

Mobile Library's new features include an enhanced search interface with additional flexibility for ranking results, and the addition of an auto-complete feature; new functionality in the Personal & Shared Library Suite including a dashboard showing recent changes to the library, discussion pages in each library for general comments, user creation and management of shared libraries, and enhanced administrative controls; and updates to the Browsed Holdings feature including improved filtering, copyright permissions ordering and compact citation display.

Infotrieve's Mobile Library offers fully secure, cloud-based anywhere, anytime access to enterprise e-content, along with instant access to a world of knowledge on a pay-per-view basis. Leveraging Infotrieve's 'borderless office' technology, users can seamlessly switch between their PC, Mac or iPad without skipping a beat, as their workspace is automatically synchronised across devices. As a flexible e-content software solution, the Mobile Library can serve a variety of customer needs, from easy searching and ordering of pay-per-view content, to a comprehensive rights management solution integrated with shared libraries and social features.

Mobile Library is Infotrieve's content access and management solution that has more than 325,000 users from 6,500 organisations in over 80 countries. The Mobile Library platform was initially launched as Content SCM in November 2008. The Mobile Library iPad app was first released in September 2010 and the entire platform was renamed Mobile Library as part of a branding update in October 2011.

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ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network established in 1998, has announced that it has added Anatomy and Biotechnology Sciences to the categories it covers. The users of the website monitor nearly 190 scientific journals publishing in these two disciplines.

ScienceIndex.com indexes the latest news, headlines, references and resources from science journals, books and websites worldwide. It covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

The website currently contains over 1.3 million stories distributed among 75 categories. Over 75,100 users monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days.

ScienceIndex.com's Biology Sciences Category covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution. Besides Anatomy and Biotechnology, its ten subsections include Genetics, Microbiology, Ecology, Environment, Agriculture, Forestry, Physiology and Zoology. This category currently contains 77,742 stories partly derived from 400 science journals publishing in these two disciplines.

ScienceIndex.com's Anatomy Sciences Category deals with the shape and structure of organisms and their parts. It currently contains over 1,000 articles partly deriving from over 10 scientific anatomy journals.

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ScienceIndex.com, a Web 2.0 sciences social network established in 1998, has announced that it has added Genetics and Microbiology Sciences to the categories it covers. The site indexes the latest news, headlines, references and resources from science journals, books and websites worldwide. It covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

ScienceIndex.com currently contains over 1.3 million stories distributed among 75 categories. Over 75,100 users monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of sciences. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is stated to be no more than two days.

ScienceIndex.com's Biology Category covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution. Besides Genetics and Microbiology, its 10 subsections include Ecology, Environment, Agriculture, Forestry, Anatomy, Biotechnology, Physiology and Zoology. This category currently contains 77,600 stories partly derived from 400 science journals publishing in these two disciplines.

The Genetics Sciences category deals with the genetic composition of populations during successive generations, natural selection, genetic variation among individuals, and development of new species. It currently contains over 20,000 articles partly deriving from over 110 scientific genetics journals.

The Microbiology Sciences Category covers microorganisms and their effects on other living organisms. One recent article in this category covers the combined use of whole-cell protein extracts for the identification (SDS-PAGE) and enzyme activity screening of lactic acid bacteria isolated from traditional Greek dairy products.

ScienceIndex.com's content is divided into 'Popular' and 'Upcoming' sections. While content in the 'Upcoming' section is rarely older than a few minutes, the 'Popular' section contains approved articles approved between 20 to 60 minutes after submission by users. All articles can be bookmarked with the AddThis Sharing tools which include the Google+1 button. The website provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to 10 closely related articles for a search and also for a selected story. The latter list is sorted primarily by relevancy and secondarily by publishing date. This helps users compiling lists of related references for literature retrieval purposes.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that the creators of Points of View Reference Center (POV) from EBSCO have released the Points of View Debate Blog. The blog is projected as a forum for students to discuss topics in the news and debate them with their peers. It is a free companion service for schools subscribing to EBSCO's Points of View Reference Center.

Students can access Points of View Debate Blog directly from their library's Points of View Reference Center database, gaining the ability to both research topics and voice opinions about them. Additionally, a corresponding Twitter account, @PointsofView_EP, will direct users to the blog website (http://ebscohost.com/pov-blog) and provide an avenue for discussion.

A $200 prize will be awarded monthly to the student submitting the most thought-provoking and well-crafted comment to that month's blog topic. According to company representatives, the blog is designed to provide a forum for wider debate and the award is designed to provide incentive and recognition.

Points of View Reference Center offers users information about key news topics each month, and explores the basics of debate. Points of View Debate Blog invites users to join the discussion and share their views, building on knowledge gained from using the reference centre.

A monthly e-newsletter also accompanies the blog. It will highlight the winner of the best student commentary, and preview the next month's Points of View Debate Blog topic. It will also keep subscribers up to date on announcements about the service.

Points of View Reference Center is said to help students research their opinions and develop persuasive arguments across subject areas, for their own debates and research papers. It presents a searchable collection of the most important social, political and cultural moments of the era. Offering topical overviews, multiple viewpoints, and guides to critical analysis, Points of View Reference Center is said to offer users a balanced perspective on current issues.

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Information services provider Swets, Netherlands, and Mendeley, creators of the online reference management and academic social networking tool, have announced the launch of Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets.

Building on the existing Mendeley functionalities, this multi-device solution provides librarians and institutions with a means to connect their collection directly to researchers and end users; support researchers within their own workflow; and create pathways for collaboration and interaction among students, professors and their peers; monitor, support and facilitate the research undertaken within their institution; and showcase the value of their institution to potential students and research staff.

With over 1.4 million active users Mendeley has established itself as a must-have research tool among academic students, professors and researchers around the globe. It claims to contain the world's largest crowd-sourced information library, with over 145 million documents. Although the software has opened up new pathways for collaboration and interaction between individual students and researchers in similar fields around the world, those researchers could still benefit from the knowledge, guidance and expertise of the traditional library. Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets addresses this need, providing a unique operating place within the Mendeley platform from which librarians can guide, support and facilitate the research undertaken across their institution.

A free demonstration of the premium version of Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets can be requested at www.swets.com/mendeley.

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Two new sections - the Control Systems and Electronics Engineering Sciences – have been added to the Engineering Sciences category of the sciences social network, Sciencia.org. The users of the website monitor 72 scientific journals publishing in these two disciplines which currently contain over 9,000 articles.

The Engineering Sciences Social Network Sciencia.org was established to provide the very latest news headlines, references and resources from scientific journals, books and websites worldwide. This science and research content is contributed by the website's users. There are currently about 1.3 million stories distributed among 75 categories, a content base that is said to be steadily growing.

Sciencia.org covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society. The Engineering Sciences Category covers the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems. This category is subdivided into eight sections including Architecture, Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Communication, Control Systems, Electronics, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

Sciencia.org's Control Systems Engineering Sciences Category deals with systems in which outputs are forced to change in a desired manner during time. Within this section the website currently contains nearly 3,500 articles partly deriving from over 35 scientific Control Systems Engineering journals.

The Electronics Engineering Sciences Category of Sciencia.org covers manipulation of voltages and electric currents by using devices. This category currently contains over 8,000 articles from nearly 50 Electronics Engineering journals.

Besides the highlighted Control Systems and Electronics Engineering Sections, Sciencia.org's Engineering Sciences Category contains another six subsections including Architecture, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Communication, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

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Two new sections, on architecture and civil engineering sciences, have been added to the Engineering Sciences category of the sciences social network, Sciencia.org. The users of the website monitor 72 scientific journals publishing in these two disciplines which currently contain over 9,000 articles.

Sciencia.org was established to provide the very latest news headlines, references and resources from scientific journals, books and websites worldwide. The science and research content is contributed by the website's users. There are currently almost 1.3 million stories distributed among 75 categories, a content base that is said to be steadily growing. Sciencia.org covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

The Engineering Sciences category covers the design, manufacture and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes and systems. This category is subdivided into eight sections including architecture, chemical engineering, civil engineering, communication, control systems, electronics, industrial engineering and mechanical engineering.

Sciencia.org's Architectural Sciences category deals with the design and construction of buildings. Within this section the website currently contains nearly 4,000 articles partly deriving from over 30 scientific architecture journals. The Civil Engineering sciences category of Sciencia.org covers the design and construction of public works, including bridges, dams and other large facilities. This category currently contains over 5,500 articles from more than 40 civil engineering journals.

Overall, 73,257 users of Sciencia.org monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of the sciences. They share about 3,000 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at Sciencia.org is not more than two days.

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New inorganic and organic chemistry resources have been added to Sciencia.org, a sciences social network. The users of the website monitor 67 scientific journals publishing in these two disciplines which currently contain nearly 12,000 articles.

The Chemistry Sciences Social Network Sciencia.org was established to provide the latest news headlines, references and resources from scientific journals, books and websites worldwide. The science and research content is contributed by the website's users. There are currently over 1.2 million stories distributed among 75 categories, a content base that is said to be steadily growing. Sciencia.org covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

The Chemistry Sciences Category of Sciencia.org is subdivided into seven sections including biochemistry, food, inorganics, organics, materials, physics and toxicology.

Sciencia.org's Inorganic Chemistry Sciences Category currently contains nearly 6,000 articles partly deriving from 26 scientific inorganics journals. The latest additions include an article on Viscoelastic Properties of Montmorillonite Clay / Polyimide Composite Membranes and Thin Films.

The Organic Chemistry Sciences Category currently contains over 6,000 articles from more than 40 organic sciences journals. One of the latest inclusions is a paper on the structures of dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP)-dependent demethylase from the marine organism Pelagabacter ubique.

Besides the highlighted inorganics and organics sections, Sciencia.org's Chemistry Sciences Category contains another five subsections including biochemistry, food, materials, physics and toxicology.

Overall, almost 71,000 users of Sciencia.org monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of the sciences. They share about 3,000 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at Sciencia.org is not more than two days.

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Academic publisher Taylor & Francis has announced a partnership with the American Institute of Physics (AIP) to offer academics access to UniPHY.

UniPHY is AIP's scientific social and professional networking site designed to enhance and accelerate collaboration amongst physical science researchers. It offers the chance for academics to network with colleagues and co-authors, identify expert researchers, locate peers and colleagues, and access data from top journals in the field. Other features include discussion groups, recommend an article, congratulate an author, job postings and upcoming industry events.

Taylor & Francis has submitted data from 32 journals which dates from 1910 to the present day. Physicists will be able to access abstracts and author information and expand their network with this additional data, helping them to advance their research and raise their profiles within their community.

If an author has published at least three physics articles in Taylor & Francis publications their research profile may already have been created in UniPHY. If not, a simple sign-up allows authors to create a profile by adding articles individually.

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Management and Marketing Sciences are two of the key sections in the Business category of Sciencia.org, a management sciences network. The users of the website monitor 215 scientific journals publishing in these two disciplines which currently contain nearly 12,000 articles.

Sciencia.org is a new sciences social network established to provide the latest news headlines, references and resources from scientific journals, books and websites worldwide. The science and research content is contributed by the website's users. There are currently over 1.2 million stories distributed among 75 categories, a content base that is said to be steadily growing. Sciencia.org covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

Sciencia.org's Management Sciences category deals with the practices of handling, supervising and controlling business. Within this section the website currently contains nearly 9,500 articles partly deriving from over 160 scientific management journals. The latest additions include an article on Customer Enquiry Management (CEM) in global supply chains. This paper presents results of a multi-case study of seven global capital goods companies managing CEM in the UK.

The Marketing Sciences category of Sciencia.org covers the commercial functions of buying and selling in a market, and currently contains over 2,500 articles. Besides the highlighted management and marketing sections, Sciencia.org's Business Sciences category contains another five subsections including accounting, administration, economics, finance and nonprofits.

