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Weekly News Digest
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November 9, 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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Mason OER Metafinder Searches for Open Resources
George Mason University and Deep Web Technologies released Mason OER Metafinder, a search engine for open source textbooks and other open educational materials. Invented by Wally Grotophorst, associate university librarian for digital programs and systems at Mason, the search engine looks at 15 leading OER repositories from a single query to give faculty members a list of OERs they can use with their students. They can search across all sources or for terms in full record, title, or author(s), as well as date range. Grotophorst says, “We believe so much in OER that we’re giving small stipends to faculty who want to produce open texts (which we’ll publish through our Mason Publishing imprint).”For more information, read the blog post.
Jisc Is Now Part of FOLIO
Jisc joined as a partner in the FOLIO community, which aims to develop an open source library services platform (LSP). According to the blog post, “Jisc will bring their expertise to the project while looking to leverage FOLIO’s technologies in their own projects where appropriate.”“Jisc is interested in being directly involved with FOLIO to contribute to its innovative efforts to shape the future of libraries,” says Ross MacIntyre, Jisc’s head of library analytics services. “As a champion of the future of digital technologies, we believe that FOLIO is an important initiative for libraries. We are in favour of increasing the choice available to our members and would like to see more competition in the library management system marketplace. We welcome an open and community-driven approach to developing services for libraries, and we appreciate the efforts of the global FOLIO Community to solve problems of need and scale.” For more information, read the blog post.
Springer Nature Removes Articles at Request of Chinese Government
Javier C. Hernández writes in The New York Times, “Springer Nature, whose publications include Nature and Scientific American, acknowledged that at the [Chinese] government’s request, it had removed articles from its mainland site that touch on topics the ruling Communist Party considers sensitive, including Taiwan, Tibet, human rights and elite politics.” However, “[t]he publisher defended its decision, saying that only 1 percent of its content was inaccessible in mainland China.” Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press came under fire for removing more than 300 articles from the Chinese site of its China Quarterly journal. Hernández cites scholars who “denounced Springer Nature’s censorship in the mainland. … They accused the company of prioritizing profit over free speech.” Springer Nature’s director of communications and engagement, Susie Winter, “called the company’s action ‘deeply regrettable,’ but said that it had been taken ‘to prevent a much greater impact on our customers and authors.’” For more information, read the article.
Clarivate Analytics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Publish Research Fronts Report
Clarivate Analytics partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences on their fourth annual report, “Research Fronts 2017,” which identifies 143 prominent areas of scientific research, “including 100 hot and 43 emerging specialty areas spanning 10 broad areas of sciences and social sciences, based on a comprehensive analysis of scientific literature citations.” Topics in the 100 hot areas include “Research on genome editing in plants and the utility in crops,” “Types and characterization of gas shale pore systems,” and “Genomics research on the origins, evolution and migration of human beings.” Topics in the emerging areas include “Analysis of tree rings and its application in environment and climate change study” and “Zika virus infections and prevention.”The report is based on 9,690 research fronts (i.e., “specialties discovered when clusters of highly cited papers are frequently cited together, reflecting a specific commonality in the research”) generated by the Essential Science Indicators database from 2011 to 2016. The Mandarin version of the report is out now, with the English version expected on Nov. 9. For more information, read the press release.
Updated Safari Platform Available to Students via ProQuest
The new version of O’Reilly Media’s higher-education learning platform Safari is now exclusively available to academic libraries through ProQuest. “This version of Safari features both a new student experience and a new business model that provides academic institutions with easier, more affordable access for their entire student body,” according to the press release. Students have full access to the platform, which offers books, videos, case studies, and other media; mobile access with offline learning options; resources in areas such as Big Data, artificial intelligence, and gaming; and personalization and content recommendations. Librarians can use administration dashboards to manage data and track usage.For more information, read the press release.
bibliotheca Adds New Language Options to Its cloudLibrary App
bibliotheca launched its new cloudLibrary app for iOS and Android devices. Its content is available in 11 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Canadian French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Maori, and Romanian. The company is working with publishers to offer ebooks and audiobooks in multiple languages (beyond the current English and Spanish). According to the press release, “A new backend update will allow this content to be catalogued according to language and country, and provide users the opportunity to search for content in the language of their choice.” In the future, bibliotheca will work to include more languages, such as Arabic and Chinese.For more information, read the press release.
