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Weekly News Digest
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March 17, 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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ReadCube Acquires Papers
ReadCube acquired the Papers reference manager from Springer Nature. Robert McGrath, ReadCube’s CEO and co-founder, will head the Papers business. He says, “For some time we’ve admired Papers’ award winning app for the Mac. Today we are proud to add Papers to the ReadCube portfolio of solutions for researchers.” The company will work with Papers’ user community to build on the tool’s existing features and “accelerate the pace of discovery,” says McGrath.For more information, read the press release.
Findaway Announces Teen- and Adult-Focused Playaway Tablets
Findaway enhanced its Playaway Launchpad children’s learning tablet to include a tablet experience for teens and adults as well as an expanded catalog of children’s content (such as digital book apps with the Dr. Seuss, Berenstain Bears, Little Critter, and Smithsonian brands, among others). The teen and adult Launchpad experience features pre-loaded and secure learning apps, brain games, casual games, and comics. It is now available for libraries and schools to preorder.For more information, read the press release.
The Government Weighs In on Web Privacy
According to The Washington Post, federal regulators “proposed a broad new set of privacy rules for Internet providers, in a major bid to give Web users some of the same privacy protections online as they receive from their telephone providers.” These providers, such as Verizon, Comcast, or T-Mobile, would be limited in how they can handle their subscribers’ personal information, such as their browsing habits and the apps they use.“If approved, the rules would significantly expand the Federal Communications Commission’s role as a privacy watchdog, giving it new ways to oversee an industry that increasingly relies on customer data as a source of business,” the article states. For more information, read the article.
ProQuest Rolls Out Ebook Central
ProQuest officially launched Ebook Central, its platform for streamlining librarians’ and researchers’ ebook workflows. It features 790,000 titles from 650-plus publishers, with an average of 100,000 newly published works set to be added each year. Librarians can use its administrative and acquisition engine, LibCentral, to access models such as demand-driven acquisition (DDA), short-term loan (STL), or outright purchasing. Researchers can find, evaluate, and access content, as well as use note-taking, highlighting, and instant-citing tools. They can also download titles for offline reading. ProQuest will upgrade its ebrary and EBL customers to the new platform over the next year.For more information, read the press release.
CCC Expands Get It Now to Middle East
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) added a new partner for its Get It Now article delivery service: ORYX Solutions, a United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based e-learning solutions and training company that serves the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Central Asia. This partnership will enable Get It Now to be offered to colleges and universities in the UAE and Oman.For more information, read the press release.
Ithaka S+R Studies the Future of Research Libraries
Ithaka S+R released “A Day in the Life of a (Serious) Researcher: Envisioning the Future of the Research Library,” a report spearheaded by Cornell University Library’s Kornelia Tancheva. It “proposes ways in which the research library may respond to changing researcher practices.” Tancheva and her team “asked researchers to map or log a day on which they did at least some research. On the following day, the team interviewed the researchers to learn how they had found, used, and shared information in the course of their activities.”For more information, read the blog post.
Boopsie Partners With Medical Library
Boopsie for Libraries entered the medical library market via a partnership with A.T. Still University (ATSU). The company will provide students at this health sciences university with “mobile access to information that supports quality medical education and patient care,” says Megan Vizzini, Boopsie’s EVP of sales and marketing. This access includes connections to EBSCOhost and EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) content, along with products from other academic and medical library vendors.For more information, read the press release.
Gale Partners With Egyptian Government for Collections Access
Gale signed a national agreement with Egypt’s Specialized Presidential Council for Education and Scientific Research to make its Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library archive available to academic institutions; schools; and public, special, and corporate libraries in Egypt. These organizations will also have access to collections from Gale’s National Geographic Virtual Library and Archives Unbound via the Egyptian Knowledge Bank.For more information, read the press release.
Knowledge Unlatched Heralds Upcoming Improvements
Knowledge Unlatched announced that it will be expanding and scaling up over the next few months. The organization will experiment with more curated thematic and topical packages, new subjects, and more diversity for its content. It will consider opening up access to journals and to backlist books and will offer more purchasing models. Other plans include the establishment of a library and publisher forum and the creation of publicly available, evidence-based assessments on the benefits of open access (OA).For more information, read the press release.
NPG to Add New Journals in 2017
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced five new online-only journals that will debut in January 2017: Nature Astronomy, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Chemistry. NPG will add these journals in response to customer feedback and to contribute to the multidisciplinary research areas “aimed at solving our most pressing societal challenges.” They will feature original research, commentaries, and review articles, among other content, and will be open for submissions in April 2016.For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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