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Weekly News Digest
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March 1, 2016 — 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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White House Reports Progress With Federally Funded Research Access
The White House released a blog post celebrating the 3-year anniversary of the memorandum “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” which directed federal agencies that spend more than $100 million in annual R&D to increase the public availability of their publications and data. Since the memo’s distribution, the White House asserts that federal agencies have made progress: 16 departments and agencies have released public access plans; other agencies are almost finished with their plans. Additionally, about half of the agencies with completed plans “now require those seeking Federal R&D funding to develop data management plans that describe the data to be collected in their studies and approaches for preserving and providing access to that data.”For more information, read the blog post.
IFLA Speaks Out on 'Right to Be Forgotten'
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) put out a statement on the “right to be forgotten,” which is “an individual’s ability to request that a search engine (or other data provider) remove links to information about himself or herself from search results.” The statement addresses issues libraries should consider when they participate in discussions about data privacy and notes areas of concern that the right to be forgotten could raise for the availability of long-term access to information.For more information, read the press release.
FCC Commissioner Throws Shade at Net Neutrality
Feb. 26, 2016, was the first anniversary of the passing of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Net Neutrality regulations. According to an article on InsideSources, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai predicted “their demise in the courts, Congress or at the agency itself.” Broadband adoption in American households, as well as ISPs’ growth in broadband investment, have both seemingly plateaued.Pai said, “One year ago today, the FCC decided to join 20th century regulation and the 21st century Internet together in not-so-holy matrimony. … It’s fitting that the traditional one-year anniversary gift is paper—for that’s pretty much all that utility-style regulation has produced over the last 12 months. … For most Americans, the marriage has been a dud.” For more information, read the article.
Knowledge Unlatched Facilitates New OA Books
Knowledge Unlatched announced that 78 new books have been “unlatched”—made open access (OA)—with support from individual libraries and library consortia around the world. This brings Knowledge Unlatched’s roster of OA titles to more than 100 books from 26 publishers. The books will be available on the OAPEN Foundation and HathiTrust platforms as downloadable PDF files.For more information, read the press release.
New Getty Tool Encourages Collaborative Research
The Getty Research Institute launched the Getty Scholars’ Workspace, a free, downloadable resource that facilitates collaborative art history and humanities research. Research teams can use this open source solution to “examine digital surrogates, build bibliographies, translate and annotate texts, share and annotate images, and exchange ideas.”Its features include a collaborative online citation manager, a comparison tool for images, a forum for storing project correspondence, a manuscript presentation tool for recording transcriptions and translations for manuscripts and other archival documents, and a timeline tool for creating chronological and illustrated lists of relevant dates. For more information, read the press release.
Cengage Learning Rolls Out Math Skills Product
Cengage Learning introduced MindTap Math Foundations, which was created with input from nearly 1,000 students. This is the first product in a new suite of solutions designed to prepare students for college. It offers skill-building work in 15-minute “Learning Bursts” that are available 24/7 for phones, tablets, or computers so students can practice on the go. These bursts include interactive video lessons, game activities, a chat function, and an interactive whiteboard.MindTap Math Foundations will be available for pilot testing in spring 2016 and fully available for purchase in June. For more information, read the press release.
Readex Releases Civil Rights History Archive
Readex is launching Civil Rights in America: From Reconstruction to the Great Society this month. This fully searchable archive is composed of digitized congressional documents that relate to all aspects of civil rights in the U.S., such as voting rights, race and education, civil rights legislation, workers’ rights, and gender and sexual discrimination. These include publications and reports from the Senate, the House of Representatives, the executive branch, congressional committees, special investigations, and nongovernmental organizations.For more information, read the press release.
LearningExpress Rolls Out SAT Prep Resources
LearningExpress, an EBSCO Information Services company, introduced new SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) preparation resources for students. Schools, libraries, and other institutions that subscribe to LearningExpress Library or PrepSTEP 2-Year College Edition have immediate access to these resources. The revised SAT, which features logic and reasoning skills assessments and real-world contexts for questions, among other changes, will take effect on March 5, 2016. The preparation resources are personalized to each student, helping them identify their strengths and weaknesses and gain practice and confidence with the new test format.For more information, read the press release.
Overleaf and PNAS Team Up for Document Creation
Overleaf partnered with PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) to give PNAS authors direct access to Overleaf’s cloud-based, scientific authoring platform for writing, collaborating on, and publishing documents. Authors can open Overleaf-customized templates from within PNAS’s website, which will then open on Overleaf’s platform and be editable in real time. The completed manuscripts can be submitted to PNAS through a submission link on the Overleaf platform. For more information, read the blog post.
Elsevier Updates SciVal
Elsevier launched new metrics on SciVal, its analysis and benchmarking tool, to help scholars measure and demonstrate the economic impact of their research. The new metrics are patent-article citations from five of the world’s largest patent offices, as well as publication views data from Scopus that sheds light on “non-publishing researchers” who do not cite articles. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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