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Weekly News Digest

January 17, 2012 — 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.

Introducing Mendeley Institutional Edition Powered by Swets

Building on the existing Mendeley functionalities, this multi-device solution provides librarians and institutions with a means to do the following:

• Connect their collections directly to researchers and end users
• Support researchers within their own workflow
• Create pathways for collaboration and interaction among students, professors, and their peers
• Monitor, support, and facilitate the research undertaken within their institution
• Showcase the value of their institutions to potential students and research staff

With more than 1.4 million active users Mendeley has quickly established itself as a must-have research tool among academic students, professors and researchers around the globe. It contains the world’s largest crowd-sourced information library, with more than 145 million documents. Although the software has opened up new pathways for collaboration and interaction between individual students and researchers in similar fields around the world, those researchers could still benefit from the knowledge, guidance, and expertise of the traditional library. Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets addresses this need.

Within their institutional profile, librarians can assist their users in a number of ways:

• Upload their A-Z list of titles
• Have teachers set up course packs to direct students to important content
• Utilize link resolvers to facilitate speedy access paths to information
• Increase the reach of researchers by helping them share their content
• Discover peers in similar research fields
• Create the library’s own citation style, or adopt a standard

A free demonstration of the premium version of Mendeley Institutional Edition powered by Swets can be requested at http://www.swets.com/mendeley.

Source: Swets 

Springer Open Choice Adopts Creative Commons Attribution License

In 2004, the hybrid OA option Open Choice was launched at Springer with the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Springer’s Open Choice option allows authors to publish their articles with OA for the majority of its subscription-based journals. The articles are immediately freely available for anyone worldwide in exchange of paying an article processing charge. The copyright remains with the author.

Bettina Goerner, manager of OA at Springer, says, “The positive experience with publishing fully open access journals under the CC-BY license at BioMed Central and SpringerOpen, lead us to believe that permitting commercial use has benefits to our authors, editors, society partners, and open access in general. We are pleased that our Open Choice option to publish open access meets the growing demand for liberal re-use rights.”

In addition to Open Choice, Springer offers fully OA journals under the SpringerOpen brand. The portfolio of more than 60 journals was recently joined by SpringerPlus, an interdisciplinary OA journal, publishing research in all STM disciplines. For more information on Springer and OA, see http://www.springer.com/openaccess.

Source: Springer

PsycTESTS Will Be Available Via EBSCOhost

PsycTESTS serves as a repository for the full text (when available) of psychological tests and measures as well as a source of structured information about tests of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work. Updated monthly, PsycTESTS includes unpublished tests, tests developed by psychologists for which no source document has been located, and information about published tests available from commercial publishers.

Researchers in all fields of psychology will benefit from the diverse array of subject areas and types of tests covered in PsycTESTS. PsycTESTS supports SmartLinking to other subscribed EBSCO databases, which allows users to easily follow an article citation in one database to the full text of that same article in another database. With this feature, PsycTESTS customers can easily link over to their other EBSCO psychology databases.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

OverDrive Adds Non-English Ebooks to Library Catalog

Content is also available to libraries and schools from OverDrive in several other languages. More than 9,000 Chinese fiction, nonfiction, lifestyle, cooking, gardening, and self-improvement titles have been added to OverDrive’s broad ebook catalog. Additional languages already in the catalog include French, German, Greek, Japanese, Ukrainian, and many more.

OverDrive provides digital distribution services for more than 18,000 libraries, retailers, and schools worldwide with support for Windows, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Sony Reader, NOOK, Android, and BlackBerry. To find a library near you, visit http://search.overdrive.com.

Source: OverDrive

Article Exchange Integrated Into WorldCat Resource Sharing Service

Article Exchange provides a single, secure location where lending libraries can place and borrowing libraries and their users can retrieve requested articles obtained through interlibrary loan. Lending libraries scan documents and upload them to the site and notify the borrowing libraries of the documents’ availability. The site generates a unique URL and password for each document. An email button enables the lender to insert the borrower’s email address and send the link directly to the library.

Once a file has been retrieved, it remains available for 5 days or five views. After 30 days, unviewed files will be removed. A file can be picked up a maximum of five times for each URL/password combination. Access to the current experimental site will end on Jan. 31, 2012.

An OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Meeting will be held on Sunday, Jan. 22 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the Dallas Convention Center, Room D227, during the ALA Midwinter Meeting. For those unable to attend, OCLC will hold an OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Virtual Meeting on Jan. 26, from 1:30 to 3 p.m., Eastern Time. Register for this event through the OCLC website.

Source: OCLC

Springer Launches Interdisciplinary Open Access Journal SpringerPlus

A transparent and fast publication process is the hallmark of SpringerPlus. If a manuscript meets the necessary scientific criteria as determined by peer review, the paper will be accepted immediately and without major revision. The only thing that counts is the high quality of research described. The peer review process is organized efficiently so that authors can count on a very short time to publication. SpringerPlus is published as an online-only journal.

SpringerPlus will feature interdisciplinary manuscripts describing original research, case studies, and methods. The journal guarantees a high standard of scientific quality while extending the range of data formats, accepting audiovisual formats, data reports, and extensive tables either as complete articles or part of the paper. There will be no restrictions on the number of words or figures, and articles detailing statistically negative correlation will be considered.

Springer ensures distribution to the widest possible audience, maximizing visibility and citations. Like all other SpringerOpen journals, SpringerPlus will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. This means that authors retain copyright and all content is freely available in full to everyone immediately. Authors will be assessed a standard open access fee.

Springer began publishing individual open access papers through its Springer Open Choice model in 2004. Since then, the publishing group has refined and extended this publication model. In summer 2010, Springer launched a new open access portfolio that now contains more than 60 purely open access journals focusing on specific research areas. The interdisciplinary approach of SpringerPlus supplements this open access portfolio. Anyone with an internet connection can access the articles in these journals without a subscription.

Source: Springer Science+Business Media