Overall, over 64,000 users of Sciencia.org monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of the sciences. They share about 3,000 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at Sciencia.org is not more than two days.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has announced that its online social networking service 'Google Plus' has crossed 40 million users mark since its launch in June.

Google Plus reportedly attracts 40 million users now. The site was opened to the public on September 20. The service was earlier available only through invitation as part of trial runs.

Google launched 'Google Plus' in late June 2011, as part of its efforts to garner a share of the lucrative social networking space.

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Construction information provider Reed Construction Data (RCD), US, a division of Reed Business Information, and GradeBeam.com have announced a strategic alliance to introduce a new product offering, Reed Insider. Reed Insider, an online communication network for construction professionals, is a complement to RCD’s construction lead services with unlimited access to information related to construction projects in a select geography or nationwide.

RCD’s construction lead customers range from contractors and subcontractors, who are looking for new projects to bid, to building product manufacturers looking for new sales and marketing opportunities. Users of Reed Insider (powered by GradeBeam.com) will be able to access a database of over 400,000 North American construction companies and easily exchange construction information, including contractor qualifications, invitations-to-bid, drawings, specifications and addenda.

Reed Insider allows customers to replace outdated communication and paper-based processes with innovative technology-driven alternatives. By utilising Reed Insider, contractors can electronically connect with new industry partners, exchange qualifications, request or submit bids, manage construction documents and instantly distribute critical information. Future product enhancements will also include similar document and communications management tools for architects and owners.

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Educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, and Library Journal/School Library Journal magazines has announced Librareo, a free web-based community that supports the future of libraries and librarianship. Librareo seeks to provide students enrolled in Library and Information Studies (LIS) programmes with free access to the professional resources they rely upon following graduation.

LIS students in the US and Canada who sign up for Librareo will get free, unlimited access to the most-requested online Gale resources throughout their library school career, such as Academic OneFile, Gale Virtual Reference Library - including access to115 ebooks commonly used in libraries today, Powerspeak Languages and several In Context products, among others. Before starting their library careers, students will be able to explore and master in-demand resources currently being used in libraries around the world.

LIS students will also have access to the Librareo message board and forum, operated by library thought-leaders and LIS faculty, giving them the opportunity to make contacts and solicit timely advice and best practices from experts.

In addition to the free electronic resources from Gale, up to 3,000 LIS students will also receive a free one-year subscription to either Library Journal, which offers librarian-to-librarian reviews of books, databases and other media as well as coverage of library news, technology and best practices or School Library Journal, a monthly magazine providing similar coverage but with a focus on the needs of librarians serving youth and teens.

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Academic publisher SAGE has announced that Methodspace, the interdisciplinary online network for the community of researchers, has now reached over 10,000 members.

Launched in March 2009, Methodspace was devised to facilitate online discussion about all aspects of research methodology. Registered users can participate in discussions about methodological issues and controversies; find out about relevant conferences and events; and discover and review new resources in methods, including free book chapters and journal articles.

The site has attracted an international community of professional and scholarly researchers from more than 100 countries and from a broad range of disciplines, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods. Users represent PhD students; researchers; lecturers; medical professionals; teachers; and business professionals.

Since the successful launch of Methodspace, SAGE has launched many other successful online communities in key disciplines including crimspace, communicationspace, and most recently socialsciencespace, launched in January 2011.

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Science magazine Scientific American has announced that a new service matching K-12 science teachers and scientists has gone live. In May 2011, the publication issued a call to action for 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days to volunteer to improve the weak state of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in the US. The response from scientists was overwhelming, with more than 1000 scientists volunteering in only 62 days, including 49 of the 50 states in the nation.

The goal of Scientific American's initiative is to engage teachers and students with the volunteer scientists for a range of activities from giving advice on lesson plans to hosting a lab visit, participating in a Skype discussion, or making a classroom visit. California, Massachusetts, and New York are the top three states in terms of volunteer scientists. Cambridge (MA), New York City and Stanford (CA) are the cities that attracted the most volunteers.

Teachers and schools can register online for Scientific American's service to match them with scientist volunteers. Teachers can search for scientists based on geographic proximity, field of study and discipline. There is both a sign-up form for scientists and a registration form for teachers on Scientific American's website, scientificamerican.com/education.

1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days is one of a number of education initiatives from Scientific American, as part of its Change the Equation commitment. In September 2010, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Scientific American's parent organisation, joined Change the Equation, a CEO-led public-private partnership to support science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) literacy in the United States.

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Technology media company TechTarget, Inc., US, has announced the release of TechTarget Social Engage, an innovative new social media platform that enables technology buyers to collaborate with other buyers simultaneously across different online media.

TechTarget's Social Engage platform allows technology buyers to participate in real-time online discussions with their peers on a wide assortment of technology topics such as cloud computing, data center management, IT security and healthcare IT. Technology buyers can access Social Engage across a variety of media, including: embedded applications in syndicated white papers, in topically relevant expandable rich media banner ads, and by interactive content modules that can run on any site in the TechTarget network. Users can read discussions between other users, answer questions submitted by their peers, and post questions of their own for the community to answer.

Social Engage is powered by IT Knowledge Exchange, TechTarget's social network of serious technology buyers who turn to each other for advice on technology strategy and technology purchases.

TechTarget's first deployment of this new and innovative Social Engage platform is the Dell Social Reader. The platform, as customised for Dell, enables consumers of Dell content to participate in real-time discussions with each other and the broader IT Knowledge Exchange community. Technology buyers access the Dell Social Reader in Dell white papers that are syndicated on the TechTarget network, via expandable rich media banner ads, and via an interactive content module on Dell's community site, DellEmpowers.com, also custom built by TechTarget.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced the launch of a new blog, UpNext!

The primary goal of the blog is to be a relevant and engaging online community where readers and contributors have a collaborative, open, and transparent environment to share their views and expertise. IMLS hopes that the blog will be a place where libraries, museums and their partners can share ideas, questions, and experiences.

Focusing on what works and lessons learned in library and museum service, the blog will feature a wide variety of topics and discussions for readers to explore as well as the opportunity to get to know more about IMLS projects, initiatives and staff and to engage with thought leaders both in and outside the museum and library communities.

Visitors to http://blog.imls.gov can subscribe to UpNext! and receive email updates when new articles are posted. Along with release of the blog, visitors to the IMLS website will notice some additional changes. The site offers users new page views that aggregate content from across the site. Users can view all content associated with a particular grant programme or a particular 'issue' and get more in-depth information about their interests.

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Integrated media firm Ziff Davis Enterprise (ZDE), US, has announced that it has launched Smart Social, a turnkey social media solution that leverages industry expertise and existing professional networks to engage qualified group members, based on specified criteria, to drive high-level discussions and deep engagements.

Smart Social is a multi-touch, push-pull solution that is comprised of a number of tightly integrated activities around key technology topics, including a dedicated LinkedIn group, a companion Community Connection (CC) page on any of the Ziff Davis Enterprise brand websites - eWEEK, Baseline, CIO Insight and Channel Insider, expert ZDE content creation and group moderation. The CC page features an engaging set of topically-focused content, sponsor assets, links, and discussion threads to generate community interaction within the LinkedIn group, increasing user value and fostering higher-level discussions between all parties.

Smart Social works for a variety of IT technology solution offerings and allows marketers to share content with social value and variable depth on a broader level. When combined with third-party subject matter expertise, Smart Social enables a vendor's sales teams to proactively engage with customers and respond to their needs.

Ziff Davis Enterprise creates, manages and nurtures the growth of every Smart Social program. This includes the development of custom blog posts, discussion threads, and custom groups to ensure audience alignment with the topic. Ziff Davis Enterprise Subject Matter Experts will work with the sponsoring vendor to showcase how they can solve critical, detailed user issues and foster community around solutions.

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Library information and knowledge management software and services provider EOS International, US, has announced a new community connection programme, 'Museum Connect'.

The EOS.Web Museum-Connect Program allows museums, historical societies, botanical gardens, archives and other organisations to share library records, information, knowledge, ideas and easily collaborate with similar organisations. The EOS.Web Museum-Connect Program can create for EOS.Web clients a secure, sociable community of libraries with similar interests, issues and goals.

The EOS.Web Museum-Connect Program is based on EOS's flagship software platform EOS.Web which uses a cloud computing hosted environment. EOS.Web was the first, fully Web-based, MARC 21 library solution to be built on Microsoft's .Net technology and the SQL relational database. It is available to all EOS.Web clients at no additional charge.

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The Frankfurt Book Fair has announced that it will launch a new series on its blog entitled 'EveryThink'. The series will comprise a set of posts by 20 experts working in the publishing and media industries, all of whom have been asked for their opinion on a particular topic. Each of these leaders will be speaking at one of the nine conferences that make up the Frankfurt Academy umbrella brand, and each have their own individual take on the issue being discussed.

It is expected that some might be controversial, some might be provocative, and some might be plain argumentative. But they will all offer food for thought.

The "EveryThink" series of blogs will be posted over the coming weeks, and there will be 20 in total by the start of the fair on October 12. Already participating in this new initiative is founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and Publishers Launch, Mike Shatzkin, who debates on whether the EU e-book market will take off in 2011. Also signed up is the founder of BookRepublic, Marco Ferrario, who offers his views on whether he thinks English-language e-books will disrupt global markets. Rights and Digital Sales Manager of Sage Publications, Huw Alexander, argues that the digital space will always be a playground of innovation and opportunity.

Coming soon to the blog will be TOC keynote speaker Mitch Joel talking about the need to reboot publishing business models, plus Profile Bookss Digital Publishing Director Michael Bhaskar on metadata.

More information about all these blogs is available online at www.book-fair.com/everythink.

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Online books retailer Amazon.com, Inc., US, has reportedly launched a social networking site for Kindle users to discuss and share notes on e-books. The site, kindle.amazon.com, allows users to set up profile pages, make notes on the e-books they read and share them with other users, as well as 'follow' other readers.

According to Amazon.com, kindle.amazon.com is a website dedicated to making reading better by bringing readers together and by helping them to learn more from the books that they read.

Kindle.amazon.com also allows users to review books, post their reading activities and share highlighted passages.

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Publishing services provider Allen Press, Inc., US, has announced the launch of a new blog called MailBlogx, a mailing and distribution resource for scholarly and special interest publishers.

The new blog will be a place for publishers who need to find out the latest information regarding postal rates for periodicals, the latest developments in list certification or the latest alerts on expected interruptions in mail service in international hot spots. MailBlogx will also include useful updates on postal regulations, rate increases, announcements, and initiatives, as well as news and information regarding industry trends, technology, terminology, and mailing services for publishers.

Fresh content will be posted every other Friday, with updates in between as news breaks. An RSS feed is available for readers who would like to be alerted when new content has been posted. Material will be archived and searchable.

MailBlogx can be found at http://allenpresspostal.wordpress.com.

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Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced that the WorldCat Identities Network gives users the opportunity to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities. WorldCat Identities is a service that provides personal, corporate and subject-based identities based on information in WorldCat.

The WorldCat Identities Network uses the WorldCat Identities Web Service and the WorldCat Search API to create an interactive Related Identity Network Map for each Identity in the WorldCat Identities database. The Identity Maps can be used to explore the interconnectivity between WorldCat Identities.

WorldCat Identities creates a summary page for every name in WorldCat, including people, things, fictitious characters, and corporations. This application was developed primarily by JD Shipengrover, Senior Web & User Interface Designer, and Senior Software Engineer Jeremy Browning.

The prototype is available from the WorldCat Identities Network activity page at http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/idnetwork.

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Research collaboration platform Mendeley, US, has released Mendeley Desktop v1.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The release marks the next step in the evolution of this fast growing academic start-up, and it follows two other major milestones for the company - one million users have now downloaded the application, and Mendeley's crowd-sourced research database saw its 100 millionth paper uploaded.

