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Weekly News Digest
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October 13, 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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The Open Library of Humanities Debuts
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), an organization dedicated to publishing open access (OA) scholarship with no charges to authors, launched after 2 years of planning. It has seven journals, with an estimated publication volume of 150 articles for the first year. With 99 institutions signed up to support the initiative, they will pay about $6 per institution per article. The Open Library of Humanities journal will publish new material on a weekly rolling cycle.Among its goals for the first 3 years of the platform’s operation are bringing in new journals, sustaining and scaling libraries’ investments to become sustainable, and improving its indexing and discoverability through cross-site search and integration with aggregation services. For more information, read the blog post.
NFAIS to Host OA-Focused Workshop
The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) announced its new workshop, The Impact of Open Access Models: Finding Stable, Sustainable and Scalable Solutions. It will take place on Oct. 23, 2015, at The Hub’s Cira Centre in Philadelphia, and anyone can participate virtually.Presenters from nonprofit, commercial, consulting, and academic sectors will share their opinions on how open access (OA) impacts the scholarly community across disciplines and how current practices can drive a “stable, sustainable and scalable path forward” for OA. For more information, read the press release.
World Statistics Day Is Oct. 20
On Oct. 20, 2015, organizations around the world will celebrate the United Nations Statistics Division’s World Statistics Day by showcasing their achievements and their ongoing efforts to improve data sources and statistical methods, develop new technologies, and strengthen statistical systems to help decision makers create informed policies.For example, Statistics Portugal will host a seminar, Sustainable Development Goals: The Challenges for the Statistical Community. The Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic will hold an open house, create an electronic quiz about search skills, and host a conference, Electronic Services of the Statistical Office. For more information, read the website.
Kudos Signs New Publisher Partners and a New Institution
Kudos announced its milestones for the month of September—it signed five publishers and one institution and also launched its new Kudos for Institutions service. Annual Reviews, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and EDP Sciences are among the new publishers, with Robert Gordon University joining as the new institution.Kudos for Institutions gives institutions a way to take a strategic approach to increasing researchers’ visibility and their work’s impact. It provides reports on how their researchers are using the service to manage communications around their work, as well as metrics on how using Kudos is affecting their work. Institutions that sign up with Kudos in October and November are eligible for a launch discount. For more information, read the blog post.
figshare Rolls Out Updated Platform
figshare will launch its next-generation data management platform for academic researchers, funders, and publishers in November 2015. With input from core customers, the platform promotes best practices as well as enables openness in collecting and finding research. It has new capabilities in three areas: control (over private or commercially sensitive data), discoverability (making it easier to collect and find relevant content), and usability (making data more easily available and showcasing authors and research).Existing customers can access the new platform for free. For more information, read the press release.
Wolters Kluwer Details Benefits of New Acquisition
Wolters Kluwer has been promoting its new product benefits since its acquisition of Effacts, a Netherlands-based legal management software provider. For example, the company notes that customers can take control of corporate and legal risks, increase efficiencies and save money, and better manage their legal departments and meet company goals. Effacts houses legal information such as contracts and compliance information to help companies control their obligations and rights, and its easy-to-navigate dashboard allows quick access to key information. Corporate counsels can use the platform to view and analyze work distribution within the legal department and optimize the use of human resources. Different departments can use it to collaborate with each other or with external legal service providers.Effacts is geared to small and medium enterprise legal departments, filling a coverage gap for Wolters Kluwer in middle-market companies that need sophisticated solutions to improve their workflow. By joining with Wolters Kluwer, Effacts will be able to extend the reach of and enhance its products. Wolters Kluwer expects that the acquisition will cover its cost of capital within 3–5 years. For more information, read the press release.
Bibliotheca Puts Cloud Library First
On the heels of its acquisition of 3M Library Systems, Bibliotheca revealed that the 3M Cloud Library will become its primary digital product. The company’s own platform, opus, had previously been available only in the U.K. but will now be incorporated into the Cloud Library.“Bibliotheca has invested heavily in the opus platform over the last 18 months, but Cloud Library is the right choice for our customers moving forward,” says Andy Chadbourne, Bibliotheca’s president of global marketing. “The unique features that we had built into opus will now be ported directly into the Cloud Library, allowing us to focus on a single digital product line to provide powerful, meaningful integrations between self-service kiosks and digital content—ultimately creating a seamless and enriched patron experience.” For more information, read the press release.
Digital Science's Companies Reach Customer Milestone
Digital Science now has 100 publisher customers across its portfolio of companies, including ReadCube, Altmetric, and figshare. These publishers consist of large global companies (such as Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and SAGE Publications), society and professional organizations (such as the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and IEEE), and university presses (such as MIT Press and Cambridge University Press).For more information, read the press release.
BiblioCommons Gains Random House Ebooks
BiblioCommons teamed up with Penguin Random House to add more than 38,000 ebooks to its collection of titles available to public libraries via BiblioDigital. Libraries can use this platform to offer their patrons library-centered ebook discovery, borrowing, and reading.Penguin Random House agreed to provide BiblioCommons with new, best-selling, and other titles from Random House and its imprints, as well as from publishers that Random House distributes. For more information, read the blog post.
Amazon Web Services Enters the IoT Development Space
Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced AWS IoT, a platform to help customers connect and manage devices and applications that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices, such as cars, turbines, sensor grids, and lightbulbs, connect to AWS services via the AWS IoT Device Gateway so companies can store, process, analyze, and act on the data they generate.“AWS IoT creates a virtual version, or ‘shadow’ of each connected device that includes all of the information about the device’s state and is always available so that applications can check the device’s status and take actions that are automatically sent to the device once it reconnects,” the press release states. AWS also offers a software development kit (SDK) so developers can use the AWS IoT functionality from connected devices as well as from mobile and web apps. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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