News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

October 24, 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.

Cengage Learning to Improve Interoperability With Sakai Courseware Management Platform

The collaboration leverages the power of Cengage Learning’s MindLinks integration to deliver improved ease of use for students, instructors, and administrators. MindLinks is a new service provided by Cengage Learning to allow for deeper integration of Cengage Learning’s digital suite into an institution’s existing Learning Management System. The service works by using portable links that allow two-way communication between a Learning Management System and a Cengage digital product. Full integration via MindLinks is planned for users of Cengage Learning digital solutions including Aplia, CourseMate, CengageNow, and MindTap, which will include single sign on and seamless links to content and gradebook export.

Unicon, Inc. is a provider of IT consulting services for the education market. Unicon works closely with colleges, universities, and corporations to find the best solutions to meet their business challenges.

Source: Cengage Learning

Revised EndNote X5 for Windows and Mac OS X Launched

Improvements in EndNote X5 let users include the following:

• Add and move file attachments between the computer and web account (requires registering with EndNote X5).
• Attach files to an EndNote web record.
• Store up to 25,000 references on the web with 1GB for file attachments.
• Update a reference automatically.
• Have EndNote search online and present you with updated record information.
• Update empty fields or replace all fields.
• View PDF files, including in the EndNote library.
• Annotate PDF files with highlights and/or comments. 

Cite While You Write’s new options include the following:

• Conditional formatting in journal styles, substituting data if a field is empty
• Selecting a new citation style—Author (Year)—in Microsoft Word
• Comparing duplicate references quickly with auto-highlights and locked scrolling

Source: Thomson Reuters

Open Access Week 2011 Opens Oct. 24

Every year, research funders, academic institutions, libraries research organizations, non-profits, businesses, and others use Open Access Week as a valuable platform to convene community events as well as to announce significant action on Open Access. The Week has served as a launching pad for new open-access publication funds, open-access policies, and papers reporting on the societal and economic benefits of OA.

This year, programs highlighting publishing and rights management choices for faculty authors, use of new media, and opportunities created by re-mixing and re-using scholarly materials are on tap. Open Educational Resources are another key topic, as is open-source technology. Campuses will be presenting a sweeping range of events, from the Harvard University-sponsored “Yana,” an open-source template for scholarly journals to develop mobile applications to the University of Utah event diving into new media, fair use, and pop culture.

Students will once again play a major role, hosting panel discussions, workshops, poster campaigns, webcasts, and movie screenings to understand Open Access and its relevance to students. Events such as “SHOW (Share/OpenAccess/Worldwide),” at the university campus in Rijeka, Croatia, will introduce students to Creative Commons licensing, Open Projects, the Open Content movement, the Open Access movement, and the Right to Research Coalition.

Participation in this highly successful event continues to grow. This year, there are over 2,000 individuals in more than 110 countries registered in the Open Access Week social network at openaccessweek.org. Participation remains strong throughout Europe and North America and will be complemented by new activities in regions as diverse as Algeria, Gambia, Iceland, Iraq, and Sudan. The global nature of this event is captured nicely by the interactive Open Access Week member map, available on the website.

To help support local programming, SPARC provides a suite of resources, including a video series featuring leading voices in research and digital technology. This year’s feature is Brewster Kahle, founder and chairman of the Internet Archive. Kahle suggests the time is ripe for Open Access; now that the “plumbing” of the Internet is in place, “We have to move beyond the mainframe model and the subscription or the license model,” he says. “It has to be so that things are… shared widely.” The video may be viewed and downloaded at http://blip.tv/sparc-north-america/brewster-kahle-5653389.

The full collection of SPARC videos for Open Access Week, including Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Dr. Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist and open research advocate; Dr. Mona Nemer, professor and vice-president for research at the University of Ottawa; students, librarians, teachers, research funders, and others are available on the openaccessweek.org website.

Open Access Week is organized by SPARC, with the generous support of its 2011 sponsors: the Public Library of Science, @mire, and Springer Open. Find activities on your campus, at your institution, or in your region—or join to participate—through the website at openaccessweek.org.

Source: SPARC

ACM Announces Innovative Article Linking Service for Authors

By linking the author's personal bibliography with the ACM Digital Library, downloads from the author's site are captured in official ACM statistics, more accurately reflecting total usage. ACM

Author-Izer also expands ACM’s reputation as an innovative “Green Path” publisher. This service is based on ACM's strong belief that the computing community should have the widest possible access to the definitive versions of scholarly literature. By making ACM Author-Izer a free service to both authors and visitors to those authors’ websites, ACM is emphasizing its continuing commitment to the interests of its authors and to the computing community in ways that are consistent with its existing subscription access models.

For additional information including a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates ACM Author-Izer, visit http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service.

Source: ACM

HeyStaks 2.0 App Improves Social Searching

The new version 2.0 features include the following:

• Highlighted results recommended by search communities, so users can easily differentiate between community and third party results
• One stop search—Users can toggle between search results from Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Flickr

The features have gone live on the Android tablet app and will be live on the iPad soon.

Source: HeyStaks

HighWire Press Uses TEMIS to Enrich Content Semantically

“Stanford’s HighWire leads the industry in discoverability, leveraging its long relationship with Google,” said HighWire’s founding director, John Sack. “This new partnership allows us to increase discoverability inside the platform with richer metadata and outside the platform by connecting to the semantic web. The broad discipline coverage and the complete suite of customization tools offered by Luxid give HighWire’s publishers the opportunity to access the full scope of the industry’s most advanced semantic toolset. Also, while Luxid can effectively tag content using taxonomies, it also performs advanced semantic analysis to identify the new discoveries happening on the cutting edge of research, those that our publishers value the most.”

Managing director, Tom Rump, continued, “Luxid marries well with our new tools for rapid product presentation and content aggregation. They’ll enable publishers using HighWire’s open platform to quickly develop new products and deliver them to market, whether on the web or mobile. It allows us to advance the intellectual and commercial interests of scholarly publishers, by having content reach its full potential and its full audience.”

“HighWire’s open and scalable platform is perfectly poised to fully leverage our semantic content enrichment solution,” said TEMIS’s CEO, Eric Brégand. “The market-leading Luxid Content Enrichment Platform provides significantly deeper insights into content than taxonomy-only solutions can. By combining it with HighWire’s ePublishing solution, we are extending to the larger STM publishing community the full power of semantics and the highest standards of user experience.”

Source: HighWire Press