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Weekly News Digest

October 9, 2018 — 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.

Cengage and Authors Resolve Their Dispute

Cengage reached a resolution with the two authors who had filed a U.S.-based federal class action lawsuit against the company. They had argued that the Cengage Unlimited subscription service violated their publication contracts and would reduce their royalty incomes.

Cengage states, “We are very pleased to have reached an agreement with our authors David Knox and Caroline Schacht. Under the agreement, Mr. Knox and Ms. Schacht will purchase Choices in Relationships: An Introduction to Marriage and Family from Cengage. And, Cengage retains the exclusive rights to other titles authored or co-authored by these authors, including M&F and Understanding Social Problems. These works continue to be available with a Cengage Unlimited subscription.”

For more information, read the press release.

Knight Foundation Report Sheds Light on Twitter’s Fake News Problem

Knight Foundation released a report, “Disinformation, ‘Fake News’ and Influence Campaigns on Twitter,” which studies how misinformation spread during the 2016 presidential election. It looks at “more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter accounts that linked to more than 600 misinformation and conspiracy news outlets” to discover that there was a concentrated ecosystem of more than 6.6 million fake news tweets in the month before the election. From mid-March to mid-April 2017, there were 4 million fake news tweets.

Additional findings include the following:

  • More than 80 percent of accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation during the 2016 election campaign are still active, and they continue to publish more than a million tweets on a typical day.
  • Sixty-five percent of fake and conspiracy news links during the election went to just the 10 largest sites.
  • Fake news sites received about 13 percent of the Twitter links that a comparison set of national news outlets did, and 37 percent of the links [were] received by a set of regional newspapers.
  • While a majority of “fake news” came from pro-Republican and pro-Trump accounts in the month before the election, smaller but still substantial amounts of fake news was spread by liberal or Democratic-identified accounts. After the election period, left-leaning fake news decreased much more than right-leaning fake news.

For more information, read the article.

NAMLE's Media Literacy Week Will Showcase the Importance of Media Literacy Education

The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) announced that the 4th annual U.S. Media Literacy Week (#MediaLitWk) will be held Nov. 5–9, 2018. The week “is designed to bring attention and visibility to media literacy education in the United States” and “to showcase the work of amazing media literacy educators and organizations around the country,” according to NAMLE. Teachers, organizations, researchers, and others can get involved by planning events for their communities, including professional development workshops, film festivals for students’ media projects, webinars about news literacy, and sessions at makerspaces to explore reading and writing using emergent technologies.

For more information, visit the website.

ProQuest Makes USC Shoah Foundation Interviews Available in Hungarian Libraries

ProQuest joined forces with Hungary’s Electronic Information Service National Programme (EIS) to make the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive available to 40 academic and public Hungarian libraries that are EIS members. The archive features 55,000-plus streaming video interviews with people from 65 countries who are survivors of and witnesses to genocide. It has tools for researchers and educators—they can bookmark clips, save projects, and embed interviews in learning management system course packs.

“The Visual History Archive includes rich content about local history in Hungary—including more than 1,300 Hungarian interviews that enable students and researchers to gain further insight into and understand their history,” says István Monok, president of the EIS Programme Board. “Having access to these primary sources will ensure that these stories will never be forgotten.”

For more information, read the press release.

Exact Editions Adds New Humanist Archive

Exact Editions digitized the complete archive of New Humanist. The collection, available for web, iOS, and Android platforms, spans 133 years and includes every issue of New Humanist and its predecessors since 1885. The magazine—published by the Rationalist Association, whose members have included Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells—has been known for its debates about religion, science, and equality. All of the issues’ pages are searchable and shareable and are able to be cited.

For more information, visit the website.

Clarivate Analytics and UNSILO Work on AI for Scholarly Publishing

Clarivate Analytics joined forces with UNSILO to pilot AI capabilities in Clarivate Analytics’ ScholarOne submission and review system. They will develop and test UNSILO’s Manuscript Evaluation features in ScholarOne, with a focus on improving decision support for editors and streamlining peer review.

Keith Collier, managing director of publisher services at Clarivate Analytics, lauds the combination of UNSILO’s AI expertise and Clarivate Analytics’ data and workflows to improve the peer-review process. Thomas Laursen, CEO of UNSILO, says, “The growth of research output will challenge the sustainability of traditional peer review models if we do not augment and strengthen people’s screening capabilities.”

For more information, read the blog post.

ACS and Elsevier Sue ResearchGate for Copyright Infringement

The American Chemical Society (ACS) and Elsevier filed a U.S.-based federal copyright infringement lawsuit against ResearchGate. The complaint states the following:

This lawsuit focuses on ResearchGate’s intentional misconduct vis-à-vis its online file-sharing / download service, where the dissemination of unauthorized copies of PJAs [published journal articles] constitutes an enormous infringement of the copyrights owned by ACS, Elsevier and other journal publishers. The lawsuit is not about researchers and scientists collaborating; asking and answering questions; promoting themselves, their projects, or their findings; or sharing research findings, raw data, or pre-prints of articles.

ResearchGate’s infringing activity is no accident. Infringing copies of PJAs are a cornerstone to ResearchGate’s growth strategy. ResearchGate deliberately utilizes the infringing copies to grow the traffic to its website, its base of registered users, its digital content, and its revenues and investment from venture capital. ResearchGate knows that the PJAs at issue cannot be lawfully uploaded to and downloaded from the RG Website. Nevertheless, [in] violation of the rights of ACS, Elsevier, and others, ResearchGate uploads infringing copies of PJAs and encourages and induces others to do so.

For more information, read the news.

EFF Urges Public to Contact Senators About Register of Copyrights Bill

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put out a call for people to ask their senators not to vote for the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, which has already passed in the House of Representatives. It says, “The Senate is considering passing a bill which would turn the Register of Copyrights into a presidential appointee. The work of the Register is done best when it is not politicized”—“registering copyrightable works and providing information on copyright law to the government. Neither of these jobs is best served by a Register that is subject to the President’s agenda.”

For more information, visit the website.

Riffyn Gives Nonprofits Free Access to Its Scientific Development Environment

Experiment design and data analytics software company Riffyn introduced Riffyn Open Access, which gives any member of a nonprofit organization free use of its Scientific Development Environment (SDE). Nonprofit organizations can use a full-featured SDE account to create and share reusable experimental methods and data on the Riffyn Open Access platform.

“Riffyn SDE represents a paradigm shift in the design, execution and sharing of scientific procedures and data analysis,” says Timothy Gardner, founder and CEO of Riffyn. “Riffyn SDE has undergone four years of intensive development in industrial biotech and pharmaceutical R&D settings. We felt it was time to offer the capability openly to the academic community, most of whom do not have the means to implement industrially-proven data systems like Riffyn SDE.”

For more information, read the press release.



Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor Brandi Scardilli
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