Cross-platform Mendeley simplifies PDF document management, bibliography sharing and annotation for scientific collaboration, and provides personalised recommendations for new research based on the content of an individual user's library. Key updates in Mendeley Desktop 1.0 include highly requested features such as automatic duplicate detection and shared annotations for group collaboration.

Since going live in 2009, the platform's rapidly expanding user base and crowd-sourced catalogue of research shows that Mendeley is solving real problems for people in academia. The new features allow Mendeley to do an even better job of achieving its mission to change the way research is done by connecting researchers with new content and with new colleagues for collaboration, and thus making research more open and transparent.

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Science magazine Scientific American has launched a new blog network which unites editorial, independent and group blogs under the magazine's banner. The community of 60 bloggers provide authoritative information and insights about science and technology, and their roles in global affairs.

The blog network, overseen by Blog Editor Bora Zivkovic, who serves as moderator for the community, encourages discussion and facilitates the exchange of ideas with both the bloggers and Scientific American readers. Zivkovic has invited a diverse group of voices for the network. Bloggers range from graduate students, who are launching their careers, to veteran science writers such as John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

The format of the blog allows for great diversity in tone and topics. Many of the bloggers focus on the bridge between science and other fields such as philosophy, sociology, music, art, gender and race, hip-hop culture and literature.

The Scientific American Blog Network features three new SA editorial blogs. '@ScientificAmerican' provides news, updates, highlights and anecdotes from the Scientific American newsroom while 'The Incubator' highlights the best work by students in science writing and journalism schools. The 'Network Central' blog will feature highlights from the blog network each week.

Existing SA editorial blogs such as 'Observations,' 'Solar at Home,' 'Anecdotes from the Archive' and 'Expeditions' remain. The network also features new blogs by Scientific American Editors Davide Castelvecchi ("Degrees of Freedom"), Anna Kuchment ("Budding Scientists"), and Scientific American Mind Editor Ingrid Wickelgren ("Streams of Consciousness"). There are future plans to launch additional staff-authored blogs.

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'Lindau Nobel Community - the interactive home of the Lindau Meetings' recently launched at lindau.nature.com. The site goes live ahead of the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, scheduled for June 26 – July 1, 2011 on the shores of Lake Constance. This year, blogs in Spanish and Chinese will add to the English and German content on the site.

As in previous years, an international team of bloggers will report from the meeting. The blog roll is hosted by SciLogs (scilogs.de), a European science blogging service. SciLogs is part of Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) company that publishes the German edition of Scientific American. Yvonne Buchholz, publisher and editor of Spanish publication MinMente y Cerebro (Mind and Brain), will be blogging in Spanish. Yvonne's regular blog 'Pistas mentales' is hosted on Scilogs. Felix Cheung, Editor of Nature China, will be blogging in Chinese. Felix and Yvonne join a community of bloggers who will be reporting from the meeting in English and German.

The Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings and NPG are once again collaborating to make the Lindau meeting as interactive as possible. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and interactive websites from NPG are mobilised to enable young researchers throughout the world to participate in the meeting. Videos of conversations between Nobel laureates and young researchers and a special Nature Outlook will be freely available to all.

This year's meeting is dedicated to physiology and medicine and brings together 25 Nobel laureates and 570 young researchers from 80 countries. Panel discussions, lectures, seminars and social events facilitate interaction between Nobel laureates and the scientific and academic elite of the future.

NPG and the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance will collaborate for the fourth year to produce films featuring one-on-one or small group discussions between individual Nobel laureates and young scientists. Produced by Nature Video, the videos will be made freely available on nature.com and on YouTube.

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Researchers from the Ontological Engineering Group (OEG) at Spain's Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Facultad de Informática are participating, together with other Spanish, English, Polish and Dutch experts, in the European Wf4Ever project. The project seeks to apply the social networking principle to scientific research.

Wf4Ever is a European Commission Seventh Framework Programme that began in December last year and is scheduled for completion in December 2013. It has a budget of €3.86 million.

The huge data output of many scientific disciplines nowadays calls for standardised approaches to the preservation of data, experimental methods and metadata associated with the scientific discovery process. These approaches are usually packaged in what are called scientific workflows and are seen to be the most important components of data-intensive science.

Wf4Ever develops a software architecture and reference implementation for the preservation and efficient retrieval and reuse of these scientific workflows, the results of workflow executions and the provenance of the data used.

First, the study focuses on what, within the research project, have been termed research objects. Second, Wf4Ever seeks to address the development of tools that provide support for the access, manipulation, sharing, reuse and evolution of these research objects. Finally, Wf4Ever contributes to supporting the integral management of the workflow life cycle and associated materials.

Wf4Ever is implemented on myExperiment, a commonly used scientific workflow support platform. This platform is extended with functions related to research object management and preservation, with support for collaboration and research object sharing and mechanisms for assuring workflow integrity maintenance and authenticity.

Wf4Ever will apply all these scientific and technological results in the context of two scientific domains - astronomy and genomics - characterised by a work method disposed to the use of scientific workflows.

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e-content business service solutions provider Infotrieve, Inc., US, has introduced a suite of fully secure social media and collaboration tools for its Mobile Library. It has added capabilities such as virtual workgroups, sharing and collaboration, annotating, rating and reviewing, along with the ability to follow colleagues to its cloud-based e-content access and management software.

Mobile Library provides secure anywhere, anytime access to enterprise e-content from a PC, Mac or iPad, and automatically synchronises individual workspaces across platforms. The new social functionality allows private virtual work groups to be created based on common interests, functional areas or project teams. Members of the groups can follow one another's progress, share and collaborate on documents and other work products, provide input and receive feedback through annotating, commenting, rating and reviewing.

Abstracts, reviews, annotations, and the workgroup conversation are full-text searchable with relevancy ranking and hit highlighting, and are automatically organised and cross-referenced based on user-defined tags. To ensure up-to-the-minute awareness, automatic alerts are delivered when relevant content is purchased or flagged by a work group member, and can be shared within work groups. Mobile Library also supports other forms of discovery including personalised recommendations, custom RSS feeds, browsing and sophisticated searching.

Mobile Library was initially launched in September 2010 as an easy-to-use, fully-secure, anywhere, anytime gateway to corporate licensed and pay-per-view content, as well as the one of the world's largest collections of scientific, technical and medical content.

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The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and its Architecture Committee have announced the creation of a Special Interest Group focused on e-books (the NISO E-book SIG). Simultaneous with the formation of the group, NISO is issuing a call for participation in the E-book SIG and its associated monitoring group.

The E-book SIG seeks to explore a range of industry best practices and standards related to the creation, distribution, discovery, delivery and preservation of digital book content. The primary responsibilities of the group will be to continuously monitor and review the state of the industry for e-books and to suggest areas for new initiatives within NISO or areas where NISO can engage with other communities on e-book work underway outside of NISO. The group will also host thought leader meetings and commission relevant research to advance the state of the industry.

While NISO is best known for shepherding groups focused on a specific problem through the creation and implementation of recommended practices and standards, NISO's new strategic initiatives seek to widen its outreach within the information industry.

Specifically, the NISO Board and Architecture Committee seek to emphasise organisation's role as a facilitator within the industry; one that can foster cross-community dialogue in a given topical area and provide a place for the incubation of ideas even if no formal standards process within NISO is ever initiated as a result.

Initially, the NISO E-book SIG will identify relevant ongoing or proposed work related to e-books. It will then begin outreach to the communities within the library, publishing, information system and scholarly communication communities actively engaged in some aspect of e-book development and support.

The NISO Architecture committee is seeking nominations for experts interested in actively participating in the core E-book SIG from all areas of the community. In addition to the core group, a larger monitoring group will also be established to receive updates from the core group and provide feedback.

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Business information provider UBM TechWeb, US, has launched 'The BrainYard', a website community for business and technology leaders who are using and exploring social technology tools and applications to drive new levels of business performance.

'The BrainYard' will serve the fast growing Social Business market that is naturally fusing important technology categories such as collaboration, content management, social media, social CRM and social analytics applications. When combined, the Social Business market opportunity represents tens of billions of dollars.

'The BrainYard' will provide news, analysis and insights on fast-changing developments within the evolving world of social business. This third-party information is fueled by commentary and discussion based on the latest news, analytical research, real-world case studies, and practical advice. Business and technology leaders can participate in 'The BrainYard' to learn how social and collaborative technologies can accelerate their business; identify best practices for putting these technologies to use; learn from case studies that show the transformative potential of social technologies and tools; leverage the collective brains of their organisation, supply chain and customers; and unlock growth in increasingly complex, dynamic business environments.

'The BrainYard' is a joint venture between UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek and Enterprise 2.0 Conference. With early and deep experience in this growing market and led by InformationWeek VP and Editor in Chief, Rob Preston, the community features the brightest minds and biggest thinkers. These include: David Berlind, Chief Content Officer, UBM TechWeb; Tony Byrne, President, The Real Story Group; David Carr, Editor, The BrainYard; Alison Diana, News Contributor, InformationWeek.com; Paige Finkelman, Business Development Manager, Enterprise 2.0 Conference; Claire Flanagan, Director, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration and Communities Strategy, CSC; and Steve Wylie, General Manager, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, among others.

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The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) will host a new discussion forum dedicated to the unique needs of the subject-based digital repository community. As repositories continue to grow as an engine for driving Open Access worldwide, new challenges and opportunities emerge and the demand for more focused conversations grows.

The SPARC Subject Repositories Forum (SPARC-SR) will enable subject repository managers, both inside and outside libraries, to share procedures and best practices, discuss possible joint projects, and support each other in providing access to an important realm of scholarly literature. The email discussion list will aim to build on the momentum of recent meetings - including SPARC's digital repositories meeting as well as those focused on subject repositories - and will be the first formal electronic platform for subject repository advocates to collaborate.

Librarians, educators, researchers, policy makers, and others who have an interest in subject repositories are welcome to join and contribute. Membership is open. Submissions will be moderated and may be subscribed to in a feed or digest.

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Online reference service Credo Reference has announced the launch of a new online community, Libraries Thriving, a space dedicated to communicating the value of libraries and their ability to impact the learning moment. Libraries Thriving facilitates collaboration on the innovative use of e-resources and is free to all members of the educational community - librarians, educators, researchers, publishers and library vendors.

To address challenges in the current climate, Libraries Thriving offers an Editor-led Discussion Forum, which covers diverse topics such as 'Marketing your Library,' 'Information Literacy for First-Year Students,' 'Libguides and Subject Guides' and others. An international group of librarians, faculty and IT staff engage on key educational technology issues and share their case studies. The online community also provides an Online Seminar series which will highlight educational discussions covering key technical issues limiting progress in libraries.

The next Libraries Thriving online seminar, 'Information Literacy and the Oprah Effect,' is scheduled for April 7 and 21. Pete Ciuffetti, Credo Reference Director of Library Innovation, will share ideas for promotion of authoritative e-resources.

The online community is one piece of a larger Libraries Thriving initiative at Credo Reference which aims to help librarians share a positive vision of their future role in information discovery and delivery and to provide the tools, resources and support for the collective achievement of this vision.

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Future Science Ltd, part of Future Science Group, UK, has launched Bioanalysis Zone - an interactive online resource for the bioanalytical community. Users of Bioanalysis Zone will be able to view featured articles, interviews, industry news, product listings and reviews, webinars, white papers, job listings and much more.

The site features selected content from the fortnightly, peer-reviewed journal Bioanalysis together with specially commissioned content and interviews, plus key articles from related journals. Site content and functionality is entirely free to all site registrants.

The website builds on the success of the journal Bioanalysis and seeks to both meet workflow needs and bring the community together. Bioanalysis Zone is now live and registration is free.

