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Weekly News Digest

December 2, 2010 — 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.

FCC Proposes Rules for Free and Open Internet

After months of hard work we have reached an important milestone in the fight to protect a free and open Internet for all Americans. 

Today, the FCC proposed basic rules of the road to preserve the open Internet as a platform for innovation, investment, job creation, competition, and free expression. If adopted later this month, these basic rules will mean several things for consumers, namely:

1. Americans have the freedom to access lawful content on the Internet, without discrimination. No one should be able to tell you what you can or can’t do on the Internet, as long as it’s lawful. Our rules will ensure that no central authority—either corporations or government—have the right to decide what you can access on the Internet.

2. You have a right to basic information about your broadband service. Our proposed framework will ensure that consumers have information they need to make informed choices about subscribing or using broadband networks.

3. The Internet will remain a level playing field. The ability for consumers to speak their mind, engage in commerce and innovate without permission from a corporation has enabled the Internet’s unparalled [sic] success. Our rules will protect against corporate gatekeepers prioritizing access to one person’s content over another’s.

The openness of the Internet has enabled unparalleled innovation and job growth, yet we continue to find examples of this freedom being attacked. We have found instances when broadband providers position themselves as gatekeepers to the Internet, and have prevented consumers from using applications of their choice without disclosing what they were doing.

We must take action to protect consumers against price hikes and closed access to the Internet—and our proposed framework is designed to do just that: to guard against these risks while recognizing the legitimate needs and interests of broadband providers.

I look forward to the very important work ahead as we strive for free and open communications for all Americans.

Source: FCC

Springer Launches SpringerBriefs as Ebooks

SpringerBriefs will cover a wide range of content from professional to academic across a variety of subject areas including business and economics, computer science, human and behavioral sciences, life sciences, mathematics and physical sciences. Typical topics might include a report on state-of-the-art techniques, a snapshot of a hot or emerging topic, an in-depth case study, or a presentation of core concepts for students.

Expert advisory boards and collaborations with academic societies will contribute to generating high-quality content. Streamlined publishing processes and accelerated schedules will take authors’ ideas to market more swiftly than with previous methods. The first titles are scheduled for release in November and December 2010.

All SpringerBriefs titles will be included in the Springer ebook packages that are delivered to libraries and institutions via SpringerLink. They will also be available for sale, through Springer's retail partners, in print, or as ebooks for around $40 − $50. SpringerBriefs will also be available in print at lower prices through MyCopy, Springer’s print-on-demand program for registered patrons of libraries that subscribe to the Springer eBook Collections.

Source: Springer

Journalism Online’s Press+ to Launch on College Newspapers

The Daily O’Collegian of Oklahoma State University will be the first college publication to launch the system on its website, ocolly.com, in early 2011. The paper will collect a small fee from online readers who are outside the school’s immediate geographic area and who do not use an email address with an .edu affiliation and who read the paper online more than three times a month. This is achieved by deploying two aspects of the Press+ platform in tandem: the “meter” technology combined with “geo-targeting” technology.

The O’Collegian has been in existence since 1895. Today, it’s read by the nearly 25,000 students, faculty and staff, and other actively engaged members of the Oklahoma State community.

“We’ve always known that the content our students produce has value well beyond the free drop distribution of our newspaper. Charging a modest fee to access our online content for non-students who live outside Stillwater helps us foster that belief,” said O’Collegian general manager Ray Catalino.

“Obviously, a college newspaper should be provided for free to the college community it serves,” said Steven Brill, co-founder of Press+. “But if at the same time these papers can solicit modest but much-needed financial support from alumni, parents or others logging on regularly from outside the community, then the hard work of these dedicated young journalists can be sustained and enhanced. By using our metered model along with geo targeting, Press + is able to do exactly that.”

Source: Press+

Reed Tech Introduces Web Archiving Service

Reed Tech and Iterasi have teamed up to bring this offering to market beginning in January 2011. Reed Tech's Web Archiving Services create fully searchable and interactive archives that not only capture the way the website appeared, but also restore its functionality. Dynamic capture modules expand this scheduled or on-demand service to encompass the archiving of a company's entire online presence, including company websites, blogs, Twitter, forums, Wikis, and more.

“Organizations of all types that have a Web presence are just beginning to understand the potential consequences of failing to archive their Web communications. Our Web Archiving Services will help prevent those potentially damaging consequences before they occur,” stated Sam Hardman, president of Reed Technology. “By combining Reed Tech's nearly 50 years of digital information services know-how with Iterasi's Web archiving expertise, customers will be able to reduce their litigation and compliance risk.”

Source: Reed Technology and Information Services

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Adds Records to WorldCat

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. BHL is the scanning and digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/), a global effort to assemble information on all living species known to science into one ever-expanding, trusted, web-based resource.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library will continue to send records to OCLC representing new titles scanned and added to their collection. The records link directly to the BHL website to access the full text.

OCLC continues to add records to WorldCat describing digitized and ebook collections of interest to the membership through partnerships with libraries, aggregators, publishers, and mass digitization projects globally. There are currently more than 8 million records describing ebooks and digitized books in WorldCat.

Institutions participating in the Biodiversity Heritage Library include:

• Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia, Pa.)
• American Museum of Natural History (New York, N.Y.)
• California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, Calif.)
• The Field Museum (Chicago, Ill.)
• Harvard University Botany Libraries (Cambridge, Mass.)
• Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Mass.)
• Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, Mass.)
• Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Mo.)
• Natural History Museum (London, U.K.)
• The New York Botanical Garden (New York, N.Y.)
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Richmond, U.K.)
• Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, D.C.)

Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends—more than any other science—upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity.

Source: OCLC

University of Pittsburgh Library System Offers Free Ejournal Publishing Service

The E-journal Publishing Program—part of ULS’ D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, which partners with the University of Pittsburgh Press—“is in keeping with the ULS’ commitment to free and immediate access to scholarly information and its mission to support researchers in the production and sharing of knowledge in a rapidly changing publishing industry,” said Rush G. Miller, Hillman University Librarian and director of the ULS.
 
The ULS trains a journal’s editorial staff in the use of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, which channels the flow of scholarly content from initial author submissions through peer review and final online publication and indexing. OJS provides the tools necessary for the layout, design, copy editing, proofreading, and archiving of journal articles. The platform provides a vast set of reading tools to extend the use of scholarly content through RSS feeds and postings to Facebook and Twitter. E-journal articles can be discovered via blogs, databases, search engines, library collections, and other means.

“We’re delighted to offer electronic publishing services free of charge to partners who share our support for Open Access to research information and use a robust peer-review process for their content,” added Timothy Deliyannides, head of ULS Information Systems. “We can help clients new to electronic publishing at every step. We will give them the tools they need to set up an efficient workflow and help them produce a scholarly e-journal of the highest quality.”

The ULS currently publishes the following e-journals: Bolivian Studies Journal; Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture; Ethnology: An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology; Études Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies; International Journal of Telerehabilitation; Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy; and Revista Iberoamericana.
 
Coming in the next few months are Timely Interventions: A Translational Journal of Public Policy and Debate; University of Pittsburgh Law Review; Journal of Law and Commerce; Pittsburgh Tax Review; Journal of Technology, Law and Policy; Pittsburgh Journal of Environmental and Public Health Law; Motivational Interviewing: Training, Research, Implementation Practice; and the Pitt Political Review.

Source: University of Pittsburgh Library System