EBSCO Launches Two Magazine Archives
EBSCO Information Services launched digital archives for U.S. News & World Report (more than 4,900 issues through 1984) and Esquire (more than 900 issues through 2014) magazines. Each issue is available from cover to cover as originally published. They address business and economics, education, fashion and lifestyle, marketing and advertising, politics, pop culture, sociology, and other topics relevant to the study of 20th-century history.For more information, read the press release.
GSA Works Toward New Option Beyond DUNS Number
According to Hudson Hollister, in a blog post from the Data Coalition, “A new procurement announcement from the General Services Administration (GSA) has confirmed that the U.S. federal government is seriously considering a new, open future for the way contractors and grantees are identified.” GSA pays D&B to run the registration system for contractors and grantees to give them a DUNS Number, which helps researchers “make sense of the federal government’s contracts and grants—over $1 trillion in 2016.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2012 that GSA believes D&B “effectively has a monopoly for government unique identifiers,” because the DUNS number was the only option.“That has changed,” Hudson writes. “The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a nonproprietary, freely-downloadable identification code, is being adopted by other government agencies around the world, and GSA’s 18F technology team has figured out how the LEI could seamlessly replace the DUNS.” For more information, read the blog post.
Thomson Reuters Studies Greenhouse Gas Emitters
Thomson Reuters unveiled its latest report, “Global 250 Greenhouse Gas Emitters: A New Business Logic.” Written with CDP, a not-for-profit organization with the largest collection of self-disclosed corporate environmental data, and others, the report “presents the latest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data from the world’s 250 largest publicly traded emitters. The Global 250 is a group of businesses in the oil, gas, utility, automotive, aircraft, manufacturing, steel, mining and cement sectors. This report looks at best practices across the economy and aims to demonstrate the relationships between decarbonization and long-term financial performance.”According to the press release, key findings include the following: - Comparing the relationship between multiyear decarbonization trajectories and a broad set of financial performance metrics, there is no evidence of a trade-off between financial and environmental performance among the G250
- Roughly 20% of the G250 have strategies in place to drive business transformations necessary to reduce their climate impacts
- A meaningful number of that 20% are demonstrating that their transformation strategies create real business value through cost structure improvements and new revenue growth opportunities, as well as risk mitigation
For more information, read the press release.
DCL Discovery Bridge Helps Publishers Make Content More Discoverable
DCL and ASTM International joined forces to make published content more discoverable for professional societies and associations. They created DCL Discovery Bridge, “a hosted subscription-based service that allows publishers to offload the burden [of discovery services’ varied content and metadata requirements] while guaranteeing consistent and timely delivery of publishers’ content to each and every discovery vendor they work with,” according to the press release.The solution uses a hub-and-spoke model. Some spokes are content from publishers and some are delivery channels to discovery vendors. The hub is a set of DCL-hosted services that pick up clients’ content (such as journal articles and conference proceedings) and “normalize the incoming metadata into a master metadata structure, creating discovery vendor-specific feeds of content objects and metadata in the format and structure each vendor can most easily integrate into their platform. The feeds are automatically delivered to each vendor for ingestion into their platforms.” For more information, read the press release.
LightSail Announces Results of Its 2017 Reading Competition
LightSail announced the winners of its 2017 LightSail Launch Challenge, a reading competition for tens of thousands of students across the U.S. and Mexico. They read a combined total of 311,101 books on the LightSail platform. First place went to Indian Land Middle School in Lancaster County, S.C., which received $3,000 in premium ebook titles from LightSail. Middle School 390 in the Bronx, N.Y., came in second, and Forest Brook Elementary in Hauppauge, N.Y., came in third (with $2,000 and $1,000 in ebooks, respectively).For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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