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Weekly News Digest
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February 26, 2015 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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NASIG and SSP Collaborate on Information Policy Event
NASIG and the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) will host a joint full-day program, Evolving Information Policies & Their Implications: A Conversation for Librarians & Publishers, on May 27, 2015 (the first day of each organization’s annual conference). The event will address public policy issues such as open access (OA), grant funder submission and publication requirements, and dataset management and preservation.The speakers come from the publishing, library, and vendor communities as well as from the intellectual property and copyright fields. They include Jayne Marks, VP of global publishing at Wolters Kluwer Health Medical Research; T. Scott Plutchak, director of digital curation strategy at the University of Alabama–Birmingham; and Caitlin Trasande, head of research policy at Digital Science and senior strategy editor for Nature. For more information, read the press release.
NPG Introduces Double-Blind Peer-Review Option
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced that in March 2015, authors will be able to opt for double-blind peer review—wherein both the authors and the reviewers are anonymous—across Nature and the Nature Research Journals. A recent NPG reader survey found that 78% of respondents were in favor of double-blind peer review.Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change implemented this option in June 2013. Other journals, including NPG’s flagship open access (OA) publication Nature Communications, will implement the option later in 2015. For more information, read the press release and the editorial.
APA Temporarily Suspends New Programs for PSYCAS Service
The American Psychological Association (APA) and Liaison will temporarily close the current soft launch of the PSYCAS service to new programs. Released in January, PSYCAS streamlines the psychology program application process for students, faculty members, and departments.The organizations will clarify and refine the workflows and business processes related to the dissemination of third-party information through PSYCAS and associated student costs so that they comply with industry best practices. Programs currently registered to accept applications for admission via PSYCAS will still be provided with comprehensive service, and students with PSYCAS accounts may continue to use it to apply to these programs. For more information, read the press release.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Develops Education Resource Organization
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) created HMH Education Services, an organization offering comprehensive resources to K–12 districts, administrators, and educators. It will provide support (e.g., technical planning and curriculum implementation guidance) and introduce new ways to deliver professional development via digital and blended learning.Resources include a Digital Learning Essentials series of best practice training for technology-enhanced instruction and the AskHMH online teacher resource. HMH expects to reach more than 400,000 educators per year. For more information, read the press release.
OverDrive Introduces a Screening Room for Streaming Videos
OverDrive launched a Screening Room feature that allows its library customers to highlight and promote their purchased streaming video content from OverDrive Marketplace. Patrons can browse streaming videos from a convenient location and borrow them from custom collections.OverDrive’s collection development specialists can help libraries add a Screening Room to their digital library and create curated collections of movies and TV shows. For more information, read the blog post.
ALA Council Accepts 2015 Master's Program Standards for Accreditation
The Council of the American Library Association (ALA) approved the adoption of the 2015 Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library and Information Studies. These revised standards emphasize planning, assessment, and evaluation to sustain quality, as well as require demonstration of how the evaluation results are applied. Implementation of these standards begins immediately for programs with comprehensive review visits in spring 2017 and later.The review process took more than 5 years and included three drafts that were issued for comment. The 2015 standards were prepared by the ALA Committee on Accreditation and were endorsed by the ALA Committee on Education. For more information, read the press release.
BetterCloud Rolls Out Office 365 Toolset for IT Departments
BetterCloud released a free toolset for Office 365 that is now available in private beta. With this toolset, IT teams have a 360-degree view of their organizations’ domains; they can audit activities across key areas; and they can see security risks, performance optimizations, and best practices on a comprehensive dashboard.“As the leading insights, management and security tool for cloud office, we have a unique understanding of the challenges these platforms pose for large enterprises,” says David Politis, BetterCloud’s founder and CEO. “In order for these organizations to adopt cloud office platforms, the additional functionality and controls provided by BetterCloud are critical. IT departments that have historically used Microsoft products are accustomed to a high level of sophistication within their security and management toolset. Now, with BetterCloud for Office 365, they can leverage similarly advanced functionality built for the Office 365 environment.” For more information, read the press release.
Springer Partners With CCC for TDM Solution
Springer Science+Business Media partnered with Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) for a solution that enables corporate life sciences researchers to do text and data mining (TDM) across publishers, giving them a single source from which to access all of the articles they want to mine. CCC will use a portion of Springer’s full-text article content (along with content from other participating publishers), normalize the XML for consistency, and make the content available to users of the solution. Users will be able to download the data and upload it to their own in-house systems for TDM.“Customers have been looking for a single and compliant source for XML content across multiple publishers,” says Lauren Tulloch, director of corporate products and services at CCC. “As a trusted partner of the scientific, medical and technical publishing community, CCC is well-positioned to fill this role. … [W]e look forward to launching our service with Springer and other participating publishers this year.” For more information, read the press release.
NISO Releases White Paper on the Future of Library Resource Discovery
NISO (National Information Standards Organization) published a white paper, “The Future of Library Resource Discovery,” which summarizes the current discovery environment; describes how the current technologies, methodologies, and products could adapt to future change; and explores possible alternatives—including those related to linked data—to current models of discovery.NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee commissioned the paper as part of its ongoing examination of discovery-related areas that the information community could potentially standardize. For more information, read the press release.
SAGE Announces the International Journal of Christianity & Education
SAGE Publications and Calvin College will relaunch the Journal of Christian Education and the Journal of Education and Christian Belief as the International Journal of Christianity & Education in March 2015. The new journal will have an increased international focus and become a reference for academic discussions about the relationship between Christianity and educational theory and practice. The two previous journals will be archived online as part of the relaunch.“SAGE is developing a strong program of journals representing leading scholars and societies across theology and religion, approaching these disciplines from a variety of perspectives including both an educational and sociological perspective,” says Karen Phillips, editorial director at SAGE. “We see The International Journal of Christianity & Education as a key forum for discussion of the interface between theology and education. …” For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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