Weekly News Digest

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has discontinued the PubSCIENCE site as of Nov. 4. A message on the site states: "Scientific and technical information is available at www.osti.gov. Specific links are available for journal literature at www.osti.gov/journal_sources.html." The agency had solicited comments about the possible elimination of the site (with a deadline of Sept. 8), but did not provide advance notice of the closure. PubSCIENCE was a Web service developed by the DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) to facilitate searching and accessing peer-reviewed journal literature in the physical sciences and other energy-related disciplines.

The ALA's Washington office reports that "While there were only 7 comments in favor of ending PubSCIENCE, there were nearly 240 public comments, many from librarians and other PubSCIENCE users, pressing for continuance of the indexing service." ALA had lobbied hard to keep the service operating and continues to urge supporters to write letters asking to have it reinstated.

The Software and Information Industry Association had lobbied against PubSCIENCE on the grounds that it duplicated and competed with databases from private-sector publishers.

PubSCIENCE allowed users to search across abstracts and citations of multiple publishers at no cost and then hyperlink to the publisher's server to obtain the full-text article. PubSCIENCE was modeled after PubMed, which covers medical sciences and is funded by the National Institutes of Health. (For more information, see the NewsBreak by Marydee Ojala at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=17110.)

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, ALA, SIIA

FIND/SVP has announced it will provide Hoover's Online users with online, on-demand custom inquiry and research services to augment the business intelligence available through Hoover's. As part of the agreement, FIND/SVP industry and business professionals will, for a fee, provide quick, personalized answers to a single inquiry—or answer up to five questions a month via a yearly FIND/SVP subscription—to help Hoover's customers more fully understand key trends, marketing strategies, best practices, competitive intelligence, and other critical business issues.

FIND/SVP will also provide Hoover's users with access to more in-depth research and custom project capabilities, depending on the requester's business intelligence requirements. The service will become available within the next several weeks.

According to Daniel S. Fitzgerald, FIND/SVP's executive vice president for business development, BizAnswers will provide a quick consulting service and directional assistance via e-mail, with one question costing $60 and annual subscriptions available for $500. More in-depth and robust service with human consultation—BizAnswers Plus—will cost $300 per question. Subscriptions could range from $12,000 per year to about $20,000, depending on need and the size of an organization. FIND/SVP plans to make similar deals with services offering business-related Web content.

Source: FIND/SVP

Emerald (the trading name for MCB University Press), an international management information publisher, has reached an agreement with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to supply content to the EIU's new Web-based Executive Briefing service (http://eb.eiu.com). Under the partnership agreement, Executive Briefing will include selected articles from Emerald's management journals, which can be accessed by the service's subscribers. Other Emerald journal articles will form the basis of research papers written by EIU analysts.

Executive Briefing is designed to provide executives with the global industry forecasts and analyses they need to make informed and timely business decisions. Building on the EIU forecasting model, the service provides 5-year country-by-country forecasts for eight key industries, in line with its macroeconomic forecasts. Free trials of the service are available.
 
Source: Emerald