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Weekly News Digest
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August 31, 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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The ISNI Organizations Registry Provides Open Identifiers
The ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) changed its infrastructure to focus on providing open identifiers to organizations in the scholarly communications field. “The ISNI Organizations Registry will enable organizations to change and correct their own records and allow the research community to identify author affiliations persistently and authoritatively, thereby supporting analysis of research output and impact,” according to the press release. The current ISNI Registry has identity records of 8.75 million named individuals and more than 650,000 organizations in the scholarly and media industries. The ISNI-IA will manage the ISNI Organizations Registry separately, and its data will be available under a CC0 license, meaning users can download it.For more information, read the press release.
ALA Publishes Report on U.S. Copyright Office
Law Librarian Blog’s Joe Hodnicki shared a report from ALA: “Lessons From History: The Copyright Office Belongs in the Library of Congress.” He writes, “Currently the Register of Copyrights is appointed by the Librarian of Congress. For several years this administrative arrangement has caught the attention of members of Congress because, in 2015, the GAO identified the Copyright Office’s shortcomings in terms of the inability of the Library of Congress to support and [manage] the IT needs of the Office. … That would change if H.R. 1695, Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, passes.”For more information, read the blog post.
MIT Plans Scholarly Communication and Information Science Summit
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is using a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a summit of workshops in spring 2018. Grand Challenges in Information Sciences and Scholarly Communication will feature international experts from various disciplines, sectors (e.g., corporate, government, and university), and domains who will discuss critical problems in information science that can be solved within 10 years. They will focus on scholarly discovery, digital curation and preservation, and open scholarship.For more information, read the press release.
Battles With Elsevier Over Fair Treatment Continue
Enago Academy reports that four major institutions in Berlin have canceled their contracts with Elsevier. These German universities are supporting the DEAL project, which aims to negotiate with Elsevier for fair publishing charges, making publications from German institutions automatically OA, and giving all DEAL institutions permanent full-text access to Elsevier ejournals. “Dissatisfaction with Elsevier has affected German, Peruvian, and Taiwanese institutions. They all have lost access to Elsevier journals, as negotiations between these institutions and the publisher have been unsuccessful,” according to Enago Academy. DEAL is also negotiating with Springer Nature and Wiley.For more information, read the article.
Adam Matthew Finishes Migration Experiences Collection
Adam Matthew completed the collection Migration to New Worlds, which follows the emigration experiences of millions of people over 200 years using materials from 26 archives from around the world. It is composed of Module I: The Century of Immigration and Module II: The Modern Era. The newly released The Modern Era begins with the New Zealand Co. in the 1840s and follows colonization companies, the activities of immigration and welfare societies, refugees’ and displaced persons’ experiences after World War II, and more.For more information, read the press release.
The Crowley Co. Launches Microfilm Platform
The Crowley Co. introduced IMAGEhost, a new microfilm hosting, viewing, and sharing platform. Users can sign in on the secure portal to view an organization’s microfilm collection in its original format. They can search by name or file number. With three options for implementation (using Crowley Imaging, scanning on their own, or hosting on their own servers), IMAGEhost is designed for libraries, circuit courts, museums, historical societies, and organizations of any size that want to share their microfilm collections.For more information, read the press release.
BMC Implements Registered Reports Format for Medical Journal
BMC Medicine is the first medical journal to accept BMC’s Registered Reports article format, which includes only the rationale and the proposed methodology behind a study in a peer-reviewed article. After peer review, the importance of the research questions and their implications for future research, policy, or practice, as well as the need for the study based on existing works are taken into account. The article undergoes a second round of peer review, and if it passes, it is guaranteed publication as a complete article.“Registered Reports format aims at fostering innovation and addressing concerns about credibility and reproducibility in science. This model warrants publishing research with hypotheses established prior to data collection and avoids questionable research practices,” according to BMC. BMC Biology and BMC Ecology are also using Registered Reports. For more information, read the blog post.
ReFigure Aims to Connect Scientific Insights
eLife announced the beta launch of ReFigure, an open source Chrome extension and website that helps users link, share, and curate scientific findings across their own data and publishers’ websites and repositories. It currently supports research materials from eLife, PLOS, PubMed Central (PMC), and figshare.Co-creators Girija Goyal and James Akin write, “ReFigure was born from an idea that research outputs should be incremental, immediately connected to published findings and not confined to the websites of individual journals. … The entries captured by ReFigure could link reproduced experiments, compile studies using a reagent of interest or highlight a novel connection between two studies.” For more information, read the blog post.
An Itemized List of 30 Years of Disagreements: LC Releases Hamilton Papers
He wrote his way out. The Library of Congress (LC) made the papers of Alexander Hamilton available for free online—a collection of about 12,000 items (he really did write like he was running out of time). The letters, legal papers, speech drafts, and other writings are presented in their original format on the LC’s website.“Alexander Hamilton is certainly having his moment and I am so thrilled that people can learn more about him—actually read his descriptions of Revolutionary War battles, read letters to his wife, see the cross-outs in his draft of George Washington’s farewell address and so many other things. Sharing this history is what the Library is all about,” says Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Man, the man is nonstop! For more information, read the press release.
Accessible Archives Updates Periodical Collections
Accessible Archives, Inc. completed the addition of titles to its African American Newspapers and Women’s Suffrage collections, meaning they are now fully imaged and come with MARC records. Women’s Suffrage is composed of The New Citizen, Western Woman Voter, and The Remonstrance: An Anti-Suffrage Periodical. African American Newspapers has nine titles, including Freedmen’s Record and The Negro Business League Herald.For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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