Weekly News Digest

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com) announced that its free science-specific search engine, Scirus (http://www.scirus.com), is collaborating with the California Institute of Technology to index the Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA), its institutional repository, and to power a search capability on the repository’s site. Caltech CODA was launched in 2000 to digitally archive and make freely available Caltech’s scholarly output. Today it holds close to 4,000 theses, technical reports, preprints, articles, oral histories, and conference papers produced by the 1,200 professional staff at Caltech.

Caltech CODA is an archive created by faculty and students. The content is made available in an open access repository so that research results are more visible and enhanced discovery is possible. Caltech results are clearly branded and identified on the results page in order to validate content as reliable and credible.

Ovid Technologies (http://www.ovid.com), a Wolters Kluwer business, announced an exclusive partnership with QUOSA, Inc. (http://www.quosa.com), a developer of full-text article retrieval, organization, and searching software, to offer QUOSA Information Manager—a complete desktop environment allowing users to query, update, organize, share, and analyze information. By addressing the need for productivity tools at the desktop, the companies aim to help end users harness the full power of scholarly information in support of medical and academic research.

The QUOSA offering complements and expands Ovid's search and discovery platform to expand the reach of literature searching. With QUOSA Information Manager, users install a desktop plug-in "dashboard" that enables batch retrieval of full-text content in PDF, HTML, or abstract formats from channels such as Ovid, PubMed, or other database search sources. QUOSA integrates with existing resource management tools including link resolvers, such as Ovid LinkSolver, and citation management tools, such as EndNote and Reference Manager.

Ovid also announced it has reached an agreement to produce electronic databases for both

MIDIRS (Midwives Information and Resource Service), a U.K.-based educational charity that provides childbirth and maternity information to midwives and other maternity health professionals, and RIPM (Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals/Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale), a nonprofit western musical history and culture education organization. The databases will be available on Ovid's SilverPlatter WebSPIRS platform beginning in November. The agreements are part of the expansion of Ovid's Partner Publishing Program.

Ovid also announced the launch of Ovid Lingua, a new multilanguage content platform. This new platform helps publishers provide easy access to electronic books and journals through an interface that supports almost 80 languages other than English. The first global publisher to offer its content electronically via Ovid Lingua is Brazilian medical publisher Atheneu.

Source: Ovid Technologies, Inc.

VeriSign, Inc. (http://www.verisign.com), a provider of infrastructure services for the Internet and telecommunications networks, announced the acquisition of Moreover Technologies, Inc. (http://www.moreover.com), a wholesale aggregator of real-time content for Web sites, search engines, and enterprise customers. The companies said that by combining Moreover's content aggregation services with VeriSign's global feed management infrastructure, VeriSign will offer bloggers, publishers, enterprises, and Web portals a more intelligent and scalable real-time content platform.

The new content aggregation services will utilize VeriSign's ping server infrastructure. Currently, Moreover aggregates more than 12,000 news sources and millions of blogs. Harvesting information from across 126 countries in 25 languages, Moreover uses an advanced content tagging system with more than 30 metadata tags and 380 categories to deliver hundreds of thousands of unduplicated real-time content articles every day. Customers such as MSN, AskJeeves, and BBC use Moreover's technology to provide their customers with real-time news and content while hundreds of other enterprises use the technology to garner real-time information about market and business trends.

Source: VeriSign, Inc.