To launch the site, Zone representatives are currently introducing Bioanalysis Zone to participants at the PITTCON event in Atlanta, Georgia, USA (stand #3527). Pittcon is the world's annual premier Conference and Exposition on laboratory science, attracting nearly 20,000 attendees from industry, academia and government from 90 countries worldwide.

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InfoViews has roped in Jane Burke, ProQuest Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, as a guest blogger. The information industry veteran will explore the latest developments in discovery and their impact on academic libraries in a six-part series that debuts this week. Her first post regarding user perceptions of the library can be found at http://mhdiaz.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/user-perceptions-of-the-library.

The new series is seen to add a new dimension to InfoViews, which seeks to explore the intersection of libraries, research, technology and learning.

Librarians tend to see the library as 'evolving' from the print model to the electronic, an initial post from the series points out. But users, especially students, don't see the library as electronic, it says. The post further notes that the library brand continues to be 'books'. Given all of the academic library investment in electronic resources, this user perception must be (another) wakeup call. According to Burke, 60 percent of students consider Google to be the easiest place to start research, compared to less than 20 percent who find library databases the easiest starting point.

Burke's next installment will explore the steps libraries need to take to reclaim the library as the starting place for research.

InfoViews, a blog run by Mike Diaz, seeks to bring together fresh insights about libraries, research and learning, and to provide some context and commentary on the the latest trends.

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ResearchGATE, a scientific network for scientists and researchers, has updated the way the ResearchGATE platform looks and operates. The new design is intended to make site navigation simpler and more efficient, improving access to the information. The website is a combination of the strongest elements of the previous design with an improved functionality.

The tools that one uses on a regular basis like the literature search, groups, file sharing, micro-feed, and job search are all still there. Possibilities are being looked into on how these tools can be optimised for the way one uses them and how their functions can be further improved. These changes are based on feedback received from users.

ResearchGATE connects researchers and information. It offers tools tailored to researchers' need and helps them keep in touch with scientists all over the world. With ResearchGATE, researchers and scientists can find new research contacts in people performing in the same field or in different fields using the same techniques.

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Manta, the US-based online community for promoting and connecting small business, has named Greg Garrick as Vice President of Marketing and Communications. In his new position, Garrick will report to Pamela Springer, Manta president and CEO. He will be based in Columbus, Ohio, the headquarters of Manta.

Garrick's primary responsibilities will center on developing and executing growth strategies, with a particular emphasis on brand awareness, marketing communications and small business profile claims initiatives.

Garrick joins Manta with a wealth of small business and marketing experience. Most recently he was Vice President, Marketing & Corporate Development for Hearst-owned LocalEdge, a leader in local search and performance-based advertising targeting SMBs. Prior to that, he worked at Dex Media in various roles, including strategy, product development and innovation.

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Academic publisher SAGE has announced the launch of Socialsciencespace, a new online network that aims to champion the value and relevance of the social sciences. Socialsciencespace seeks to bring together researchers, funders, societies, think tanks, policy makers and government to explore, share and debate the major issues in social science.

Launched in association with major learned societies and professional bodies from around the world, socialsciencespace acts as a hub for all groups connected with social science research. Initial contributions feature leading figures from academia and beyond, including the Academy for Social Sciences; Institute for Education; the Metropolitan Police; the National Institute of Health; and the Institute for Government.

The network features blog posts on key issues such as funding and 'impact'; a forum to share discussion; a resource centre with free videos, reports and slides; and events listings for social science conferences and seminars across the world. All content is freely accessible and the site is free to join.

One of socialsciencespace's launch partners, the Academy of Social Science, will shortly commence a major campaign to promote and defend UK social science and its top international ranking, the Campaign for Social Science. Socialsciencespace will act as a major supporter of this initiative, promoting upcoming activities and opportunities to engage; hosting video from the launch event and regional events; as well as other discussions and commentaries.

Catriona Moore has been appointed as the site editor. Moore is a writer and policy analyst who has worked in health and social care policy development for fifteen years, in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Her most recent role was at the Social Care Institute for Excellence, an independent charity that researches and disseminates good practice in social care across the UK.

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Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, UK, is expanding the features and engagement opportunities available in AtmosPeer, a social community designed for atmospheric scientists, and EEBO Interactions, a companion site to ProQuest's flagship database Early English Books Online. With steady growth in the number of registered users in both communities, ProQuest is evolving the technology behind them.

With the help of partners such as American Meteorological Society (AMS), UCAR, Royal Meteorological Society, Scientific American, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), AtmosPeer acts as a source of community information. It connects atmospheric scientists to not only their colleagues - no matter their location - but also to emerging research trends, current news feeds, conference information, and funding opportunities. Based on user feedback received during its first year of operation, Atmospeer has recently gone through a comprehensive usability redesign that now allows members to more easily access the most heavily used information areas of the site.

EEBO Interactions gathers scholars of the Early Modern era around its seminal body of primary sources - Early English Books Online - enabling them to connect with one another and contribute to the database. Launched in mid-2010, the resource is now used intensively as a forum for discussion and the dissemination of scholarship. Contributions by users (particularly on questions of authorship and attribution) have already resulted in enhancements to the bibliographic information both in EEBO itself and in other scholarly bibliographies of the period. With 60 percent of members now contributing, ProQuest is streamlining the process for registered users to share their contributions - within the EEBO Interactions community and on the Web.

Users can now create, edit and publish commentaries and notes that are clearly attributed and accessible instantaneously by all web users. They can also view all of their contributions to EEBO Interactions on a single page that can be viewed by other contributors. Registered users of EEBO Interactions can also use a new 'Watch' button, which appears near the top of every page, to receive instant notifications about new postings on particular authors or works by other EEBO Interactions users. A new Share/Save feature makes it easier to share contributions to the site via email or services such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and Digg.

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An ad hoc working group has created a new blog to share and discuss draft standard author rights language for library content licenses. This language is intended to be used by libraries and consortia as they negotiate contracts with content vendors in order to ensure that authors at these institutions retain consistent rights to make educational and scholarly uses of their own publications.

Interest in this model language was first expressed at a 2009 meeting regarding policy development for open-access repositories, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Subsequently, the ad hoc working group developed a model language for use by those who license content for libraries. The language consists of a license clause that retains rights for authors to use their own work and provides definitions for terms used in the clause.

At their meetings in April 2010, the ARL Reshaping Scholarly Communication Steering Committee supported the draft language and the ARL Board endorsed use of it by member libraries.

The blog contains the model language in a form that can be downloaded for use in existing content licenses. It also provides a place for comments about the license clause language and its use. Other sections of the blog list adopters and endorsers, as well as related efforts. The blog can be found at http://authorrights.wordpress.com.

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Project Euclid, the online information community for mathematics and statistics resources from independent and society publishers, is implementing a new technology to make the presentation of mathematics as attractive on the web as it is on paper. MathJax, an open-source JavaScript display engine, renders standard mathematics codes readable in regular web browsers.

Both TeX and MathML-coded mathematics can be viewed on any modern browser, without new plug-ins or font installations. Currently, MathJax is turned on for a set of 20 titles in Project Euclid, and more titles are being added regularly. Eventually, MathJax will be used throughout Project Euclid.

MathJax is a joint project of the American Mathematical Society, Design Science, Inc., and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. As project sponsors, these institutions also provide major funding. Together with the American Physical Society, Project Euclid is one of the original supporters of MathJax.

Project Euclid was developed and deployed by the Cornell University Library and is jointly managed by Cornell and the Duke University Press. The initiative seeks to advance scholarly communication in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced the next stage in the evolution of its innovative 'Workbench' development platform. NPG is inviting the community to develop customised applications ('widgets') to search, discover and share scientific information. The Workbench development platform is built on OpenSocial technology - as used by, among others, iGoogle. NPG declared its Workbench officially 'open' for new widgets at the OpenSocial Europe Summit in the Netherlands.

NPG launched its Workbench environment on Nature Network in May 2010. The Workbench is a configurable webpage on Nature Network that users can customise by selecting, removing and moving widgets that can be used as tools for common online research activites. Scientists and developers are now invited to develop and submit their own widgets for Workbench.

As a demonstration of the Workbench, NPG has developed some widgets of its own, and has also worked with other organisations to develop some examples. These include a search widget for the nature.com site, semantic searching (powered by the Novoseek search engine), myExperiment - for browsing and sharing scientific workflows, a video player for nature.com videos, as well as a selection of bioinformatics tools, i.e. PCR amplification and a protein to DNA converter.

The global publisher has also been active in promoting and delivering the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling developers to add value to the process of scientific communication. These include well-established APIs to access Connotea, NPG's online bookmarking service, and OpenSearch APIs, launched in 2009. NPG's OpenSearch APIs allow remote searching of the nature.com platform, returning results in a format that can be reused and redisplayed. An API is available for nature.com blogs, NPG's community-run science blog tracking and indexing service. In addition, nature.com RSS feeds are available for use by widget developers. RSS feeds include free-to-access news and features hosted on the Nature News site.

NPG encourages active collaboration and contributions from scientists and web developers alike. The Workbench can be found on Nature Network at network.nature.com/workbench. Developers interested in finding out more about developing widgets with NPG should visit the Workbench blog at blogs.nature.com/workbench.

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Academic and professional publisher SAGE has announced that its new social networking site, Communicationspace, welcomed its 1000th member in just two weeks after launch.

SAGE launched Communicationspace, a multidimensional, online network for scholars and research communities in media and communication studies, on November 1, 2010. The site recently crossed the 1000 member mark.

Communicationspace has been created for students and researchers to network and share research, resources and debates. The site is open to anyone studying or researching in media studies, mass communication, journalism, new media, game studies, interpersonal communication and the many other communication studies fields.

Earlier this month, SAGE also launched a second social network, crimspace, for criminology and criminal justice researchers. The site is also rapidly approaching 1000 members.

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The American Institute of Physics has announced the addition of UniPHY Discussion Groups - a new interactive feature - on the UniPHY (aipuniphy.org) professional and social networking platform. 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.

The new feature will allow UniPHY members to form collaborative environments centered on any number of common interests, including journals, disciplines, institutions, organisations or upcoming events. It gives researchers the ability to create public groups, which any UniPHY member can join; create private groups and invite selected members to join; create or comment on threaded discussions within group pages; and search for groups created by other members.

UniPHY claims to be a first-of-its-kind networking platform for physical scientists. The platform is pre-populated with 300,000 profiles of individual scientists based on their publication history. A researcher can discover the work each of these scientists has conducted and follow a web of connections, including co-authors and the co-authors' collaborators.

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ResearchGATE, a scientific network for scientists and researchers, has announced that SIGMA XI, The Scientific Research Society, has implemented its social networking platform for its more than 60,000 members - students, researchers, and scientists. More than 200 Nobel laureates have been members of Sigma Xi, including Albert Einstein, James Watson & Francis Crick, and more.

With ResearchGATE, members of Sigma Xi will now have the ability to share their profiles with other members, see updates from other scientists and researchers in their network with the new microblogging feature, and share documents and data effortlessly so that scientists can work more effectively together and learn from previous experiments.

ResearchGATE connects researchers and information, and offers tools tailored to researchers' need and helps them keep in touch with scientists all over the world. Users can search abstracts and find experts or colleagues from all over the world. They can query powerful search engines to discover articles related to their research focus in indexes containing millions of publications from different sources. The site also has an international job board with a listing of more than 950 career opportunities.

ResearchGate has built a network of more than 400,000 researchers from 200 countries. More than 1,000 subgroups have been created for specific disciplines, and more than 60,000 research documents have been uploaded for sharing with others on the site. Sigma Xi has its own sub-community on ResearchGATE, which can relate to other sub-communities and groups based on various affinities.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has reportedly agreed to pay $ 8.5 million to settle a legal dispute with several users of Google's web-based email service Gmail. Gmail users claimed that Google Buzz, a social-networking app found within Gmail, violated their personal privacy.

