(guelphmercury.com): It seems that science and technology has progressed exponentially in the last 10 years. Much good has come out of these advances. But as with all advancements in society, we are forced to take the good with the bad. A Dutch laboratory has seemingly created a form of the avian flu that can be transmitted between ferrets, which apparently is the model used to represent humans. With all the media coverage in recent years about avian flu, most would know that it is highly fatal, but hasn't become a widespread pandemic because it is hard for the virus to cross from poultry to humans.
(dynamicbusiness.com.au): ePublishing is being used by savvy businesses as a tool to remain relevant in the digital age. Mandie Spooner looks at the many reasons why SMBs should add digital publishing to their communications toolkit.
(publishingperspectives.com): The number of company acquisitions and investments in the German publishing industry increased significantly in 2011, primarily reflecting a shift toward investments in digital business models. The 225 such transactions last year represented a 10% increase over 2010, according to the study "Transaktionsmonitor Verlagswesen 2011" (download the report here), published by the consulting firm Bartholomäus&Cie.
(dailytech.com): The traditional print publication business in both magazine and book form is hurting today after decades of dominance. As more and more consumers go to the web for digital publications rather than buying print versions of the same publications, it is becoming a challenge for book publishers to continue to remain profitable.
(information-age.com): Some respondents identified new areas where open data would be useful. Network equipment vendor Cisco wrote that the 'Internet of things' will become a primary generator of information that should be considered open data. The ever-increasing ability to analyse so-called 'Big Data' means that datasets of previously perceived low value will become well worth collecting and publishing.
(intechweb.org): This InTech white paper is based on a review of current research and a survey sent to 20,000 STM researchers worldwide. The survey attracted an overall response rate of 1.3 percent, with 275 participants taking part and 253 (92 percent) completing it. The majority of respondents were researchers (75 seventy) based at a university (70 seventy).
(niso.org): This publication is the outcome of the NISO Electronic Resource Management (ERM) Data Standards and Best Practices Project, a successor to the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI). The project's primary goals were to perform a "gap analysis" of standards and best practices and make recommendations on the future of the ERMI Data Dictionary.
(springer.com): eBooks have evolved considerably over the last five years, beyond the more mature, but less dynamic eJournals space. They are now poised at an intersection of library, technology and research trends that afford great opportunities and challenges, for both the library and publisher communities.Similar to the formative years of STM eJournals adoption, eBook uptake shows both promise and challenges: promise as an efficient source for research, and challenges as stakeholders grasp how best to manage this relatively new content format. In their sixth year, eBooks are entering an Age of Experimentation. Stakeholders must learn how to flourish despite the dizzying pace of the technologies that support the eBook format.
(papers.ssrn.com): This paper outlines responses to two definitional questions that arise in the context of orphan works: (1) exactly what is the "orphan works" problem?, and (2) what is the size of this problem? The answers to these two questions are central to understanding how proposed solutions work to remedy the situation. While the most common descriptions of the orphan works problem focus on unlocatable copyright owners, others have framed the issue in terms of a broader problem of market failure. This paper explores both formulations of the problem.
(icsti.org): Video, audio, images, and other types of multimedia have the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness and communicative abilities of traditional text-based information collections. These new forms of scientific information, including multimedia, numeric data, and social media, are emerging rapidly, with a significant increase observed just over the past four years. Many scientific conferences and symposia, for example, are now recorded, and the presentations are offered to attendees and others in video format.
(arl.org): As the skills and infrastructure needed to sustain scholarly communication change in the electronic age, many organizations are reevaluating their publishing strategies. Smaller societies and institutions are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the demands of their authors to link research data with publications, repurpose content in new ways online, or push the boundaries of intellectual property to mix and mash-up. Librarians, meanwhile, are extending their skills to organize and preserve data, support XML workflows, and build deep understandings of digital rights and permissions. .
(youtube.com): This presentation describes a project at the University of Oregon which helps students to understand the uses of primary source materials, and also to think about their own roles as creators of such materials, and as prospective contributors to the collective social record. Technology comes into play, of course, but is very much in the background in some sense. It seems the ideas here can be readily adapted and used by a wide range of institutions. If you are not familiar with this project, the video of this presentation is worth watching.
(oclc.org): Preliminary results from a new study into researcher dissemination behaviors were reported at this session. This builds on work done in Scotland funded by JISC in which we have participated, and provides evidence of faculty preferences for "disseminating" their research outputs in ways other than via traditional journal or monograph publication. Discussion included the effectiveness of the institutional or subject repository, and other venues, for dissemination purposes, and the differences that emerge across scholarly disciplines.
(eprints.rclis.org): Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want summarizes findings from research conducted by OCLC on what constitutes quality in library online catalogs from both end users and librarians' points of view. In 2008, OCLC conducted focus groups, administered a pop-up survey on WorldCat.org - OCLC's freely available end user interface on the Web - and conducted a Web-based survey of librarians worldwide. The findings indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog's delivery-related information is just as important to end users.
(slideshare.net): The topic of sustainability keeps coming up in all discussions of scholarly communications. Sustainability implies stasis, but what we need is innovation. It is very, very hard to make economic sense out of anything that is not growing. This presentation describes some trends, trends that I believe are inevitable, and suggests ways to align scholarly publishing with those trends, the better to reap financial gain from them.
