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Weekly News Digest
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January 28, 2021 — 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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Clarivate Rolls Out Mobile App for Accessing Web of Science Publication Records
Clarivate introduced the mobile app Web of Science My Research Assistant, which “enables scientific researchers to easily search, save and share publication records of the trusted research data in the Web of Science citation index using their mobile devices.”Researchers can “search the Web of Science citation index and the associated Master Journal List to access an unrivaled breadth of world-class literature records linked to journals rigorously selected for their quality and impact criteria. Spanning all disciplines and regions, the Master Journal List is a highly popular and invaluable tool to seek out journals aligned to a particular field of study.” They can “save research publication records, create reading lists and curate a personalized feed that reflects their chosen topics of interest,” as well as share the publication records with collaborators directly from the app. The free version of the app allows for searching by topic, and users of this version can “create up to three saved search feeds viewing up to a maximum of 25 most recent search results over the past five years.” For more information, read the press release.
Altmetric Releases Its List of Top 100 Research Topics for 2020
Altmetric announced its annual list of the year’s most discussed and shared research. The 2020 Altmetric Top 100 covers sources that garnered international online attention, including public policy documents, blogs, Wikipedia, and social media. The research topics come from all disciplines, and the list reports the top five works by Altmetric Attention Score from 20 subjects.According to the press release, “Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 research accounts for roughly 30% of the Top 100 across many disciplines including biomedicine, built environment and design, and economics. Virus transmission and face mask protection were among the most heavily discussed topics.” The other two most popular topics were “climate change and racism. In a year that saw global lockdowns and a corresponding dip in CO2 emissions, it’s no wonder that one article discusses exactly this. Other articles on the subject of climate change look at deforestation, the rising temperatures in our oceans and greenhouse gas emissions.” Also, “two articles in the Top 100 discuss and reflect on police violence and reform whilst others discuss the subject of institutional racism in academia.” For more information, read the press release.
The Boston Globe Debuts Fresh Start Program to Update Past Coverage
Zoe Greenberg reports on The Boston Globe’s Fresh Start program, which allows people to submit an application to the paper for it to update coverage of them online, including making them anonymous. Greenberg writes the following:The ‘Fresh Start’ initiative is part of a broader effort to rethink the Globe’s criminal justice coverage and how it affects communities of color, amid a national reckoning over racial inequity. Similar to ‘right to forget’ programs that have cropped up in a number of newsrooms across the country, the undertaking is meant to address the lasting impact that stories about past embarrassments, mistakes, or minor crimes, forever online and searchable, can have on a person’s life. … Jason Tuohey, managing editor for digital, said the Globe would consider all requests and would set an especially high bar for updating or anonymizing stories about public figures or serious crimes. To apply, people fill out a short form online with an explanation of why they are requesting a review, including any relevant court documents. … The Cleveland Plain Dealer launched a similar online initiative in 2019, curtailing the use of mugshots and allowing people who have received court expungements to apply for their names to be removed from the site. The Globe’s initiative does not require people to get a court expungement, in which the court permanently erases a criminal record, before applying. … (Tuohey said the Globe would accept requests from individuals only.) For more information, read the article.
Gale's Educator Resource Opens a Learning Center
Gale In Context: For Educators now has a new Learning Center, “an on-demand professional learning hub for finding, organizing and learning how to teach—virtually or in-person—using the content created within For Educators. Now teachers can take control of their own professional learning and find support as they work to use For Educators to drive student learning outcomes.” The Learning Center offers access to support and guidance at any time, with resources such as the following:- Nearly 30 on-demand training videos, ranging from 1-3 minutes on how to find classroom-ready resources, organize them for lessons and teach students with materials created in For Educators.
- Step-by-step tutorials that introduce For Educators tools and provide real-world examples on how to use the solution to plan instruction, teach independent research and collaborate with colleagues.
- Sample lesson content sets to download and use immediately or customize for later use.
For more information, read the press release.
Exact Editions Provides Access to the MindSet Mental Health Magazine
Exact Editions is now offering institutions the ability to subscribe to MindSet magazine’s digital archive. MindSet, which is “dedicated to the health of the mind,” is published quarterly and “reports on all aspects of mental health; from prevention, diagnosis, treatments and rehabilitation to workplace initiatives and financial and legal advice.” Exact Editions’ archive has every issue of the back catalog.“We’re delighted to be supporting Mindset in their mission to remove the taboos around mental health,” says Daryl Rayner, Exact Editions’ managing director. “The magazine is slick and easy-to-navigate across all digital devices and the subject matter is of paramount importance, especially amongst students whose wellbeing has been so heavily challenged this year.” For more information, read the press release.