Legal paperwork, recently made available online, detailed the proposed settlement, which awaits approval by the federal court judge in San Francisco presiding over the case. According to court documents, legal representatives that filed the class-action suit staked out 30 percent of the settlement money and the seven named plaintiffs were to get no more than 2,500 dollars each. The rest of the money, which Google is to deposit in a fund, was earmarked for organisations devoted to Internet privacy policy or education. The settlement also called on Google to do more to educate people about privacy at Buzz.

Google Buzz social network was in troubled waters after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google's failure to protect users' personal data, in February this year. Google quickly worked and fixed the issue while the service continued to receive lukewarm response from Gmail users. A number of changes have been implemented in the service since then. The court filing came as Google updated its privacy policy.

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The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International, US, has launched a member networking site – EngineerXchange. Built specifically for mobility engineers, the site provides exclusive access to powerful new networking tools, jobs, career counselling and management tools, and advance access to SAE technical information.

EngineerXchange allows users to personalise their own professional profiles with the ability to share information with everyone, friends only, or keep information to themselves. Users can participate in spaces, communities and blogs, joining in joint discussions about the latest technology, design challenges and career opportunities. In addition, the site offers relevant professional advice through SAE Expert Community Groups, which are moderated by veteran designers, engineers, specialists, recruiters and career counsellors.

Along with expert advice from fellow SAE members, EngineerXchange offers exclusive access to important data like polls, salary surveys and the ability to preview SAE technical information, including magazine feature articles, standards and technical information.

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edWeb.net, a professional social network for the education community, has announced the launch of a new community 'Exploring eBooks for K-12'. This is a forum where educators and industry executives can connect and collaborate together to discuss the evolution of this new technology and its potential for use with students and in the classroom.

The 'Exploring eBooks for K-12' Community is sponsored by Neal Goff, the founder of consulting firm Egremont Associates and former president of Weekly Reader. The community has already acquired over 130 members. These include teachers, superintendents, librarians, media specialists, principals, technology directors, publishers, educational associations, and more. Members are also joining from around the world.

The community is already engaged in an active dialogue projected to help all members gain a better understanding of the opportunities, needs, and obstacles in adopting eBooks in education.

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Internet search services provider Google Inc. has reportedly acquired Internet company Angstro. Google has confirmed the acquisition. However, it declined to comment on how it planned to use Angstro technologies. Financial terms were also not disclosed.

This acquisition is seen to be part of Google's efforts to build a social-networking service that can effectively compete with Facebook Inc. Rohit Khare, one of the founders of the company, will now serve Google in a new role.

The move is the latest in a series of acquisitions by Google aimed at boosting its social-networking offerings. Angstro marks the fourth company acquired by Google this month. Earlier during the month, Google bought Slide, a social games developer; Jambool, developer of the Solid Gold virtual currency platform that competes with Facebook Credits; and Like.com, a visual shopping engine.

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Life science networking company Technology Vision Group LLC (TVG), US, has announced plans to expand its Global Life Science Network, providing clients with partnering opportunities and support from local and regional industry organisations in over 70 countries. New collaborations in 2010 include AusBiotech, General Biologic (GBI) and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) - expanding the TVG network into Australia, China, and providing recent content to TVG clients' desktops through NPG's BioPharma Dealmakers e-newsletter.

AusBiotech is Australia's biotechnology industry organisation, which represents over 3,000 members, covering the human health, agricultural, medical device, bioinformatics, environmental and industrial sectors in biotechnology. Its annual conference, AusBiotech 2010, is claimed to be the premier biotechnology industry conference in the Asia Pacific region. With its theme, 'Creating Global Solutions', the event is expected to bring together key industry experts working on various biotechnology solutions. Conference attendees will access a global business network in person and online through TVG's biopartnering.com community – an online meeting venue connecting attendees before, during and after the conference.

GBI is an information and professional services firm focused on China’s pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. Its information products, including its flagship online data product SOURCE, seek to provide competitive and market intelligence to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare companies, and a select group of investors, consultants, law firms and financial analysts.

NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine. BioPharma Dealmakers is a new bi-weekly e-newsletter that brings recent content, freely available, from the journals Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery and Nature Medicine. The content of the newsletter includes news and analysis at the intersection of academia and business and the science and strategy behind the deals. It provides profiles of big companies in search of partners to fill a particular niche, and profiles of smaller companies looking for larger partners, to work towards a mutually beneficial partnership.

TVG's Global Life Science Network seek to connect an international consortium of regional trade and business development organisations focused on promoting the growth of the life science and biotechnology industries worldwide. Regional affiliates are said to include important industry associations and government institutions in every major biotech hub across 13 countries.

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Sigma Xi, an international society of science and engineering, has partnered with the online resource ResearchGATE (researchGATE.net) to provide new networking opportunity for its membership of 50,000 scientists and engineers.

ResearchGATE is a professional scientific network for scientists and researchers. It connects researchers and information, and offers tools tailored to researchers' need and helps them keep in touch with scientists all over the world. Users can search abstracts and find experts or colleagues from all over the world. They can query powerful search engines to discover articles related to their research focus in indexes containing millions of publications from different sources. The site also has an international job board with a listing of more than 950 career opportunities.

ResearchGate has built a network of more than 400,000 researchers from 200 countries. More than 1,000 subgroups have been created for specific disciplines, and more than 60,000 research documents have been uploaded for sharing with others on the site.

Sigma Xi has its own sub-community on ResearchGATE, which can relate to other subcommunities and groups based on various affinities: universities, private and governmental research institutions, disciplinary pursuits like chemistry, physics, biology, economics, and civil and electrical engineering, interdisciplinary pursuits like biochemistry, quantum computing and so on. The Society has already established affiliations with four British university groups: East Anglia, Cambridge, University of London and Imperial College–London.

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Internet search services provider Google Inc. has announced that it has acquired Jambool, developer of the Solid Gold virtual currency platform that competes with Facebook Credits. Jambool CEO Vikas Gupta and CTO Reza Hussein, who previously worked on Amazon.com, announced the deal in a company blog post.

While the details of the acquisition were not disclosed, media reports indicate that Google is paying about $ 70 million for this acquisition. Jambool's Solid Gold virtual payment platform lets application developers insert payment options into online games and other applications.

With this acquisition, Google seeks to further boost its social-networking presence. Earlier this month, Google announced the acquisition of Slide, a US based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Bebo and Friendster.

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Internet search services provider Google Inc. has announced the acquisition of Slide, a social technology company. Slide is a US based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Bebo and Friendster. No detailed product plans were announced with the deal.

With this acquisition, Google seeks to boost its social-networking presence. According to media reports, this is a key area where Google wants to grow as Americans spend 33 percent of their online time in social networking and online gaming. In announcing the acquisition, Google Engineering Director David Glazer said that the company would be investing even more to make Google services socially aware.

Some of Google's earlier attempts to crack the social networking sector have ended in disappointment. This includes Dodgeball, a mobile social-networking service that let users share their location with friends, and more recently Google Buzz, a social-networking service tied to Gmail. Google Buzz got off to a bad start when users complained about privacy violations.

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Equalis, an on-line destination for the mathematics community, has announced that it has partnered with Scilab, the open source reference for numerical computation, and has joined the Scilab Consortium. This partnership will provide Scilab users with direct access to the Equalis expert math community to connect with each other, share ideas, and solve tough problems together.

Equalis enables the free flow of ideas, cutting-edge research, open source technology, problem solving, and job opportunities for individuals and organisations with a common interest in math and math-centric endeavours. Equalis hosts a thriving community of Scilab users, including a dedicated user group and forum.

The Scilab Consortium was created in 2003 at the initiative of INRIA. Twenty three organisations unite their efforts within the consortium to make Scilab software, the free reference in numerical computation ensuring the integration of industrial needs and scientific advances. More than 100,000 downloads are done every month on the Scilab ebsite. For more information: www.scilab.org.

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The American Chemical Society has announced upgrades to its professional network site, ACS Network. The ACS Network was designed for scientists by scientists. With thousands of members worldwide, it claims to be the destination of choice for chemists and scientists to connect, communicate and collaborate online.

Members can manage their careers, learn, and grow in their profession through the network. To further improve the network, ACS has added tools that will allow users to send and receive in-system private messages; collaborate and share documents in private or open groups; participate on-the-go with e-mail digests and alerts; bookmark and share favorite links; tag and categorise content more effectively; and stay engaged on the latest discussions in various communities of interests.

The ACS Network attracts leading chemists and science practitioners in the fields of chemistry, bio-chemistry, environmental chemistry, materials science and other areas. The network is designed to allow users to interact freely within a trusted community of scientists, find people with shared interests, and meet others. It is seen as a place to gather information, insights and opinions, and explore opportunities. Members can tap into these resources by simply logging on and creating a profile at www.acs.org/network.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and InnoCentive, which built the first global web community for open innovation, have announced that Solver Sandip Bharate has been awarded $10,000 for his solution to a Challenge posted on the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion (www.nature.com/openinnovation) by Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in January of this year. Solver Bharate is a Postdoctoral Scientist in Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Science from Missoula, Montana.

The Challenge was posted by DNDi on the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion, and jointly hosted by InnoCentive. DNDi sought validation of its existing efforts and new starting points for a target-based approach to drug discovery for kinetoplastid infectious diseases. They sought proposals highlighting molecular targets and associated small molecule compounds that could be used as leads to drive the drug discovery process. InnoCentive provided their Challenge development and screening services pro-bono and NPG offered a $10,000 award for the successful solution. The submissions were judged by a panel at DNDi along with two appointed judges - Dr. Alan Hudson, a medicinal chemist, and Dr. Simon Croft, Professor of Parasitology and Head of the Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In an extensive, 46-page review of the scientific and patent literature, the winning Solver presented a list of 33 chemically validated targets along with 86 small molecules that have been shown to specifically affect these targets. Sandip Bharate described the existing knowledge with a wealth of detail, including a shortlist of the 11 most promising candidates.

Launched in June 2009, the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion is jointly hosted on Innocentive.com and nature.com, and provides a hub for scientific collaboration and open innovation. Companies and not-for-profit organisations (known as 'Seekers') can post 'Challenges' in life sciences, physical sciences and clinical medicine on the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion. These 'Challenges' are briefs allowing Seekers to tap into external expertise to solve research problems or drive new ideas. Successful Solvers receive financial rewards. To date, 44 Challenges have been posted in the nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion. Seventeen of these Challenges have already been awarded a total amount of $225,000 for satisfactory solutions.

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ResearchGATE, a scientific network for scientists and researchers, will work together with the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, and has created a community specifically for their members and attendees as a way to continue discussions and scientific collaboration even after the meeting is over.

ResearchGATE recently attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 2010 to spread the word about the latest private community within the network, created exclusively for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings' attendees. This year 650 top young scientists and 59 Nobel Laureates participated in the meeting from June 27 - July 2, 2010, and reflected on current scientific topics while presenting relevant fields of research. The ResearchGATE team met a number of top researchers there ranging from a mexican researching quantum optics to a viroligist from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich.

The Lindau Nobel community offers attendees the means to connect with one another, discover new research, share their findings and work collaboratively using ResearchGATE's many applications. It will also provide a platform for scientists attending the meetings in the future, enabling them to search through the hundreds of other scientists and find specific individuals with whom they would like to discuss with.

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EE Times Group, a United Business Media company, has launched the new EE Times website at www.eetimes.com. An innovative media platform, the new website claims to be the first professional community linking everyone in the global electronics industry to drive technology sales. The restructured website combines the power of the over 1 million monthly visitors with the EE Times Group's extensive portfolio of online brands, must attend events as well as online education and training courses.

The new website is highly intuitive with contextual navigation. Every page of the website contains at least six points of entry to onsite discussions. The site delivers a full suite of multimedia content including video and audio and enables a deeper level of engagement by the global electronics industry.

