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Weekly News Digest
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April 25, 2024 — 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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Recent Clarivate News
On April 24, Clarivate shared that “it has signed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) Publishers Compact. Signatories of the compact pledge to develop sustainable practices and act as champions of the SDGs during the Decade of Action (2020-2030).” Liliana Hinderman, SVP and chief risk and sustainability officer, says, “We have signed the UN SDG Publishers Compact as a commitment to thinking forward to grow our global impact on SDGs worldwide. Whether our data and insights are used to explore more sustainable resources or accelerate delivery of life-changing drugs and treatments, we are committed to solving the world’s most complex challenges across the spectrum of research, knowledge and innovation.”On April 23, Clarivate announced that it acquired Global QMS, Inc., which provides cloud-based solutions that automate regulatory reporting and compliance management for life sciences clients. “Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed,” the press release notes. “Global Q supports leading pharma, medtech and biotech companies by providing comprehensive access to linked and standardized workflow-ready data via its SaaS platform, Optiqs360 Digital.” On April 22, Clarivate named the winners of the South Asia Innovation Awards 2024. The press release shares that “16 companies in India and one in Sri Lanka received awards for their exceptional innovation performance.” Vasheharan Kanesarajah, VP and head of strategy, Intellectual Property, at Clarivate, says, “Congratulations to all the winners of our South Asia Innovation Awards 2024! Your impact on society is remarkable. In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, sustaining innovation is becoming increasingly challenging. At Clarivate, we are committed to helping you anticipate and navigate the ever-evolving challenges and trends that affect innovation with every solution we offer and every insight we deliver.”
Thomson Reuters Details Its Plans for a More Productive GenAI Assistant
Thomson Reuters is expanding CoCounsel, its GenAI assistant for professionals, so that customers can eventually access the company’s product capabilities across its entire portfolio. First, customers of Thomson Reuters’ Tax and Legal divisions will see the rollout of Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel, Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel (for U.K. customers), and CoCounsel integrations with Microsoft 365 starting in summer 2024. “Thomson Reuters will use its GenAI platform to create even more GenAI skills, and they’ll be introduced into products across every business segment it serves under the CoCounsel brand,” according to the press release.“CoCounsel is an AI assistant that acts like a team member—handling complex tasks with natural language understanding,” the press release states. “Completing tasks at superhuman speeds, CoCounsel provides high-quality information at the right time, maintains multiple threads of work, as well as keeping context and memory across the different tasks and products customers use each day. By augmenting professional work with GenAI skills, CoCounsel delivers accelerated and streamlined workflows, enables professionals to produce higher-quality work more quickly, all while keeping customer data secure.” For more information, read the press release.
An Update on Florida Book Challenges
Kiara Alfonseca writes the following in “DeSantis Scales Back Book Ban Law Amid Spike in Florida Book Objections” for ABC News:As Florida schools face a growing number of book ban attempts, Gov. Ron DeSantis is scaling back policies that made it easier for people to challenge materials in schools. In 2022, DeSantis signed HB 1467, which required elementary schools to provide a searchable list of the books accessible to students in libraries or classrooms and allow for public comment on all new materials. … Now, DeSantis has signed HB 1285, which he said will limit the amount of book objections that can be made by people who don't have a child who is accessing school materials. Parents of children in the school districts or using district materials will still be able to object to an unlimited amount of material. For more information, read the article.
National Library of Turkey Shares Its Plan to Digitize Its Collections
Daily Sabah reports, “Efforts are underway to digitize [the Turkey] National Library’s vast collection, totaling 20 million pages of resources, with plans to extend accessibility beyond [its location in] Ankara, announced Taner Beyoglu, general director of Libraries and Publications at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.”Beyoglu says, “In recent years, the National Library has digitized over 20 million pages, primarily focusing on newspapers, magazines and books. We prioritize scanning books with expired copyrights, making them accessible through the digital library on the National Library’s website. Additionally, all issues of our national newspapers until the end of 2023 have been digitized. Our efforts continue as we digitize local newspapers, beginning with the oldest editions.” For more information, read the article.
