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Weekly News Digest

July 26, 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.

Kno Delivers New Platform for Elsevier’s Pageburst Digital Books

Elsevier, a provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, announced that Kno, Inc. will provide its newest platform option for one of Elsevier’s lines of digital books. Pageburst, which encompasses Elsevier’s nursing and health professions books in a digital format, will now offer even more flexibility and user-friendly learning features through the addition of the new Kno platform.

“This collaboration will provide students with a more interactive and feature-rich learning environment,” says David Straus, vice president, products for Kno. “Our innovative ebook platform and Elsevier’s respected, comprehensive educational content will enable an enhanced learning experience for students and a better teaching experience for instructors.”

Elsevier digital books on Pageburst go beyond typical ebook platforms by offering an abundance of interactive study features that are designed for the way students learn. The Kno platform for Pageburst will mirror the look of a traditional print textbook and will give students and educators direct access to all-new dynamic and interactive learning tools.

Now with Elsevier’s Pageburst digital titles being on the Kno platform, nursing and health science students will have even more freedom in how they study, enabling them to access their course materials anywhere and at any time throughout their education and professional careers. 

Source: Elsevier 

Desire2Learn Announces New Integration Partnerships

Desire2Learn, Inc., a provider of teaching and learning platforms, and Cengage Learning, a provider of teaching, learning, and research solutions, announced the availability of enhanced interoperability of Cengage Learning’s digital content and solutions within the Desire2Learn platform.

Made possible through Cengage Learning’s standards-based, web-services architecture—MindLinks—via a Desire2Learn extension, the integration provides Desire2Learn users with direct access to Cengage Learning's digital content and core curriculum solutions. The most recent launch of the platform, Desire2Learn Learning Suite 10, focuses on providing users with a simple and intuitive user experience while providing deep feature richness. This enhanced integration with Cengage fits with this approach and continues to enhance the system’s usability with streamlined access, automatic sign-on, and Gradebook exchange for Cengage Learning’s MindTap platform, as well as the placement of embedded links at the activity level for CourseMate products within the Desire2Learn platform. For all CourseMate titles, the integration includes the ability to directly link through Desire2Learn to individual assets, including student activities and the ebook.

Desire2Learn and CourseSmart, a provider of etextbooks and digital course materials, also announced an enhanced integration that will enable students and faculty to access CourseSmart’s growing catalog of more than 30,000 titles more seamlessly within their existing workflows. Faculty will now be able to effortlessly add etextbooks, eresources, and supplemental materials to their courses within Desire2Learn Learning Environment that will be available to students through a single sign-on access.

Without leaving the Desire2Learn system, instructors can easily create deep links to a required reading assignment, homework problems, or other activities that reside in their digital course materials, and easily share that information with their students. Additionally, CourseSmart’s analytic offerings support adaptive learning programs and student retention while availability on iPads, Android devices, computers, or any web-enabled device online and offline provides unlimited opportunities for content engagement anytime, anywhere.

A provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) eLearning solutions for education, Desire2Learn supports more than 8 million learners worldwide in higher education, K-12, healthcare, government, and the corporate sector. Founded in 1999, Desire2Learn has personnel in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Singapore.

Source: Desire2Learn, Inc.

iCopyright Granted U.S. Patent on Peer-Policing System

iCopyright.com announced that it has been granted a U.S. patent on its instant copyright licensing and verification system. The invention is unique because it enables people to instantly verify that someone using copyrighted material has the proper license to do so, and it enables others to obtain their own license to use the work directly from the copied work, not just the original. Without the invention, for example, it is difficult for a commercial enterprise to know if its employees have properly licensed works of authorship, which may subject them to significant liability. Additionally, people who receive copies of copyrighted works often want to make their own copies, but they would be doing so illegally without obtaining their own license.