The six main components of the new EE Times include EE Life Community; News & Analysis; EE Times Design; EE Times Products; Education & Training; and EE Times Events. EE Life Community is the first social networking community where the global engineering community will come together to gather and share information. EE Life will cultivate deeper engagement among constituents of the electronics industry community and deliver strong peer-to-peer interaction around industry information through proven social networking technologies. The News & Analysis section will see EE Times, Embedded.com, TechOnline and DesignLines come together in one robust location to report the news that affects the electronics industry with insight and analysis not only from EE Times experts but also from the EE Times community.

EE Times Design provides engineers with deep vertical content by incorporating all EE Times network websites - Embedded.com, TechOnline, Designlines - within one location. EE Times Design offers opportunities for users to connect, contribute and collaborate on content critical to the detailed design phase such as product specification data, troubleshooting and how-to information. EE Times Products deliver fast access to critical information including application notes, reference designs, teardowns, webinars, video, and specific product parts search. Website visitors can link to components, manufacturers, and franchised distributors to check inventory, order samples or place orders.

EE Times Events will serve as a portal to the EE Times Group event websites - ESC, DesignCon and the ARM Technology Conference - as well as global industry events. It provides event reviews, discussions and comparisons that will drive reader engagement and event registration.

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McGraw-Hill Higher Education, part of McGraw-Hill Education, has announced that its student knowledge sharing and collaboration network, GradeGuru.com will be presented with the 2010 Effective Practice Award at the 3rd Annual Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C). Sloan-C is an association of institutions and organisations of higher education engaged in online learning. The Sloan Consortium Emerging Technologies for Online Learning conference will take place in San Jose, California on July 21, 2010.

GradeGuru is a free knowledge sharing network where college students can share their study materials, engage in collaborative learning and get peer-support while building their online academic reputations for rewards, internships and career opportunities. GradeGuru's university and class specific communities provide a relevant and intuitive social learning environment for thousands of students from more than 300 universities across the country.

The Effective Practice Award recognises educators, institutions and organisations for effectively innovating to realise the potential of online learning in higher education. Winners of this award are judged against strict criteria, including demonstrating researched evidence of a significant impact on learning outcomes, broad scope and application in multiple learning contexts, and an overarching test of agreement that 'Every institution should be doing this!' The effective practices selected for the award are peer reviewed to ensure quality and are based on their ability to advance the goals of access, learning effectiveness, faculty and student satisfaction and scalability.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that Collexis, an Elsevier business and developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, has launched its community module for their Expert Profiling application. The release of version 3.6 Expert Profiling connects experts across the Collexis community from multiple institutions by research concepts.

The Collexis Expert Profiling community module allows for the identification of not only an institution's research experts based on their historical publications but research experts from other institutions who subscribe to the Collexis Expert Profiling application. Additional features within the Collexis Expert Profiling application include the capability of finding similar experts, searching by key concept and provide the 'Scientific Context' that will display related experts, grants and publications based on the Fingerprint of an individual grant or publication.

The current Collexis community includes institutions such as Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Johns Hopkins University; University of Maryland; Medical College of Georgia; University of Miami; University of Michigan Medical School; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Oregon Health & Science University; University of California; The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; and Wayne State University.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings and Mars Incorporated have announced a collaboration to make the 2010 meeting the most interactive ever. Young scientists worldwide will now be able to interact with Nobel Laureates through a social media aggregation site at lindau.nature.com. The site goes live ahead of the 60th annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, scheduled for June 27 - July 2, 2010.

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and interactive websites from NPG are mobilised to enable young researchers throughout the world to participate in the meeting. Videos of conversations between Nobel Laureates and young researchers and a special Nature Outlook will be freely available to all.

This year's interdisciplinary meeting gathers an unprecedented number of Nobel laureates, as 61 Nobel Laureates in physiology, medicine, physics and chemistry will meet with over 600 young researchers from all continents. Panel discussions, lectures, seminars and social events facilitate interaction between Nobel Laureates and the scientific and academic elite of the future.

The run-up to the meeting begins with a Q&A forum on lindau.nature.com, where users can suggest and vote for questions they would like to be put to the Nobel Laureates attending the Lindau Meeting. A forum on Nature Network (http://bit.ly/912lw2) connects this year's attendees with past attendees. Flickr competitions are up and running, and young researchers will post photos and video throughout the meeting. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube streams will also be fed into the site.

An international team of bloggers will report from the meeting. The blog roll is hosted by SciLogs (scilogs.de), the leading European science blogging service. SciLogs is part of Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the NPG company that publishes the German edition of Scientific American.

NPG and the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance will collaborate for the third year to produce films featuring one-on-one or small group discussions between individual Nobel Laureates and young scientists. Produced by Nature Video, the videos will be made freely available on nature.com and on YouTube.

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GradShare, an online graduate school support community developed by ProQuest, has launched GradShare Blogs to provide students with often-sought, but difficult-to-find guidance concerning postgraduate education. Since its launch in February 2009, GradShare has provided students with forums containing hundreds of discussions on numerous challenges. The new GradShare Blogs seek to offer the graduate student community an additional resource to further enrich their educational experience.

The GradShare Blogs are available for free and give insight on various topics relevant to all graduate students, across institutions and subjects. This includes advice on the best research tools, stories from schools around the academe and analysis of the current news affecting graduate students. Bloggers include popular authors, graduate student leaders, and everyday students.

GradShare provides students with the information and support they need to be successful in graduate school. This free community connects students from schools throughout the US and Canada to share their experience with researching, teaching, writing, and balancing school with all of their other commitments. Universities use GradShare to recommend local resources in-context, bringing their extensive campus services to the social web.

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Specialised vertical search, information services and e-publishing company GlobalSpec, US, has announced that it has implemented a series of enhancements to help suppliers promote their social media presence on GlobalSpec. GlobalSpec clients can now add social media links to company profiles and supplier videos of product announcements, providing additional ways for industrial suppliers to leverage social media to engage buyers through GlobalSpec.

GlobalSpec clients can add Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog links within their individual company profiles, giving engineering, technical and industrial professionals another way to connect and learn more about companies of interest. Other enhancements include the ability for suppliers to add video to their marketing hub and product announcements, allowing them to feature key products and capabilities to their target audience.

Driving the additions are the results of a recent survey of current GlobalSpec clients. The results indicated that 48 percent of respondents are using LinkedIn, 31 percent are using video, 25 percent have company Twitter accounts and 16 percent have Facebook pages. Another one-third realise the value that social media holds, and plan to use it within their businesses accordingly - 37 percent of respondents plan on implementing a company blog over the year and 31 percent will develop a company Facebook page.

GlobalSpec is already participating in social media for both the user and supplier communities. On the user side, its CR4 website is a social network for the engineering, technical and scientific communities. The site also has a LinkedIn group, a Twitter account and a Facebook group. For suppliers, there is the Marketing Maven blog and a corresponding Industrial Marketing Mavens LinkedIn group and Twitter account.

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Information provider ProQuest, US, has announced that EEBO Interactions (http://eebo-interactions.chadwyck.com), a Web 2.0 community, will connect scholars working with ProQuest's database Early English Books Online (EEBO) in a single forum. Leveraging the power of social networking, EEBO Interactions is claimed to conquer traditional barriers of distance. This would enable scholars in different institutions and different parts of the world to share their expert understanding of the 15th through 17th century works contained in the collection.

EEBO Interaction's Web 2.0 technology seeks to offer scholars more direct and more immediate ways of disseminating and responding to new knowledge. The network's registered users can share commentary, queries, contextual material and links relating to works and authors represented in EEBO, and edit and expand upon existing submissions by other contributors. EEBO Interactions also provides an avenue for researchers to contribute to the database itself by allowing corrections and improvements to existing attribution and dating information.

By creating a forum for engaging with users of EEBO around the world, the site is expected to sponsor debate, highlight new scholarship and serve as a vehicle for teaching and research Q&A, made easy through the site's support of direct messaging.

While the EEBO Interactions site is freely accessible on the web, the ability to interact with the resource - to add, edit and/or delete submissions - is restricted to its registered users. Registration is open to authenticated EEBO users and to other scholars who complete the site's Registration Request form.

EEBO Interactions will be moderated by a team of independent editors and ProQuest is currently accepting inquiries for new moderators.

EEBO Interactions is claimed to be part of ProQuest's larger initiative to leverage social networking to advance serious research. AtmosPeer, an online community for atmospheric scientists developed in collaboration with the American Meteorological Society, the Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) and The Conference Exchange, was launched in January 2010.

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Researchers connected to the UK's national grid service can now carry out long term collaborative research with peers across Europe through an improved network. Scientists in the UK can tap into the new grid initiative, called EGI.eu, to access computing power, data, software and storage space in over 50 countries.

EGI.eu does not own or operate any computers, but co-ordinates thousands of clusters of computers hosted in university departments and data centers, national hubs and even desktop PCs. The UK, along with the other nations, will contribute resources and make contributions of funding each year to a common pot to ensure that the initiative is sustainable. By creating this improved network, the Europe-wide research community hopes to make significant breakthroughs in data-intensive scientific research, previously considered too time consuming to consider.

The UK's national grid initiative is made up of the National Grid Service and GridPP projects funded by JISC, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced the National Library of China as a new participant in the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing service. Under the initiative, the National Library of China will share its rich collections with libraries and researchers worldwide.

Since November 2009, 2.4 million records from the National Library of China have been added to WorldCat, an online resource for finding library materials. With those records in WorldCat, resources from the National Library of China are more visible worldwide through the Web. Once records from the National Library of China are discovered in WorldCat, researchers and scholars will be able to access and obtain these important Chinese materials through WorldCat Resource Sharing.

The National Library of China, which celebrated its centennial in September 2009, claims to be the largest library in Asia with a collection of 30 million volumes and articles. In addition to collecting and preserving records of Chinese culture, the National Library of China provides document consulting services to leaders of the Chinese government to facilitate their decision making, as well as to support research and teaching in China. Now the library will share its rich Chinese collection with libraries worldwide through WorldCat Resource Sharing.

WorldCat Resource Sharing is a unique set of tools built on the WorldCat database through which more than 10,000 libraries in over 40 countries cooperate to create a global network to simplify interlibrary lending. It provides an integrated set of features that help libraries reduce costs, increase efficiency and quickly satisfy user needs.

OCLC's partnership with the National Library of China began in 1986 when OCLC introduced its CJK system to support cataloguing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts. The National Library of China and OCLC formed a partnership at that time to create in WorldCat the National Bibliography of the Republic Era, 1911-1949. The library now uses the OCLC Connexion service to catalogue its newly acquired titles, and participates in OCLC Worldcat.org for exposure of its holdings on the Web.

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WebJunction, an online learning community for librarians and library staff, has partnered with the State Library and Archives of Florida to launch the new WebJunction-Florida. Library staff in Florida will now be able to access courses at no individual cost through the WebJunction community, and use the site to keep their skills up-to-date and help their libraries respond to current patron needs. As part of this online learning community, members can take courses on a wide range of technology and library subjects - as well as connect with other library staff - creating an engaging learning experience.

This partnership takes advantage of WebJunction's Custom Catalog service, designed to maximise the customisation and reach of training through a centralised training catalogue with streamlined registration for all users. All WebJunction-Florida participants will be able to access courses, regardless of geographic location or library size. Additionally, as part of the Custom Catalog, WebJunction-Florida will be able to add unique, Florida-specific courses to the extensive course offerings from WebJunction that form the foundation of the catalogue.

WebJunction-Florida joins 17 library organisations that offer custom communities for libraries and staff. The site is now available at http://fl.webjunction.org.

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A coalition of European data protection officials have warned social-networking site Facebook for putting users' privacy at risk due to the changes it brought to its service. In a letter addressed to the social networking company, officials advising European Commission have said that changes to its default settings in December were 'unacceptable'. The letter is from Article 29 Working Party, an influential group of data protection officials from 31 countries, which advises the European Commission on privacy matters.