ResearchGate Gains More OA Science Journals
Trans Tech Publications Ltd., which created Scientific.Net and is the publisher of scientific content focused on materials science and engineering, partnered with ResearchGate to make seven of Trans Tech Publications’ journals—six fully OA and one hybrid—discoverable and accessible via ResearchGate’s Journal Home platform.“All version-of-record article content, including 135,000 archive articles and all new articles, will be available to ResearchGate’s 25m+ researcher members—boosting readership and engagement, and enabling Trans Tech Publications to connect with new audiences of highly relevant authors,” the press release states. “Dedicated journal profiles will be activated on the ResearchGate platform, providing key information and content from the journals, as well as uniquely enabling ResearchGate members to explore how their network is connected to a journal. The journals are also prominently featured on all associated articles and relevant touchpoints throughout the ResearchGate network.” For more information, read the press release.
The Digital Preservation Coalition Expands Its Work in the Americas
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is creating a new program of work, led by a U.S.-based staffer, to support existing and new members across the Americas. The DPC notes that “this work will bring greater attention and access to good practice and excellence within the dynamic digital preservation community from across the region.” ITHAKA will provide the organizational home for the new DPC-dedicated staff member. “After a period of planning and development and through its arrangement with ITHAKA, the DPC will deliver a program of face-to-face events for members in the Americas, as well as facilitating knowledge exchange between organizations in the region through briefing days, working groups and task forces.”The DPC partners “with its network of organizations to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services through community engagement, targeted advocacy work, training and workforce development, capacity building, and sharing good practice and standards. … By establishing a USA-based resource, DPC hopes to expand its collaboration with the established, robust digital preservation community in the Americas to complement, celebrate and sustain their activities and amplify them for DPC members around the world.” For more information, read the news item.
What the TikTok Legislation Reveals About Media Literacy
Nir Eisikovits writes the following in “TikTok Fears Point to Larger Problem: Poor Media Literacy in the Social Media Age” for The Conversation:The U.S. government moved closer to banning the video social media app TikTok after the House of Representatives attached the measure to an emergency spending bill on Apr. 17, 2024. … President Joe Biden has indicated that he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk. … Perhaps the most compelling argument for banning TikTok is that the app’s ubiquity and the fact that so many young Americans get their news from it turns it into an effective tool for political influence. But the proposed solution of switching to American ownership of the app ignores an even more fundamental threat. The deeper problem is not that the Chinese government can easily manipulate content on the app. It is, rather, that people think it is OK to get their news from social media in the first place. In other words, the real national security vulnerability is that people have acquiesced to informing themselves through social media. For more information, read the article.
Cambridge University Press and Cassyni Extend Their Partnership
Cambridge University Press’ pilot with Cassyni was deemed a success, meaning that the publisher “is expanding the rollout of Cassyni journal seminar series to more journals in [its] portfolio. The series enable Cambridge to grow researcher communities around its journals, and supports authors in increasing the reach and impact of their published research.” The press release continues, “Cassyni seminar series are also being used to help build communities around the recently launched Cambridge Prisms open access journals, which focus on cross-disciplinary approaches to real-world challenges, as well as the Data-Centric Engineering journal.For more information, read the press release.
Amazon Bedrock Rolls Out Enhanced Development Options for GenAI
Amazon Web Services introduced new capabilities for Amazon Bedrock that allow customers to run customized GenAI models. “Amazon Bedrock’s powerful models are offered as a fully managed service so customers do not need to worry about the underlying infrastructure, ensuring their applications operate with seamless deployment, scalability, and continuous optimization. Today’s announcements empower customers to run their own fully managed models on Amazon Bedrock, make it simple to find the best model for their use case, make it easier to apply safeguards to generative AI applications, and provide them even more model choice,” according to the press release.For more information, read the press release.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance and Partners Pledge Support for Diamond OA in the U.S.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance announced the following:Representatives from the Big Ten Academic Alliance Libraries (BTAA Libraries), California Digital Library (CDL) and Lyrasis attended the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Toluca, Mexico in October 2023. The Summit convened the international community to engage in dialog about how to advance Diamond Open Access (OA) to secure scholarly research as a public good and ensure equitable access to both the publishing and reading of that research. You can learn more from the recently released Report of the 2nd Diamond Open Access Conference. The Summit made evident the substantial global commitment to Diamond OA. If the United States is to be a strong participant in this important global movement, it is our observation that collaborative action is needed to develop this model at a national scale within the US as an equitable, robust, and values-driven pathway to open access. We acknowledge the deep commitment to Diamond OA already exemplified by the activities of the library publishing and repository communities in the US, and we seek to build on this commitment, strengthening the Diamond OA pathway by committing to working together and making our shared resources go further. … In the next few months, we will be sharing news of a specific set of activities aligned with these aspirations. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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