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Weekly News Digest
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July 21, 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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Pew Studies Presidential Election Campaign Websites and Social Media
Pew Research Center’s Journalism & Media division released the results of two separate studies that examined the campaign websites of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump from May 1 to June 15, 2016, as well as their activity on Facebook and Twitter from May 11 to May 31, 2016. These studies found the following:- Clinton’s campaign has almost entirely bypassed the news media while Trump draws heavily on news articles.
- On websites, citizen content is minimized or excluded altogether; in social media, Trump stands out for highlighting posts by members of the public.
- None of the three websites featured any distinct section addressing specific voting groups or segments of the population—a popular feature of campaign websites in 2008 and 2012.
- Facebook and Twitter usher in a new age in audiovisual capabilities.
For more information, read the report’s summary.
Government Transparency Bill Introduced
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) introduced the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, a bipartisan bill “to make all reports written for Congress by federal agencies available to the public,” according to the press release. The act would mandate the creation of a single website that allows the public to search, sort, and download these reports. Quigley is founder and co-chair of the Bipartisan Transparency Caucus, which works on projects aiming to enact legislation that is focused on an open and accessible federal government.“Public trust in government has reached historic lows, causing too many Americans to simply give up on Washington and the mission of government. The best way to rebuild the public’s trust and promote a more efficient and effective government is by furthering government accountability through increased transparency, and that’s precisely what the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act does,” says Quigley. For more information, read the press release.
OpenAthens Sets Goals for Helping Publishers
OpenAthens released the OpenAthens Publisher Manifesto, which is designed to ensure that the company’s products and services evolve along with customers’ needs and that the company is properly supporting publishers in their management of access to knowledge. The manifesto is composed of the following five actions:- Providing the best end-user experience possible at the heart of authentication into e-resources and applications.
- Enabling single sign-on that is simple to set up and easy to maintain within publishing platforms.
- The use of common standards across SAML [security assertion markup language] and other authentication protocols to deliver interoperability.
- Providing a forum where all parties involved in access and authentication into eresources can share views and challenge orthodoxies.
- Recognising that change is now constant, and that our services must continually evolve to meet new challenges.
For more information, read the press release.
Digital Science Adopts New NIH Metric
Digital Science agreed to adopt the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), the new article-level metric of scientific influence from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is designed “to evaluate funded medical and academic research, [and] to provide an improved indicator on the relative citation strength of a given paper, field-normalised and benchmarked against its peers.” Digital Science companies adopting the RCR include Symplectic, ReadCube, and figshare.For more information, read the press release.
ProPublica Expands Access to Information on Congress Members
ProPublica took over Inside Congress, an interactive database to help the public keep track of who represents them in Congress, from The New York Times. It will expand the database and launch a companion one called Represent, which grew out of a Times app.“While the original interactive database at The Times focused on bills and votes, our new project adds pages for each elected official, where you can find their latest votes, legislation they support and statistics about their voting. As we move forward we want to add much more data to help you understand how your elected officials represent you, the incentives that drive them and the issues they care about,” ProPublica’s Derek Willis states in a blog post. “The new Represent will help you track members, votes and bills in the House of Representatives and Senate. We’re also launching a Congress API, or Application Programming Interface, so developers can get data about what Congress is doing, too.” For more information, read the blog post.
Thomson Reuters Adds Bankruptcy-Focused Ebooks to ProView Platform
Thomson Reuters and the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) partnered to add 60-plus ABI ebook titles to the Thomson Reuters ProView e-reading platform throughout 2016 and into 2017. Topics covered in the ebooks include litigation, financing, fraud, and real estate. Readers can access ProView features such as full-text searching, secured notes and highlights, and content updating.For more information, read the press release.
SAGE Publishes New Childhood Obesity Journal
SAGE launched Childhood Obesity and Nutrition (OBN), an OA journal, which replaces the non-OA ICAN: Infant, Child & Adolescent Nutrition journal. OBN broadens ICAN’s scope with a focus on the changing field of pediatric obesity and nutrition. It covers practical strategies for obesity and nutrition counseling, psychological and social causes of obesity, public policies for improving children’s nutrition and weight status, and other topics.“Childhood Obesity and Nutrition strives to carve out a unique niche among scientific publications devoted to the serious public health problem of … obesity among children and adolescents,” says Goutham Rao, OBN’s editor. “Our goal is to create a multi-disciplinary forum for novel ideas that can inform our current understanding of pediatric obesity.” For more information, read the press release.
EOS.Web Seeks FedRAMP Compliance
The EOS.Web ILS is working on achieving Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) compliance, the federal authorization for highly secure and responsible cloud services. It needs to add certain features to its software to fulfill the requirements and complete the compliance process. If successful, EOS.Web would be the first provider in the industry to achieve FedRAMP compliance.For more information, read the press release.
Social Sciences Repository Alternative to SSRN Debuts
SocArXiv, a new open repository for preprints, launched as a social sciences-focused companion to the sciences-focused arXiv. “It will be a simple method for getting your work out there without putting it behind either a paywall or placing it in the hands of a company that wants to make money off of it, not increase access to it,” according to the orgtheory.net blog.For more information, read the blog post.
D&B Provides Group of Startups With Free Access to Data
D&B is giving FinTech Sandbox’s startups access to its global commercial data on businesses so they can develop and test new products and enhancements for the financial technology sector. FinTech Sandbox partners with industry leaders to offer startups free access to data they can use to advance their companies and share with other startups. By using D&B’s information, these startups can improve customer experiences, integrate data across systems, deliver insights in real time, and more. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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