Facebook recently modified its site to automatically share profile information with partners such as Pandora, Microsoft Docs.com and Yelp. Users can opt out by unchecking a specific box within Facebook's settings. The site also expanded the amount of information publicly shared. The working party has reportedly informed Facebook of the need for default settings that would only allow access to profile information and friends to self-selected contacts, and that access by search engines should be the explicit choice of users.

This is reportedly the strongest rebuke yet for the US Company from European data protection officials. Richard Allen, Facebook's director of public policy in Europe, has said that that he was considering the company's response to the letter. Facebook has made adjustments to address privacy concerns raised by European regulators in the past. However, Allen has said that there could be some areas where the company would be unwilling to compromise.

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Microsoft's FUSE Labs, the research arm of enterprise software firm Microsoft Corp., US, reportedly unveiled Spindex, a new social networking project, at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Spindex aims to aggregate and streamline social networks into a single console to help users interact in a smoother and more efficient manner.

It has been observed that the growth of social networking has also made it more unwieldy and cumbersome. To begin with, Spindex will help users reach and consolidate information flow from Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, RSS feeds and Bing.

Existing tools that streamline social networks include Tweetdeck and AOL’s Lifestream. Spindex differentiates its service by providing personalised trending topics, picking up keywords and hot topics among the user’s personal social network. Additionally, Spindex searches for articles and information via Bing, letting users access vaster and deeper information.

According to the Spindex site, users can also keep track of relevant information via Evernote, which runs inside the Spindex page. As users browse their friends' updates, Spindex puts forth related content via Bing.

FUSE Labs’ recent introductions include Bing Twitter Maps, Docs.com and Outlook Social Connectors. While Spindex consolidates social networks into a single site, Outlook Social Connectors helps users separate social streams by contact and spot message threads and status updates related to a specific individual.

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Trade publisher Canon Communications, US, has announced the acquisition of Pharmalot, a blog focused on news and information in the pharmaceutical industry. As part of the acquisition, Pharmalot’s founder, Ed Silverman, will join Canon as an Editor at Large in the Pharmaceutical Media Group and will continue as Pharmalot’s Editor.

Pharmalot has been reportedly named one of The Times of London’s 50 Best Business Blogs and was a finalist in the 2010 Dose of Digital “Dosie� Awards in the Best Industry Observer Blog category. The acquisition is projected to boost Canon’s position in the pharmaceutical marketing space and enhance its existing pharmaceutical assets, including news and opinion blogs Pharmalive.com, PharmaBlog Review, Med Ad News Insider and R&D Directions Insider, and print publications MedAd News and R&D Directions.

Silverman is a journalist who has covered the pharmaceutical industry for nearly 15 years. Most recently, he has been a bureau chief for The Pink Sheet, an industry newsletter, and a contributor to its sister publication, In Vivo magazine. Before that, Silverman worked as a business writer for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey.

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ResearchGATE, a scientific network for scientists and researchers, has introduced a series of new features to make it easier for scientists to share, stay connected and learn from each other online.

Users of ResearchGATE can now enable micoblogging on their profile to keep their connections up to date on their latest work and subscribe to updates from other scientists in their network. Microblogging feeds from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be consolidated on ResearchGATE to give users a holistic view. Members can also effortlessly share documents, data or experiment information so that scientists can work smarter together and learn from previous experiments.

ResearchGATE connects researchers and information. It offers tools tailored to researchers' need and helps them keep in touch with scientists all over the world. With ResearchGATE, researchers and scientists can find new research contacts in people performing in the same field or in different fields using the same techniques.

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The Library of Congress has announced a partnership with networking site Twitter. Twitter is donating its archives of tweets to the Library of Congress, going back to the first one posted by co-founder Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.

The Library of Congress will store tweets to provide researchers a better way to revert to discussions of significant events. Only tweets meant for public viewing will be available. Accounts with restrictive privacy settings will not be included. Also, the Library of Congress will not be able to offer access to specific tweets until six months after they are posted.

In a related announcement, internet search services provider Google announced plans to roll out a new tool that will allow people to sift through Twitter messages about specific topics by day, month or year. Only tweets going back to February 11, 2010 will be available initially. Google eventually expects to gain access to all the messages dating back to Twitter's birth.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced the creation of ARL Policy Notes, a blog developed by ARL’s Law and Policy Fellow Brandon Butler.

ARL Policy Notes reports on public policy issues that impact the research library community - from copyright and intellectual property issues, such as the Google Book Search Settlement, to access to federally funded research, the Federal Depository Library Program, and telecommunications policies, such as net neutrality.

The postings will be authored by Brandon Butler. In addition, guest bloggers will be asked to contribute their insight and understanding of specific policy issues. The blog will also collect interesting quotes, images, video, and audio from all over the Web to reflect the broader conversation on these issues. The public policy blog is available at http://policynotes.arl.org.

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Cambridge University Press (CUP), Lightning Source, Salt and HarperCollins have joined the recently launched Cambridge Publishing Society (CAMPUS). The organisation is a counter to the Oxford Publishing Society, OPUS, and has been given initial sponsorship money by CUP.

CAMPUS is for anyone involved in publishing in Cambridge. It will hold a variety of events to debate, network, research and market ideas. The new forum is projected to help showcase talent and expertise. Freelance writers and members of the local Society of Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) can network alongside representatives from various publishing organisations. These include Melrose Books, Cambridge Publishers, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Woodhead Publishing, Hart McLeod, Lightning Source, Pearson and The Lancet.

Around 50 people attended the recent launch event which was hosted by MA Publishing students from Anglia Ruskin University. The panel of special guests from the publishing arena discussed the future role of the editor. Chris Hamilton-Emery, Publishing Director of Salt Publishing, and Mal Peachey, Director at Essential Works, helped to lead the debate involving over 100 guests.

Annual fees for the society will be £15 for individuals, and this will include admission to quarterly events. CAMPUS is hoping to facilitate short training courses run by the university, network opportunities and research projects.

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EE Times Group, part of United Business Media, has announced the appointment of Karen Field as Vice President, Community, beginning March 15, 2010. She will report to Paul Miller, CEO, EE Times Group and will be located in the company's Framingham, MA office.

In this newly created position, Field will lead the EE Life site, a new social networking community for the electronics industry, which will be unveiled in Q2 of 2010. Specifically, Field will focus on developing content that resonates within the culture of the engineering community and will lead the charge across the new EE Times Group website as they implement social media strategies spanning the full product line up.

Field brings more than 20 years of experience working in the electronic media industry at Reed Business Information, including Design News, Electronics Weekly, and EDN. A hallmark of her work has been the creation of highly unique content that leverages conventional and cutting-edge media and showcases community-generated content.

EE Times Group will launch its restructured web solutions in Q2 of 2010 with EE Life as the core product for community engagement and will be featuring user generated content throughout the wider website from news and analysis through new products and 'how to' design solutions and Field will be central to this audience involvement.

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The US’ National Science Foundation has launched a new interactive web page designed to encourage participation and collaboration between the agency and the citizens it serves. Additional information about this activity, as well as a link to the OpenNSF dialogue, is accessible at www.nsf.gov/open. The dialogue page is open for ideas and comments until March 19, 2010.

NSF's Open Government Web page will allow members of the public to submit ideas, comment on and vote for ideas proposed, and flag posts that are off-topic. In addition to welcoming general ideas and comments, NSF specifically seeks input regarding access to large data sets and collaborations that aim to facilitate transformative research.

The agency will incorporate submitted ideas and suggestions into an official Open Government Plan, to be published on April 7, 2010. This plan is expected to serve as the ‘road map’ to improve transparency and to better integrate public participation.

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WebJunction, an online learning community for librarians and library staff, is working with the State Library of North Carolina, the Missouri State Library, and HSLC/Access PA to launch three new state sites - WebJunction–North Carolina, WebJunction–Missouri and WebJunction–Pennsylvania. Library staff in these states will now gain access to courses, articles, discussions and a professional network that will keep their skills up-to-date and help their libraries stay relevant to current user needs.

As part of these online learning communities, members will be able to connect with people from across the library community using social and professional networking tools; create and publish their own content; participate in discussions and form interest groups; take courses on a wide range of technology and library skill subjects; and engage in an online community experience that makes learning fun.

WebJunction–North Carolina, WebJunction–Missouri and WebJunction–Pennsylvania join 17 library organisations that offer custom communities for libraries and staff.

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The British Library and Microsoft Research have announced that the new open source 'Research Information Centre' (RIC) Framework v1.0 is now available to download for free at http://ric.codeplex.com. The RIC is seen to represent an entirely new way of conducting research by providing an online environment in which to navigate the collection of digital information available to 21st century researchers. It aims to maximise web technology to improve both flexibility and knowledge sharing for researchers, wherever they are in the world.

The British Library and Microsoft Research have worked in partnership to design and develop a 'virtual research environment' that will provide a single easy-to-use interface enabling research teams to work collaboratively. The RIC is projected to provide an environment in which users can create, share, discuss, manage, find and track articles, references, bookmarks, funding proposals, presentations and all the other digital information related to their research.

Built using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Platform, the binaries and source code are being made publicly available. This is aimed to encourage experimentation and use amongst the scientific community to develop the RIC's foundation templates into an application that will offer support at every stage of the research life-cycle. The British Library is developing a RIC template that will incorporate a range of intuitive and customisable tools of relevance to biomedical research.

The British Library is working with a number of partners to understand biomedical research user needs and evolve the functionality of the RIC to meet those needs. The aim is to develop and support an RIC community that focuses on development and sharing of web parts that can be 'plugged in' to the RIC to enable research teams to define their own online environment.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), UK, has announced the release of ChemSpider SyntheticPagesbeta, a community resource of reaction synthesis procedures. The launch of a beta site is the result of a collaboration between ChemSpider, a free online structure centric community for chemists, and the original SyntheticPages. SyntheticPages is a freely available interactive database of synthetic chemistry for the dissemination of practical and reliable organic, organometallic and inorganic chemical synthesis, reactions and procedures deposited by synthetic chemists.

Under the partnership, ChemSpider will host content from SyntheticPages. A search of ChemSpider SyntheticPagesbeta allows identification and detailing of the experimental procedures for the synthesis of specific chemical compounds. The database has been seeded with SyntheticPages.org data and will be expanded by inclusion of data from journal articles published by RSC.

Researchers will also be able to deposit their own synthetic procedures to the site. Using online semantic markup technologies and integrating to the ChemSpider database will allow interactive display of chemical structures, spectral data and a multitude of related data. Scientists can comment upon a growing resource of interactive synthetic processes, while leveraging the resources contained within the ChemSpider databases.

ChemSpider SyntheticPagesbeta is released in beta form for feedback from the community at www.chemspider.com/syntheticpages.

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Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, UK, has launched a new online community, AtmosPeer, designed specifically for researchers, scholars, librarians and students in the atmospheric science community. AtmosPeer (www.atmospeer.net) seeks to connect atmospheric scientists to not only their colleagues, but also to emerging research trends, current news feeds, conference information, and funding opportunities. It is a free service from ProQuest that was developed in partnership with AMS, the Atmospheric Science Librarians International and the Conference Exchange.

Created in close cooperation with the atmospheric science community, AtmosPeer is projected to offer a tailored research environment for scientists in the field. It seeks to allow scholars to identify peers doing similar research and creates a simple method for document sharing and collaboration. Users can create discussion topics and share ideas and best practices in a community forum. To help users stay current on the latest developments in the field, AtmosPeer acts as a central source of community news from such websites as American Meteorological Society, UCAR, Royal Meteorological Society, Scientific American, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Background on current and upcoming conferences is easily accessible for quick reference and abstracts from emerging research can be searched and explored. Further, relevant articles from AMS publications can be quickly surfaced with a unique deep indexing tool that uncovers data and findings not only in the text, but in the tables and figures, too. The site also allows a quick, simple search of material that has been presented at conferences in the atmospheric sciences, specifically by linking to the content stored at The Conference Exchange, an AtmosPeer partner.