IGI Global Makes 30 Journals Open Access
IGI Global has converted 30 of its journals to full gold OA. The publisher states, “This will enable authors to publish their work under a CC BY license (where the authors maintain the copyright and others can distribute, adapt, and build upon the work without limitations), as well as freely provide timely, peer-reviewed research that spans across 11 core subject areas, including business and management, computer science and IT, education, social sciences, and more.” Each of the gold OA journals will enter major OA repositories, such as DOAJ, to increase discoverability. All of IGI Global’s content is currently available via its InfoSci-Open platform.“Now, more than ever, there is a need for the timeliest and highest quality research, and IGI Global has recently made the decision to begin to convert our journals into OA with the ultimate goal of transitioning our full journal collection to OA,” says Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, IGI Global’s founder and CEO. For more information, read the news item.
OverDrive and Hachette Provide Anti-Racist Books to Schools
Hachette Book Group gave school libraries “a collection of books that provide resources to students to learn about the importance of anti-racism, empathy, and social justice.” Curated for elementary and secondary schools, the collection offers both fiction and nonfiction titles, such as Becoming Kareem by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo; Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi; and Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes.Hachette donated “10,000 physical books and 20,000 ebooks and audiobooks on topics of race, anti-racism, equality, and identity, partnering with Follett for the physical book distribution and OverDrive Education for digital distribution. This outreach will connect with thousands of elementary, middle and high schools, with Follett providing 1,000 sets of 10 print books each to designated Title 1 schools and OverDrive Education fulfilling 20,000 ebooks and audiobooks to 2,000 school libraries across the country, for a total of 200,000 downloads (students can then read the ebook or audiobook in OverDrive Education’s student reading app, Sora).” OverDrive shared a blog post with instructions on how to enroll: “The enrollment period [began] on Monday, Jan. 25 and will last until all spots are filled. Slots are first-come, first-served—so be sure you don’t miss out! You can sign up using this link.” Instructions are as follows: - Any school in the U.S. and Canada can choose up to 10 titles from the given list.
- Registration is limited to 1,450 schools, on a first-come, first-served basis. Each school can only enter once.
- Selected schools will be granted 10 free concurrent circulations of each title.
- Titles will appear in the Sora app the week of Feb. 8.
For more information, read the news item.
Ex Libris Enhances Its Funding Solutions With Pivot-RP
Ex Libris launched Pivot-RP, which combines its Pivot and Research Professional products into a single funding solution and database. It also ingrates with Research Professional News (“an authoritative, editorially independent service focusing on research policy, news, and analysis”) and Esploro (“the Ex Libris research information management solution”).According to the press release, “The unified funding solution helps institutions connect researchers to funding opportunities, offers insights and shortcuts that assist research organizations in winning a large share of available funding, and facilitates the discovery of potential collaborators.” It offers “millions of researcher profiles; insights into previously awarded grants; real-time curation of funding opportunities, by Ex Libris funding experts; as well as world-class technical support.” And “Pivot-RP administrators can set-up recurring funding newsletters, send funding-alert email messages, create groups, embed search results directly on department or research office web page[s], generate shared calendars, add internal funding opportunities, and more.” For more information, read the press release.
ProQuest Provides French History via Le Monde Archive
As of March 2021, ProQuest will offer the historical archive (i.e., 1944–2000) of France’s Le Monde newspaper for academic and public libraries. It will have “cover-to-cover full-page images, article-level indexing and searchable text” and feature content such as news articles, photos, advertisements, obituaries, and cartoons.“Le Monde is a key source for researching French history and culture, and offers insightful perspectives on some of the most tumultuous time periods in Europe’s past,” says Susan Bokern, ProQuest’s VP of product management. “ProQuest is proud to be the exclusive provider of this publication to academic and public libraries. With access to the historical backfile of Le Monde, students, faculty and patrons can learn about important events and people, identify key trends and themes, and analyze how they evolved over time to shape our world today.” For more information, read the press release.
W3C Shares Working Draft of New Accessibility Guidelines
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Accessibility Guidelines Working Group released a First Public Working Draft of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0. The guidelines “explain how to make web content, apps, and tools more accessible to people with disabilities. … WCAG 3 is intended to be easier to understand and more flexible than WCAG 2. The flexibility is to address different types of web content, apps, and tools—as well as organizations and people with disabilities.”W3C is encouraging evaluators, developers, designers, project managers, policymakers, people with disabilities, and other stakeholders to provide input by Feb. 26, 2021. For more information, read the news item.
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Brandi Scardilli
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