“iCopyright was founded on the principle that people who wish to use copyrighted material for commercial purposes will do so legally, as long as it is quick and simple,” said Michael O’Donnell, founder and director of iCopyright. “We recognized that encryption mechanisms rarely work. Compliance with copyright laws and policies is better ensured by peer influence, not by locking content. For example, most professionals won’t risk their reputations or the reputations of their companies by improperly using someone else’s material, especially when it is easy for their customers to instantly know whether they have the rights to be using that material. Until this invention, it was virtually impossible to verify whether one who was copying and redistributing material had the rights to do so. It was also impossible to instantly obtain a license directly from the copied work. With this invention, iCopyright has made copyright more enforceable and more valuable in the 21st century,” he said.

iCopyright provides licensing and clearinghouse services for digital content worldwide. Since its founding in 1998, iCopyright has promoted and protected the proprietary rights of tens of millions of pieces of content for thousands of publishers and content creators. iCopyright also offers Discovery, a content monitoring and infringement detection service for publishers that locates copies of content posted on the internet and automates the recovery and remedy of infringed content, and Clip&Copy, a free press-monitoring service. 

Source: iCopyright.com

Persée Content Now Searchable via EBSCO Discovery Service

Persée content is now available via EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing. Due to a recent agreement with Persée, EDS now indexes scientific French journals in the field of humanities. EDS offers metadata for all Persée content and searchable full-text for freely available content. This addition confirms EBSCO’s commitment to continually expand international content in EDS.

Content from Persée represents more than 390,000 articles from French journals covering the field of humanities. The journals are carefully selected by an editorial board, guaranteeing the collection’s scientific coherence. Persée content covers the following disciplines:

  • Anthropology
  • Archaeology
  • Arts
  • Economics
  • Education Science
  • Geography
  • History
  • Information and Communication Sciences
  • Law
  • Linguistics
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social Sciences
  • Sociology

The EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. EDS creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

New Portal for Earth Science Data Exploration

As research in the earth and environmental sciences evolves to become more data-intensive, the ability to discover, integrate, and analyze massive amounts of heterogeneous scientific information has become critical to enabling researchers to address complex questions about the environment and our role within it. DataONE, the Data Observation Network for Earth, has released technology capable of providing researchers access to globally distributed, networked data from a single point of discovery. 

DataONE represents a collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and interrelated but often heterogeneous, scientific data. It is supported by a $20 million award made as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program (Grant #OCI-0830944). DataONE features coordination nodes at the University of New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Tennessee, and member nodes including the California Digital Library (CDL).

DataONE provides users a suite of tools and training materials that cover all aspects of the research data life cycle, from data collection to management, to analysis and publication.

DataONE offers searchable access to data held by South Africa National Parks, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, the Ecological Society of America, Dryad, Oak Ridge National Laboratories Distributed Active Archive Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Long Term Ecological Research Network, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, and the CDL.

The CDL, through its University of California Curation Center (UC3), has supported the long-term preservation of the university's digital assets for more than 10 years. While originally focused on the management of cultural heritage materials contributed by campus libraries, archives, and museums, UC3 has seen increasing demands for its preservation services by the social and physical science communities.

DataONE is a community-driven organization and the DataONE Users Group provides the opportunity for funders, users, developers, educators, and any other stakeholders to gather and contribute to DataONE products and services. Within DataONE, experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences can bridge these worlds and provide an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

Another member node soon to be added by CDL and UNM is ONEShare, a special-purpose repository that will accept spreadsheet data from researchers who do not have an explicit affiliation with another existing member node.

Source: University of California

NPG Expands Linked Data Platform

As part of its wider commitment to open science, Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) Linked Data Platform now hosts more than 270 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements. It has been expanded more than 10 times, in a growing number of datasets. These datasets have been created under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) waiver, which permits maximal use/reuse of this data. The data is now being updated in real time, and new triples are being dynamically added to the datasets as articles are published on nature.com.

Available at http://data.nature.com, the platform now contains bibliographic metadata for all NPG titles, including Scientific American dating from 1845, and NPG’s academic journals published on behalf of our society partners. NPG’s Linked Data Platform now includes citation metadata for all published article references. The NPG subject ontology is also significantly expanded.

The new release expands the platform to include additional RDF statements of bibliographic, citation, data citation, and ontology metadata, which are organized into 12 datasets—an increase from the eight datasets previously available. Full snapshots of this data release are now available for download, either by individual dataset or as a complete package, for registered users at http://developers.nature.com.

NPG’s platform allows for easy querying, exploration, and extraction of data and relationships about articles, contributors, citations, publications, and subjects. Users can run web-standard SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries to obtain and manipulate data stored as RDF. The platform uses standard vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, PRISM, BIBO, and OWL, and the data is integrated with existing public datasets including CrossRef and PubMed. The platform originally launched in April 2012.

Source: Nature Publishing Group 



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