AtmosPeer was designed with an advisory group that includes AMS, Environment Canada, Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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The US’ Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has launched a public consultation on its Public Access Policy. The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

OSTP launched an interactive, online discussion on December 10. The discussion is focused on three major areas of interest. These include: Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20): Which Federal agencies are good candidates to adopt public access policies? What variables (field of science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities, etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication a public release?; Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to 31): In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximise public benefit? How are these anticipated to change; and Management (Jan. 1 to 7): What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Each of these topics will form the basis of a blog posting that will appear at www.whitehouse.gov/open and will be open for comment on the OSTP blog.

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Turpion Limited, a company owned by Pion Ltd and the Institute of Physics Publishing, UK, recently launched a new Web portal Physics-Online.Ru to attract a wide circle of scientists, scholars, students and post graduates to discuss modern physics problems. An English user-friendly interface is now available at http://www.physics-online.ru/eng.

The site offers enhanced design and many new features to further assist the physics community worldwide to use web tools such as blogging and social networking. Information on first openly published documents from the history of high energy lasers and laser based systems in the former USSR, and unique collection of papers and video materials devoted to 40th anniversary of ‘Scientific and Production Association ASTROPHYSICS’ are also available.

Additional features have also been incorporated to improve functionality. These include ability for users to initiate a discussion and to submit news, articles and books; and to announce an event in world of physics. In addition, authors will now be able to compose a list of references for their own publications and to convert it to XML format.

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The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), UK, has announced the launch of a year long campaign called ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’, to debate how digital technologies are changing not only what research we do, but how it can be carried out.

According to JISC, the UK can maintain its worldwide reputation for quality research, only if researchers take advantage of the digital revolution. As the key provider of digital infrastructure for UK higher education and research, JISC is seeking answers to the question ‘How will research be in future?’ during the Research 3.0 campaign.

A new video, ‘How digital technologies are creating a new paradigm in research’, sets the agenda for the coming year and introduces key issues such as how to share data, why collaborate and how to publish research work online. To support this video, THE (Times Higher Education) has published a ’Data Revolution’ supplement highlighting how JISC is supporting universities and the Research Councils to advance in the ever-changing technology landscape.

Earlier this month, JISC released a report as part of its ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity. The new ‘Open Science’ report trails key research trends that could purportedly have far-reaching implications for science, universities and the UK society. Written by UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Digital Curation Centre, the report identifies open-ness, predictive science based on massive data volumes and citizen involvement as being important features of tomorrow’s research practice. It is hoped that this document will stimulate and contribute to community discussion in the UK, which is ranked second in the world for its output of quality research. It is also expected to fuel the open science debate on the global stage.

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Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of technologies for R&D, has announced an integration of Symyx Notebook and Thermo Scientific Watson LIMS. The integration is seen to enable scientists engaged in biological and bioanalytical workflows to electronically pass study information, sample lists, experimental results and reports between the electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) and the LIMS. This helps in reducing time-consuming manual transcription and data manipulation that can result in costly laboratory errors and regulatory compliance issues.

The integration is projected to enhance the value of laboratory information throughout an R&D organisation by enabling scientists to access critical experimental information quickly and efficiently. Other benefits include the ability to design studies in Watson LIMS and publish them in Symyx Notebook; transfer sample information from Symyx Notebook into Watson LIMS; document lab activities (including sample preparation) in Symyx Notebook; annotate Watson LIMS worklists in Symyx Notebook; perform supplementary calculations and analysis in Symyx Notebook; and transfer completed Watson LIMS reports back to Symyx Notebook.

Thermo Scientific Watson LIMS is a specialised, protocol-driven laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed for drug metabolism/pharmacokinetic studies and bioanalytical testing. Symyx Notebook is a single, multi-disciplinary electronic laboratory notebook for the enterprise that accelerates R&D productivity, improves collaboration, lowers costs and streamlines regulatory compliance. The Symyx Isentris data access, analysis and decision support system enables scientists to leverage corporate, commercial and local database information in an integrated, self-service research environment.

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The Indiana University (IU) has announced that it has received more than $1.8 million from the US’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collaborate on VIVO, a $12.2 million, seven-university project designed to network researchers around the country. While the proposed new networking system will contain authentication mechanisms to protect sensitive data and intellectual property, it is being described as a Facebook for scientists.

IU's portion of the project is led by Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science and director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at IU. Co-investigators with Börner at IU are Ying Ding, an assistant professor of Information Science, and Robert McDonald, associate dean for library technologies at IU and associate director for the Data to Insight Center at the Pervasive Technology Institute.

Börner's team at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center will conduct research and development on data analysis and visualisation. Ding will be responsible for ontology development and McDonald will be in charge for the implementation of VIVO at IU. VIVO is a networking template currently deployed at Cornell University. It seeks to bring together publicly available information on the people, departments, graduate fields, facilities and other resources that collectively make up the research and scholarship environment in all disciplines at Cornell.

The Cornell VIVO software is projected to offer IU significant opportunities for advancing enhanced data mining capabilities towards discovering semantic relationships among faculty research. This applies to data both within the IU system and in external comparison to other research institutions that also use the software.

As it is currently envisioned, the system will federate information about faculty and staff from institutional repositories, listings of published articles from academic publishers, and researchers would provide information regarding their own interests. Users will still view the information on what looks like regular web pages, but VIVO is designed to then collect the facts a researcher wants and then assemble a unique page.

Also involved in the project, in addition to IU and Cornell, are the University of Florida, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the journal Science and Science Careers, the career development arm of AAAS, have announced the launch of a pair of online social networking sites. These are expected to help scientists and science trainees who hope to translate laboratory research into clinical medicine and to help minority scientists navigate their career paths. The networks have been designed to serve two distinct groups - CTSciNet is a community for people pursuing careers in clinical and translational research, and MySciNet is a network focused on nurturing diversity in the scientific workforce.

Both sites were developed by AAAS along with contributions from several scientific societies and with corporate and foundation funding. CTSciNet was funded by a grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund while MySciNet was sponsored by Genentech and Pfizer.

The new social networks offer free, secure virtual communities for scientists at all career stages. After registering, users can post and respond to questions on career-related, academic, scientific, or social subjects; join virtual groups on specific topics or for specific organizations; read articles on navigating a career path; and pass along articles and hyperlinks from outside resources.

The networks contain features similar to those offered by Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks. But since it is monitored by Science Careers staff and populated exclusively by scientists, science trainees and science career experts, science professionals are projected to find CTSciNet and MySciNet considerably more focused.

CTSciNet, which stands for Clinical and Translational Science Network, focuses on building a network of scientists and trainees who wish to speed the translation of scientific breakthroughs into real-world therapies. It seeks to cater to scientists from all disciplines with clinical or basic science training. Also welcome are people from other fields, such as business and clinical medicine, who wish to explore the possibilities for turning science into new and potentially profitable new technologies.

MySciNet is a professional network that seeks to connect scientists and students of diverse backgrounds based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military service, and economic circumstances. Its objectives are similar to those of CTSciNet. It allows members to form communities to discuss education and jobs, research opportunities, and strategies for overcoming obstacles.

The research community is increasingly opting for collaborative initiatives to expand access to data. Earlier this month, representatives of nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the opening of a new semantic-Wiki based website (http://acawiki.org) that allows scholars, students and bloggers to easily post summaries and discuss academic papers online. It enables users to easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and literature reviews online. Also, it helps users to share and organise summaries through the use of tags and RSS feeds. Again this month, publisher Springer announced the launch of a free, multidimensional professional networking site, TheNeuroNetwork.com, for those working and studying the brain.

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Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of technologies for R&D, has announced the launch of hosted informatics software for researchers working in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical industries and academia. The new hosted offerings, to be accessed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, will seek to combine Symyx software with data archiving capabilities in a secure data hosting and communications facility. The hosted informatics environment is projected to enable more R&D organisations to benefit from scientific software by reducing the requirements for IT infrastructure and resources, lowering the total cost of ownership and accelerating ELN deployment.

Initially, Symyx Notebook is being made available as a hosted electronic lab notebook (ELN) service enabling medicinal chemists, synthetic chemists and biologists to manage, explore, share and reuse experimental information and intellectual property (IP). Using a hosted ELN service, R&D organisations can deploy and leverage the electronic notebook quickly and efficiently without added IT infrastructure and resources while collaborating more effectively with partners, according to Symyx.

In developing the hosted ELN service, Symyx is seen to leverage its operational experience with the DiscoveryGate content platform. DiscoveryGate has been delivering hosted scientific information from millions of publications to hundreds of companies worldwide for over seven years. The software hosting experience is expected to position Symyx to manage compound registration, inventory, work request and ELN systems successfully in a secure hosted environment.

The hosted informatics infrastructure provided by Symyx will be supported by Switch Communications Group L.L.C., an information storage and protection services firm.

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STM publisher Springer, Germany, has announced the launch of a free, multidimensional professional networking site, TheNeuroNetwork.com, for those working and studying the brain. The website offers an online community and networking site for those studying neural activities in the brain (invertebrate to human), including brain-like systems and networks. Currently more than 1,300 individual members and 40 interest groups representing over 70 countries have created profiles on the network.

The NeuroNetwork was established to allow students and researchers to find and interact with each other in a professional online environment. Members may create searchable profiles with their research interests and publications; upload poster presentations, images, and videos; post questions and start discussions on new research; form and join public or private groups based on their interests or geographical location; post and search job listings; start a blog; and view, post, and RSVP to upcoming meetings.

Members may also create profiles for their organisation, institute, society, or even their lab. Such profiles may be used to post meetings, news, links to articles, press releases, or calls for papers. The website will also provide original content in the form of interviews with researchers, and is looking for live bloggers for upcoming meetings.

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Forensic Science Policy & Management, published by Taylor & Francis, has launched a discussion forum that seeks to provide readers and the entire forensic science community the opportunity to discuss current issues in forensic science. The Forensic Science Forum moderator Barry Fisher will launch discussions based on articles published in the journal as well as other timely topics.

Along with Forensic Science Policy & Management, the Forensic Science Forum aims to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, quality, and operations of forensic science laboratories as well as the education and training of forensic scientists. In addition, it will explore the government and institutional policies that affect the practice and management of forensic science.

Forensic Science Policy & Management does not focus on the science of forensic science, but rather on how scientists, managers, and policy makers practice and use that science. The journal seeks to provide a vital forum for exploring both current practice in forensic science and methods for improving and advancing the field so that it can meet rapidly increasing public needs and expectations. Authors and readers include scientists, practitioners, laboratory supervisors/directors, and policymakers in academia, government, and forensic science laboratories around the globe.

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Academic publisher Cambridge University Press has announced a partnership with FiledBy to provide over 100 Cambridge authors with websites on the FiledBy marketing platform. Cambridge is one of the world's largest university publishers with a programme that encompasses virtually every academic discipline, including science, technology & medicine, humanities, social sciences, reference and general interest books, journals and electronic products.

The companies started working together before the FiledBy platform launched in the spring of 2009. A pilot programme was designed to register 50 Cambridge authors on FiledBy and provide them with powerful premium web tools. Given the success of the pilot program, Cambridge elected to expand with an additional 65 author sites in August. Since FiledBy websites are pre-assembled and all published authors and their books are represented, the sites are easy for an author to claim and enhance with photo, biography, videos, documents, podcasts and links.

FiledBy is an online directory of author sites providing web tools, e-commerce and community-building solutions for published book authors and contributors - co-authors, illustrators, photographers, artists, translators and editors. FiledBy provides authors and readers with social tools to connect with each other and includes more than 3 million pre-assembled author and contributor websites and 8 million book pages that can be discovered through a single database.

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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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