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Weekly News Digest
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March 24, 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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Plum Analytics Facilitates Funding Searches
Plum Analytics introduced PlumX Funding Opportunities, a tool that helps researchers find grants to subsidize their work. They can perform customized searches for available grants, save them to their PlumX Dashboards profile page, and use the PlumX Suite to analyze them within the context of the impact of their current research. When new grants based on previous searches become available, the results are automatically embedded into the researcher’s profile page.For more information, read the press release.
SPECIAL REPORT: Open Data Day
This year’s Sunshine Week (March 13–19) was preceded by celebrations on Open Data Day (March 5). A wiki promoted worldwide events (e.g., workshops and hackathons) that showcased in-progress projects and datasets. For example:- GovEx presented a series of challenges to create guides that might help the international open data community determine “what works.” It also offered links to local events around the nation.
- Open Data Day DC occurred over 2 days (March 4–5) and featured workshops, projects, and an opportunity to post ideas for future work (“Somebody ought to …”).
- California officials celebrated California Data Demo Day (March 1) by showcasing state data transparency projects while identifying open data challenges that remain: “funding, infrastructure and culture change,” according to Government Technology.
On March 7, the Obama administration introduced the Opportunity Project, a new open data portal that combines data from a variety of federal agencies, not-for-profit organizations, companies, and online tools to give communities insights into jobs, transportation, housing, and school districts. “Officials are also using the White House announcement event as a call to action for communities to build upon the tools released [March 7]. All of the data sets and services have been posted on open source code management platform GitHub,” FedScoop notes. Building on the Open Access Button, the Open Data Button (initially only for Chrome) helps “people find, release, and share the data behind papers. … When you need the data supporting a paper (even if it’s behind a paywall), push the Button. If the data has already been made available through the Open Data Button,” you’ll get a link to it. If not, you’ll be able to start a request for the data. “Authors can respond to requests via email simply by attaching files or sharing a URL.” Look for coverage of Sunshine Week in next week’s NewsBreak. —Barbie E. Keiser
Max Planck Society Furthers OA Goals
The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) launched the website for the OA2020 initiative, which aims to facilitate collaboration and exchange among institutions that are involved with scholarly publishing, such as universities, funders, and libraries. It features a roadmap with guidelines for practical steps needed to improve open access (OA) practices. A network of “National Points of Contact” in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region will work on future developments and iterations for the initiative.For more information, read the press release.
Kudos Introduces Pilots for Supplemental Article Materials
Kudos partnered with Research Media and Research Square on pilot programs to help increase readership and impact for scholarly publications. Through these programs, Kudos allows publishers to sponsor the creation of outreach support materials for selected content.The Research Media pilot includes the ability to have professionally written lay summaries and designed infographics. With the Research Square pilot, Kudos allows publishers to sponsor the production of short, animated abstracts. These support materials will be available on the Kudos platform and will be linked through to the corresponding articles on publishers’ websites. For more information, read the blog post.
NA Publishing Debuts Publishers Weekly Collection
NA Publishing, Inc., in collaboration with Publishers Weekly, launched the Publishers Weekly Digital Archive (1872-2013). The publication has been continuously released since 1872 and is the authoritative source for U.S. publishing industry news, with additional content such as book reviews and coverage of the British book trade. The archive features every page of each issue in high definition and full color, including advertisements, covers, and supplementary indexes.For more information, read the press release.
dtSearch Is Now Available for Historical Newspaper Archive
Contegra Systems added its server-side PDF hit highlighter to dtSearch Corp.’s instant searching functionality for use with Fulton History’s online historical newspaper archive. Contegra users can enter a dtSearch request to access highlighted hits superimposed on original newspaper page images. Fulton History users can instantly search 34 million pages of content and view the exact place their search term appears on the newspaper page.For more information, read the press release.
Alexander Street Debuts Disability Studies Collection
Alexander Street rolled out a new primary source collection, Disability in the Modern World: History of a Social Movement, which has 150,000 pages of sources, supporting materials, and archives, as well as 125 hours of video content related to disability studies and the disability community’s history. In addition, Alexander Street has updated its platform to be JAWS screen reader-compatible and ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) Section 508-compliant.For more information, read the press release.
NISO Opens Altmetrics Draft for Public Comment
NISO (National Information Standards Organization) released the Altmetrics Definitions and Use Cases draft document from the NISO Altmetrics Initiative for public comment through April 20, 2016. It features a statement about altmetrics’ role in research evaluation; highlights of how stakeholders collect, develop, and consume altmetrics; and explanation and contextualization for commonalities among stakeholders’ needs, goals, and usages.For more information, read the press release.
European Union Tackles Piracy via Public Wi-Fi
An article on Telecompaper says, “Operators of public Wi-Fi networks cannot be held liable for copyright infringements committed over the networks, according to an opinion by the EU Court of Justice's advocate general.” This decision stems from a German court case between a business in Munich and Sony. The business’ unsecured Wi-Fi network was used to share music illegally. “The advocate general's opinion is not binding. The EU Court must still issue a final opinion in the case,” the article states.For more information, read the article.
Gale Overhauls Digital Archive Program
Gale announced that it will expand and rebrand its digital archive program, with more product volume and multicultural content to support growing research needs in new disciplines as well as in the areas of digital humanities and text and data mining. For example, Gale Primary Sources will publish 35 new products in 2016 that cover more than 500 years, including Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity, Early Arabic Printed Books, and American Fiction, 1774-1920.For more information, read the press release.
BioMed Central Gains Health-Focused Journal
Genes & Nutrition, which examines the relationship between genetics and nutrition, moved to BioMed Central (from NuGO) and became a fully open access (OA) journal. “A number of research papers have shown that open access articles are viewed more often than articles that are only available to subscribers, and are cited more often. This may be because they can be viewed by audiences who might not otherwise have had access to the research, including clinicians for example,” says Ruth King, editorial director for health sciences at BioMed Central.For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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