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Weekly News Digest
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December 30, 2002 — 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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AIP Offers Free Bibliographic Search Service
The American Institute of Physics announced that it will offer free searching of all the bibliographic records on its Online Journal Publishing Service (OJPS) for which PDF files of full-text articles are available. To date, searching has been restricted to those who subscribe to at least one of the more than 100 journals on the OJPS platform. The name of the new service is Search OJPS (http://searchojps.aip.org), and it will be accessible on a six-month experimental basis to anyone who registers.The service has similar functionality to SPIN (Searchable Physics Information Notices), AIP's abstracts database. In Search OJPS, users may browse or search bibliographic data from 110 online journals published by AIP and other scientific and engineering societies, with various options for accessing full-text articles. Search OJPS enables fielded, cross-journal searching on more than 300,000 abstract records. Users may also browse tables of contents (with links to abstracts) for each of these journals. Within each of these areas, options are provided for users to obtain the full-text articles. Users may directly download PDF files from journals to which they or their institutions subscribe, or they may use the pay-per-view facilities of AIP's DocumentStore (http://www.documentstore.org) to purchase full-text articles from publications to which they do not subscribe. Source: The American Institute of Physics
Yahoo! to Acquire Inktomi
Yahoo! Inc. and Inktomi Corp. announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Yahoo! will acquire Inktomi for a purchase price of approximately $235 million. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval and the approval of Inktomi's stockholders. The companies expect to complete the transaction in the first quarter of 2003.Inktomi recently sold its enterprise search software business to Verity in order to focus on Web search and its paid inclusion business [see the newsbreak by Avi Rappoport, http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=17046]. Inktomi had also made "significant improvements" in its overall Web search capability, including increased relevance, a fresher and larger index, paid inclusion, the utilization of an XML interface and features targeted at understanding user intent for interactions on the Web. Inktomi had been a search provider for Yahoo! a few years ago, but Yahoo! has been using Google since 2000. Source: Yahoo! Inc.
Nstein and Gale Announce Partnership
Nstein Technologies, Inc., a provider of computer-aided indexing (CAI) solutions to the e-publishing industry, and Gale, a part of The Thomson Corp., have announced an agreement to provide Gale's subject taxonomy through Nstein's automated indexing software. According to the companies, this agreement will enhance content search and retrieval services and extend market reach for both companies in many domains, including: business/financial services, law, medicine and health, technology, and social sciences.Gale's 70,000 node subject taxonomy will be pre-packaged within Nstein's Intelligent Categorizer and Nfinder automated indexing and search tools. This will enable Gale, Nstein, and their partners to license and deploy a hybrid product to enterprises around the globe. Business analysts, financial researchers, product managers, and information professionals now will have a means for automatically indexing and retrieving information from their databases - quickly and with pinpoint accuracy. Sources: Nstein and Gale
Public Library of Science Announces New Journals
The Public Library of Science (PLoS; http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org), a nonprofit, international grass-roots organization of scientists, announced that it is launching a new scientific publishing venture - with two new journals: PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. The PLoS journals will retain all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer-review and high editorial standards, but will use a new business model in which the costs of these services are recovered by modest fees charged to the authors or research sponsors for each published paper. This new model will allow PLoS to make all published works immediately available online, with no charges for access or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use. PLoS plans to begin publishing in the second half of 2003.This new effort is backed by a five year, $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and by a policy decision from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The PLoS initiative has been led by Harold E. Varmus, president of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, former director of the National Institutes of Health and 1989 Nobel Laureate, Patrick O. Brown of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, and Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence Orlando Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California-Berkeley. PLoS is confident that the scientific community will support its new publications. In the past two years, more than 30,000 scientists from 180 countries signed an open letter circulated by PLoS, which called on established scientific journals to provide open access to their archives. Source: The Public Library of Science
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Brandi Scardilli
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