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Weekly News Digest

August 8, 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.

Cancer Research Portals Launch on HighWire Platform

The 11 ASCO Cancer Portals seamlessly incorporate content from multiple sources: the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of Oncology Practice, ASCO meeting sites, news and reference sources, ASCO Clinical Practice Guidelines, as well as incoming links from PubMed and other relevant HighWire-hosted colleague publications. Each custom portal is focused on a targeted segment of oncology research, re-purposing content and presenting it in a way designed to reach new audiences.

“Themed sites, such as the ASCO Cancer Portals, are a clever way to frame a collection of scholarly content with related information, enabling an agile response to the needs of readers,” said John Sack, HighWire's founding director. “As part of our Open Platform Solutions, HighWire is actively developing a standardized mini-site template which will allow publishers to collect and connect content into useful, relevant, highly engaging, and quickly deployed sites.”

The HighWire Open Platform solution set will enable publishers to re-purpose, integrate, and monetize content within and beyond their HighWire-hosted publications. The ASCO custom portal mini-sites integrate up to eight different types and sources of information. This comprehensive approach is being implemented using Drupal, one of the world’s most popular open source frameworks for website enhancement.

Source: HighWire Press

bitly Acquires Twitterfeed

According to the announcement, “the publishing workflow provided by Twitterfeed constitutes a core part of the bitly ecosystem. Along with other products (such as SocialFlow and dlvr.it) that use bitly to share content and track engagement, Twitterfeed is both creating and consuming gobs of bitly data every day. We also look forward to bringing the enhanced sharing functionality of Twitterfeed directly to bitly.com. We are already hard at work with the Twitterfeed team thinking through ways that combine our efforts to make the social web a better place.”

Source: bitly

The Hastings Center Partners With Wiley-Blackwell

The self-published Report publishes essays, commentary, and scholarly and research articles on ethical and social issues raised by advances in medicine and the life sciences. Recent issues have included two series—one on synthetic biology and one on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment in children—as well as articles on paid organ donation in Pakistan, and paid oocyte donation in the United States. Articles in the Report are frequently cited by the media and generate significant debate on blogs.

The Hastings Center, one of the world’s first bioethics research institutes, was founded in 1969, at a time when revolutionary developments such as organ transplantation and genetic testing were posing new ethical dilemmas for individuals and society. The Hastings Center Report was launched the following year to bring these and other emerging issues into public and scholarly debate.

“The relationship brings Wiley-Blackwell’s expertise in publishing, without losing what has been attractive about self-publishing,” said Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Report and a Hastings Center Research Scholar. “Wiley-Blackwell will broaden the Report’s reach and allow us to improve our service to authors and readers, but the Hastings Center will maintain its identity and control of its journals.”

The Report will be included in the Wiley-Blackwell Collection, making it available in 3,300 libraries globally that do not currently subscribe to the Report. The January/February 2012 issue will be the first in the new partnership.

Electronic distribution of the Report will be provided by Wiley Online Library (http://wileyonlinelibrary.com), an online content delivery platform that will provide new tools for Report readers, such as Early View, which allows access to accepted articles before they have been bound into an issue of the Report, and “Virtual Issues,” which collects articles and other content that bear on a subject. Wiley Online Library will also allow the Report to be integrated more closely with Bioethics Forum, the Center’s online blog.

Source: Wiley-Blackwell

ProQuest Acquires U.K.’s Expert Information

“ProQuest’s acquisition of Expert Information is a significant milestone toward the worldwide, integrated access to graduate works demanded by serious researchers,” said Rod Gauvin, ProQuest senior vice-president, publishing. “The content in Index to Theses and Theses.com captures landmark works and emerging research from the U.K.’s most influential universities. Including this deep historical archive strengthens ProQuest’s dissertations publishing program and enables us to serve a much broader range of the world’s researchers.”

Expert Information abstracts and indexes more than a half million dissertations and theses, covering more than seventy years and continually growing by nearly 20,000 records per year. The content has been available via ProQuest through its product PQDT: U.K. & Ireland. Now, as part of the ProQuest family, the publishing program behind Expert Information’s products will expand to meet the global information needs of researchers.

Approximately 99% of North American graduate degree-granting institutions contribute their students’ works to the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database, enabling them to be easily discovered and accessed. Chosen by the U.S. Library of Congress as the official archive of American dissertations, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses encompasses more than one quarter of a billion pages. Its 1.4 million digital dissertations and 2.9 million records create a unique and continually growing trove of research. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses is relied upon as a source of enlightening information as well as a pivotal tool for new scholars who aim to make their research available to the world’s intellectual communities. A team of scholars and technologists, who combine their talents to make it accessible, reliable, and supported by continually advancing technology, manages the archive.

To learn more, visit http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/.

Source: ProQuest

EBSCO Discovery Service Reachable via Innovative Interface’s Encore

Executive vice president of technology and chief information officer for EBSCO Publishing, Michael Gorrell, says a dedicated API allows users accessing EDS through the Encore platform access to the valuable resources available in EBSCO Discovery Service. “EDS has quickly become the discovery service for hundreds of universities around the world. EDS provides a full-featured experience for end users. In other words, we have brought together a comprehensive index and a single search approach, but we also offer a true academic and powerful environment in order to facilitate a comprehensive discovery experience. As much as we’ve invested into our native user interface, we also must accommodate the users who may start their research on a partner platform such as Encore.”

This most recent announcement builds on a long-standing relationship between Innovative and EBSCO in which the two companies continue to explore areas where collaboration would benefit libraries. Encore Synergy’s Services Oriented Architecture seamlessly integrates discovery services like EDS into the user experience without the limitations and trade-offs of ‘one size fits all’ systems.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Social Media Features Included in New AccuWeather for Android App

 Features include the following: 

• Accurate and localized forecasts for locations worldwide. Updated each hour, forecasts include detailed hourly forecasts for the next twenty-four hours, plus day and night weather forecasts and information for the next 15 days—all in 23 languages.
• Weather Alarms, for locations worldwide, for weather events including, snow, ice, rain, wind speed/gusts, and the probability of thunderstorms.
• Sharing function allowing users to share the current, hourly, 15-day forecast, or forecast detail view using the social media applications installed on their phone. The share function is part of the Android menu.
• Current weather conditions data updated every 15 minutes and including humidity percentages, visibility, UV index, wind speed gusts and direction, times for sunrise and sunset, and RealFeel—AccuWeather's proprietary weather forecasting system that takes into account multiple weather conditions to determine how the localized temperature actually feels.
• Weather display of North American radar and worldwide satellite overlaying interactive Google Maps.
• Current news and broadcast-quality weather videos with many available in both English and Spanish.
• Storage for unlimited amount of locations along with up to 10 favorite locations. Favorites show current temperature along with a short description. From the “Locations” menu option, long press hold on a favorite location for more actions.
• Choice between metric or imperial units, and either a 12-hour or 24-hour time display.

AccuWeather for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market, https://market.android.com/details?id=com.accuweather.android

Source: AccuWeather