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Weekly News Digest

January 10, 2011 — 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.

NPG Introduces Mobile and Article ‘Rental’ Access Options

Readers can now view selected NPG content on the DeepDyve platform. Access to a single article for a 24 hour period is available for $3.99. Articles are available from Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Medicine, and Nature Chemical Biology. An archive is available back to 2008, and new content will be added as it is published. The rental allows viewing only; readers may not download, print, or copy and paste from the article. In addition, abstracts and metadata from all NPG journals will be viewable and searchable on the DeepDyve platform. Links to the DeepDyve platform to rent individual articles will be provided on participating journals on nature.com. For more information, visit http://www.deepdyve.com/nature.

Low cost access options are also now available on the nature.com iPhone app. Initially introduced in February 2010, the app has recently been upgraded and now includes: Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Physics, and Nature Communications. Thirty-day and annual subscriptions are available. For Nature, access via the iPhone app is available for $9.99 for 30 days or $79.99 a year. Access to the other titles is $8.99 for 30 days or $69.99 a year. Subscriptions are paid for through the iTunes store. Like the DeepDyve offering, article access through the app is read-only. Access via the app is included in existing personal subscriptions. A future release of the app will allow iPhone users to purchase a week's access to individual articles for $3.99, and support site license access via IP range. NPG expects to launch a nature.com iPad app, the nature.com reader, this month. The app will cost $3.99 and offer the same subscription options and range of journals as the iPhone app.

Source: Nature Publishing Group

SwetsWise 5.6 Goes Live

Feedback, comments, and suggestions from customers are used to fuel the development process at Swets, resulting in the number of the technical additions and change requests that are included in each release. Some of the main features in SwetsWise 5.6 include the following:

• SwetsWise Selection Support—The evaluation and analysis tool available for making collection development decisions has received a host of additional data, reporting, and usage updates, including a more concise overview of relevant data for packaged titles and data management as well as enhancing the flexibility of reporting periods.
• SwetsWise Online Content and Title Bank—The electronic gateway has had additional subject categories implemented, allowing customers to better select which categories they would like to use/search for either ebooks or ejournals.
• eDeal Renewal Service—A valuable component of SwetsWise Library Edition, eDeal Renewal service customers can now benefit from some increased usability features, including pricing totals and the addition of comment fields to allow the user to make notes easily. These features are designed to provide a customer with a deeper insight and more clarity into what is being spent and why.

Source: Swets

Tutor.com Launches New Mobile and Personal Features

Tutor.com To Go allows library users to browse Tutor.com educational and career resources and save and review their sessions on an iPhone or iPod Touch from anywhere at any time. And this spring, students and job seekers of all ages will be able to connect to a tutor right from their phone to study for an exam, review a homework question, and replay previous sessions. Tutor.com plans to develop for additional mobile devices.

Tutor.com is also launching personalized services for users that will make their one-to-one tutoring experience even better. Students can now select and connect to their favorite tutors when they set up an optional account and even view the tutor’s online schedule. Connecting to a favorite tutor is the most requested feature from students and the company expects an enthusiastic response from the close to one million users who use Tutor.com’s services through their public library.

Students and job seekers who create an optional account can also save and review their sessions at anytime and even share these sessions with friends, parents or teachers. Students have the option to playback their sessions at different speeds to aid them in studying for an exam.

Tutor.com’s comprehensive and professional reports have been upgraded based on librarian feedback and input from our advisory council. These enhancements help libraries showcase the success of their Tutor.com programs to friends of the library, funding organizations, and the community. Reports include new graphs and trend data and are easy to incorporate into presentations, print, or email.

Source: Tutor.com

NewspaperDirect Releases PressReader App for Android

Key features of the new Android version of PressReader include the following:

• Presentation of complete digital newspaper replicas, often before the print version is on newsstands
• Automatic download of favorite newspapers for offline reading
• Browse pages in full-page mode—even before completion of the download
• Browsing of entire publications with one finger (including zoom, pan, and scroll)
• Fast navigation from article to article, and to a favorite sections using the Table of Contents thumbnails
• A rich graphics page view and, for individual news stories, an easy-to-read text view
• Sharing of articles by email
• On-demand narration of news stories

PressReader for Google Android is available as a free download from the Android Market. Most newspapers and magazines can then be purchased for $0.99 per issue, or downloaded in conjunction with a paid PressDisplay.com subscription. For subscription pricing, visit the subscription page.

Source: NewspaperDirect, Inc.

University Presses to Publish Books Online at JSTOR

“Books at JSTOR” will make front and back list titles available to libraries around the world in flexible ways that encourage purchase, adoption, and use. This new initiative is the result of a year-long investigation into the needs of the publishing, library, and scholarly communities. Consultations with dozens of libraries, end-users, and project partners helped to identify elements of a solution that include overcoming limitations on use and offering flexible purchase models for libraries, while developing a sustainable model for publishers for whom online book publishing must migrate quickly from being ancillary to a fundamental part of their business. Among the instrumental collaborators in this project were several presses beyond those announced here, including California, Harvard, and MIT.

It is, however, authors and scholars that factor most prominently in this new effort. Press partners are being encouraged to join based on the quality of their publishing and the relevancy of their lists to material already part of JSTOR to improve both visibility of authors’ work and ease of use for scholars. The books will be deeply integrated with the 1,600 current and archival journals on JSTOR, as well as the diverse primary sources available today. All the content will be cross-searchable, and the books will be linked with the more than 2 million book reviews and hundreds of thousands of books references in the journal literature. Works written by the same authors or focused on the same topics, regardless of format, will be connected, and alerting services for users will cross publishers, other content providers, and content formats.

Michael Spinella, JSTOR managing director, says “This is really the next step in a series of efforts to integrate scholarship across formats and media and to establish a platform where librarians, publishers, authors, and users can innovate in the future.”

Longevity and stability, particularly with new media, is also an important focus of the initiative. “Authors, users, and librarians need to know these books and related work will be available over the very long term,” said Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA, the organization that is home to JSTOR and to the digital preservation service, Portico.

Source: ITHAKA

Readex to Release African American Periodicals, 1825-1995

Like African American Newspapers, 1827-1998—its essential complement for American history and African American studies—this new collection is based upon James P. Danky’s monumental African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998). Drawn from matchless holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, African American Periodicals ranges over more than 150 years of American life, from slavery during the Antebellum Period to the struggles and triumphs of the modern era. Editorial views from the pages of these periodicals include opinions on the abolitionist movement; “Jim Crow” segregation; African American achievements in literature, music, sports and science; the integration of U.S. public schools in 1954; the beginning of the Freedom Movement; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968; the Million Man March of 1995; and much more.

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, is the inaugural collection in Readex’s America’s Historical Periodicals series. For the broadest coverage available of African American history, culture, and daily life, this new collection can be cross-searched with African American Newspapers and every other Archive of Americana series.

Source: Readex