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Weekly News Digest
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March 23, 2017 — 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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ProQuest Adds New Digital Library Option to OASIS
ProQuest integrated the OASIS system with Rittenhouse Book Distributors’ R2 Digital Library platform to allow customers to order from a selection of 5,700 health science ebooks from R2 Digital Library via OASIS. OASIS is also partnered with platforms such as University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO), Wiley Online Library, Taylor & Francis, and De Gruyter.For more information, read the press release.
IFLA Launches Metropolitan Libraries Short Film Contest
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is calling for submissions to its 2017 IFLA Metropolitan Libraries Short Film Award contest. The award, sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia, honors short films about public libraries and librarians in large cities and metropolitan areas that fit into one of three sections: fiction, documentary, or advertising. Individuals or institutions may apply. An individual winner will receive €500 (about $538) in filmmaking equipment, while an institutional winner will receive the same amount in travel expenses to the IFLA World Library and Information Congress (Aug. 19–25, 2017, in Poland).For more information, read the press release.
Gale Puts New Emphasis on Women's Studies
Gale introduced the Women’s Studies Archive to the Gale Primary Sources program. The archive’s first collection, Women’s Issues and Identities, features 1 million pages of manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals, and other sources that explore the foundation of women’s movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include efforts to get women into high-profile government positions from the 1950s to the 1970s and the birth control movement.For more information, read the press release.
University of California Campuses Join OA2020 Initiative
The library at the University of California (UC)–Berkeley signed the OA2020 Expression of Interest, affirming its commitment to achieving universal OA for scholarly journals alongside UC–Davis and UC–San Francisco. The OA2020 movement aims to convert all of scholarly journal literature to OA by 2020. UC–Berkeley professor and librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason says, “Our mission, as scholars and educators, is to generate new knowledge for the benefit of the world. … Much of the world can’t read our publications. They can’t get access because they can’t afford it. As the nation’s premier public research university, we need to be leaders in the effort to change that.”For more information, read the press release.
IMLS Speaks Out on Federal Budget
Kathryn K. Matthew, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), released a statement on the president’s proposed FY2018 budget. The following is an excerpt:The institutions we serve provide vital resources that contribute significantly to Americans’ economic development, education, health, and well-being whether by facilitating family learning and catalyzing community change or stimulating economic development through job training and skills development. Our agency’s support enables museums and libraries to offer learning experiences for students and families, as well as to increase care for, and access to, the nation’s collections that are entrusted to museums and libraries by the public.
For the rest of the statement, see the press release.
Impactstory Rolls Out OA Article Finder
Impactstory introduced Unpaywall, a Chrome extension that links users to free, full-text versions of research articles as they browse for them online. Its index of more than 10 million legally uploaded OA articles is designed to help individual researchers, nonprofits, and others who don’t have institutional access to academic subscriptions. As an example, Impactstory notes that about half of a set of 11,000 recent articles about cancer research from mainstream media outlets were able for free to Unpaywall users.For more information, read the blog post.
Globalscape Partners With HP for Secure File Transfer
Globalscape launched the Unified Communications Backup Appliance, which combines the company’s information exchange platform Enhanced File Transfer (EFT) with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) technology to help users manage corporate data. Customers can quickly implement a secure file transfer solution without extra money or IT resources.For more information, read the press release.
Google Fights Back Against 'Questionable Content' in Search Results
According to FORTUNE, Google is deploying 10,000 content-monitor contractors to “rein in the amount of questionable content,” including fake news, that appears in search results. “What’s new is they will now be asked to look at actual real search requests—which may lead to what updated Google guidelines describe as ‘upsetting-offensive’ content—and then rate those results.” Their findings will be used to improve search algorithms. For more information, read the article.
Clarivate Analytics Debuts Garfield Award
Clarivate Analytics is starting a memorial scholarship to honor Eugene Garfield’s legacy. The Eugene Garfield Information Sciences Pioneer Award “will be given annually to at least one promising information scientist, selected by a board of prominent scientometricians,” according to the press release. The award will go to an early-career researcher (one who has had a Ph.D. for less than 10 years), and that researcher will receive in-kind support and access to Web of Science data. The award application will be available in April 2017.For more information, read the press release.
Academic Associations Plan OA Publishing Initiative
The Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the AAUP (Association of American University Presses) will begin a new initiative this spring to increase the dissemination of humanities and humanistic social sciences research by faculty members in these fields. They will publish free, OA digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs. So far, 12 institutions have agreed to participate by incorporating the following components into their publishing projects: provide a baseline grant of $15,000 to support the publication of an OA title that is fewer than 90,000 words in length, award at least three publishing grants per year, and participate in the initiative for 5 years.For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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