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Weekly News Digest
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January 22, 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.
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Accessible Archives Announces Free Webinar on African-American Newspapers
To celebrate Black History Month, Accessible Archives, Inc. is hosting a free webinar on its collection of African-American newspapers on Jan. 25, 2019, at 2:00 p.m. EST. “Our African American Newspapers Collection provides important original source material—written by African Americans for African Americans—readily available for research and fresh interpretation by historians, educators, and students. In addition, The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard will be thoroughly discussed.” Register here.For more information, read the blog post.
Authors Guild and Society of Authors Tangle With the Internet Archive
Porter Anderson writes for Publishing Perspectives, “In the same kind of solidarity they showed in calling for author contract reform from publishers, the United States’ Authors Guild and the United Kingdom’s Society of Authors are making simultaneous demands that the Internet Archive’s Open Library immediately stop lending scanned copies of physical books on their site.”On Jan. 18, 2019, the Society of Authors “issued a media alert to its cease-and-desist open letter to the Internet Archive, and—as in previous instances in which the English-language world’s two largest author trade organizations have teamed up—the eloquence inherent in writers’ work is quickly apparent in how they’re putting across their message,” he writes. For more information, read the article.
A Win for the 'Right to Be Forgotten' for a Doctor in the Netherlands
Daniel Boffey writes for The Guardian, “A Dutch surgeon formally disciplined for her medical negligence has won a legal action to remove Google search results about her case in a landmark ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.” She had served a conditional suspension from being registered as a healthcare professional while still being allowed to practice. The first Google results for her name had linked to a website for an unofficial doctor blacklist.“Google and the Dutch data privacy watchdog, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, initially rejected attempts to have the links removed on the basis that the doctor was still on probation and the information remained relevant,” Boffey writes. “The judge [for the district court of Amsterdam] said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people, and that was not supported by the disciplinary panel’s findings.” He continues, “The surgeon’s lawyer, Willem van Lynden, from the Amsterdam firm MediaMaze, said the ruling was groundbreaking in ensuring doctors would no longer be judged by Google on their fitness to practise.” For more information, read the article.
ScienceOpen Adds Hogrefe Publishing Group Collections
ScienceOpen extended its partnership with Hogrefe Publishing Group to enable the integration of seven new featured collections—in psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and healthcare—into ScienceOpen’s research discovery environment. Hogrefe’s content is published in English and German and consists of high-quality, peer-reviewed articles. It aims to “facilitate better understanding of people as psychosocial individuals,” according to the press release.The collections are on topics such as childhood, youth, and development; human resources and assessment; and nursing. New articles will be added continuously. For more information, read the press release.
The Future of DuckDuckGo
Drew Millard’s article for Medium—“Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway.”—notes that “2019 may finally be the year for ‘The Search Engine That Doesn’t Track You.’” Millard writes:This, in a nutshell, is DuckDuckGo’s proposition: ‘The big tech companies are taking advantage of you by selling your data. We won’t.’ In effect, it’s an anti-sales sales pitch. DuckDuckGo is perhaps the most prominent in a number of small but rapidly growing firms attempting to make it big—or at least sustainable—by putting their customers’ privacy and security first. And unlike the previous generation of privacy products, such as Tor or SecureDrop, these services are easy to use and intuitive, and their user bases aren’t exclusively composed of political activists, security researchers, and paranoiacs. The same day [DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO Gabriel] Weinberg and I spoke, DuckDuckGo’s search engine returned results for 33,626,258 queries—a new daily record for the company. Weinberg estimates that since 2014, DuckDuckGo’s traffic has been increasing at a rate of ‘about 50 percent a year,’ a claim backed up by the company’s publicly available traffic data. ‘You can run a profitable company—which we are—without [using] a surveillance business model,’ Weinberg says. If he’s right, DuckDuckGo stands to capitalize handsomely off our collective backlash against the giants of the web economy and establish a prominent brand in the coming era of data privacy. If he’s wrong, his company looks more like a last dying gasp before surveillance capitalism finally takes over the world. For more information, read the article.
The U.S. Government Shutdown's Effect on Data Science
Eric Hinsdale writes on FireOak Strategies’ website, “The long-term effects of the [government] shutdown on data science are hard to predict.” In particular, “the loss of access to public data is proving disruptive for those who rely on access to open data to do their jobs.” He continues:Data.gov, the federal government’s central catalog for open data sets, went offline sometime during the morning of January 9th. A General Services Administration spokesperson was quoted by FedScoop, explaining: ‘As data.gov is not a static site, it requires staff monitoring and maintenance to be online. Because personnel that monitor and maintain the site are currently furloughed, data.gov redirects to usa.gov. The decision to take data.gov offline is consistent with previous funding lapse practices.’ … The status of other data repositories besides Data.gov is also inconsistent. PubMed Central is still operational, as is NASA’s Data Portal. But others such as the USAID Development Data Library (DDL) are offline. For more information, read the article.
Exact Editions Introduces Future Music Collection Magazine Bundle
Exact Editions and Future PLC launched the Future Music Collection, a combined subscription to five magazines: Computer Music, Guitar Techniques, Future Music, Total Guitar, and Guitarist. Available for institutional libraries, the collection covers topics such as music technology, guitar tuition, and music production. Each magazine has an archive of digital issues dating from January 2017. Users can search the entire collection or navigate to a single issue.For more information, read the blog post.
Microsoft Edge Commits to Fighting Fake News
Tom Warren writes on The Verge, “Microsoft has started warning users of its Edge mobile browser about untrustworthy news sites. The software giant has partnered with NewsGuard to provide warnings in its Edge browser for iOS and Android, and this functionality has been added this week as an optional setting.” NewsGuard, founded by journalists, rates sites using nine criteria, such as whether they use deceptive headlines or often publish false content and whether they are transparent about their ownership and financing.Warren notes that “[a]lthough Edge mobile isn’t widely used, Microsoft’s move is still significant. Experts have warned that we’re heading towards an ‘information apocalypse’ involving AI-generated fakes and fake news. A significant lack of digital literacy can make people easily vulnerable to fake news and viral hoaxes, and as technology and AI get even smarter it’s going to be more difficult to spot a fake.” For more information, read the article.
CC Technology Joins Digital Science
Digital Science is adding CC Technology to its roster of companies. The grants management system provider offers the CC Grant Tracker system, which helps funders manage the full lifecycle of a grant, from a call for proposals to the evaluation of performance and impact. Digital Science acknowledges a potential for integrations between CC Grant Tracker and a number of Digital Science products.“Joint clients have asked us about the possibility of closer links between our two organisations for a number of years, so it made a lot of sense to bring CCT into the Digital Science family,” says Christian Herzog, CEO of Digital Science’s ÜberResearch. “We look forward to joining the dots and making better tools for funders.” For more information, read the press release.
The Royal Society of Chemistry Gets OA Help From 67 Bricks
According to software development consultancy 67 Bricks, “The [U.K.’s] Royal Society of Chemistry brought in 67 Bricks to help build a new, automated OA system that would be flexible and robust enough to grow alongside their Open Access programme, evolve with the changing landscape and support staff and external users simultaneously.” This partnership allows the society to streamline its OA processes and customer experience. Read the case study here.For more information, read the news.
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Brandi Scardilli
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