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Weekly News Digest
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January 8, 2019 — 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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Public Domain News
On Jan. 1, 2019, new works entered the U.S. public domain for the first time in more than 20 years. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School notes, “Works from 1923 will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee. They include dramatic films such as The Ten Commandments, and comedies featuring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. There are literary works by Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, and Edith Wharton, the ‘Charleston’ song, and more.” Other coverage of the public domain works includes articles from The Atlantic and Smithsonian, as well as blog posts from Library Babel Fish and The Scholarly Kitchen.
CCC Becomes a Reseller of FontoXML Editor
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) teamed up with FontoXML to become a reseller of the FontoXML Editor solution for creating structured and intelligent content that users can make discoverable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.“As knowledge engineering specialists, we have a clear vision of what ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ content means to our business and the value it brings our clients,” says Kim Zwollo, VP of client engagement and business development at CCC. “We’ve been on a quest to find the ideal editor tool to support that vision, and we’ve found it in FontoXML.” For more information, read the press release.
QxMD's Free Medical Apps Are a Hit With Healthcare Researchers
QxMD announced that its content engagement platform for healthcare professionals, QxMD Pathways, has reached more than 200 million annual views across mobile and web platform channels. QxMD Pathways consists of a library of free medical apps—Read by QxMD, Calculate by QxMD, and Learn by QxMD—that provide access to full-text research, continuing medical education, and tools that drive disease recognition and therapy optimization.For more information, read the press release.
Library and Tech Trends Past and Future
Librarian and Information Science News posted “Ten Stories That Shaped 2018.” They cover topics such as the opioid epidemic, fake news, search engines, and open access.InsideSources looks ahead with “Five Tech Trends to Watch in 2019”—predictions of a fintech IPO boom, antitrust action against big tech companies, action on Net Neutrality, and more. DMI has an illustrated guide to AI: “8 Most Important AI and Analytics Trends for 2019.” It says, “By one estimate, artificial intelligence will drive nearly $2 trillion worth of business value worldwide in 2019 alone.”
Entrepreneurship in Libraries
The Urban Libraries Council announced a new toolkit to help libraries with their entrepreneurship services. The press release’s headline states in part, “Libraries Must Learn to Think Like Entrepreneurs in Order to Strengthen Their Role as Entrepreneurial Hubs.” The toolkit will offer regularly updated strategies and resources for providing entrepreneurial support.EveryLibrary created an initiative to encourage libraries to participate in National Entrepreneurship Week (Feb. 16–23, 2019), “the annual Congressionally-chartered week dedicated to showcasing and supporting entrepreneurship throughout the United States.” EveryLibrary writes, “If your library supports startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, add your library to the list of organizations participating in #NatlEshipWeek … and make new connections across the e-ship ecosystem.” Libraries on the list will receive free promotional tools for social media outreach.
National Geographic Learning Rolls Out Subscription Service
National Geographic Learning (NGL) introduced Pathways, a subscription service designed to lower costs and increase college-level course access for high schools. It features a curated collection of online educational programs for career and technical education (CTE), advanced placement (AP), honors, and electives. Available now for an annual, per-student fee regardless of the number of courses a student uses, it reduces the cost of learning resources by up to 50% compared to other options.For more information, read the press release.
FlatWorld Institutional Makes College Textbooks More Affordable
FlatWorld unveiled FlatWorld Institutional, a fully customizable college textbook subscription for university- or department-wide usage in the U.S. and Canada.“For the last two years, FlatWorld has offered a subscription solution that gives access to our entire catalog. While many larger universities appreciated this unlimited option, we also received feedback from universities big and small that they wanted the option to subscribe to select textbooks, as opposed to paying for an ‘unlimited’ subscription that included many textbooks their students didn’t need,” says Alastair Adam, co-CEO of FlatWorld. “This new offering is very much in line with our commitment to providing the most affordable, high-quality textbook solutions on the market.” For more information, read the press release.
Recent News From the Sciences
BMC launched a new blog, On Society, which features “new research and commentary exploring the many facets of what it means to live in society.” (For example, its ninth post covers mortality and survival in Game of Thrones.)Altmetric released The 2018 Altmetric Top 100, which is contextualized on its blog. The top three most-mentioned scholarly articles published in the past year are “Mortality in Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria,” “The Spread of True and False News Online,” and “Alcohol Use and Burden for 195 Countries and Territories, 1990–2016.” Springer Nature and Publons entered a partnership to help “improve the peer review process and enable peer reviewers to receive recognition for their contribution.” BMJ’s new OA journal, BMJ Open Science, partnered with ScienceOpen “to promote best practices in preclinical and basic biomedical research with an interactive featured collection on the platform.” EDP Sciences’ journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) signed a 2-year transformative OA agreement with the Max Planck Society whereby “funds previously paid by the Max Planck Digital Library for subscriptions will, instead, be converted into a publishing fund, enabling corresponding authors from the Max Planck Institutes to publish their articles open access in A&A, and at the same time, granting access to the journal’s content to all Max Planck researchers.” Nature turns 150 in 2019. Take a look back at its history here. “Nature is known for its original research as well as its news journalism and commentary. Today this is spread across different formats, but the goal of the coverage remains the same: to help readers make sense of the world of science; to help them in their work and in their careers; and to help them to assess the position of science in the context of society.”
Research and Search News
Stephen Shankland writes for CNET, “An expanded Firefox search deal with Google helped push Mozilla’s annual revenue up 8 percent to $562 million for 2017—money that should come in handy as the nonprofit tries to salvage what's good about the internet.”Michelle Silvestre writes for OpenAthens, “According to the [organization’s] new research growing numbers of students and researchers are working from home, on mobile devices or in off-site locations, which is causing a huge surge in the demand for remote access to library resources.” Mary Jo Foley writes for ZDNet, “Microsoft is working on a project codenamed ‘Bali,’ which is designed to give users control of data collected about them. The project is a Microsoft Research incubation effort and seems to be in private testing at this stage.” Casey Newton writes for The Verge, “Academic researchers, pro-democracy hackers, and tech employees have begun collaborating on initiatives designed to identify and combat misinformation wherever it appears online. And while the work remains in an embryonic stage, advocates say they are at least somewhat optimistic that the worst actors can be reined in—and that trust can be restored to a greater part of the internet.”
LibraryReads and NoveList Will Host Book Genre Webinars
LibraryReads and NoveList are joining forces to offer a series of genre webinars in 2019, starting with Science Fiction on Jan. 15. All of the sessions will be archived on NoveList’s website.LibraryReads’ executive director, Rebecca Vnuk, notes that the series is “a 101 crash course for some of the more popular genres, designed to give librarians a sense of why readers are drawn to the genre; some tips for talking with fans; key books in the genre to know; sub-genres and crossover titles to keep in mind; and tips for searching NoveList for themes, appeal terms, and genre information and more. Whether you’ve never read in a genre or it’s just been a while, we hope these webinars will provide you with the grounding you need to talk with confidence about all books.” For more information and the full webinar schedule, read the news.
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Brandi Scardilli
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