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Weekly News Digest

September 20, 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.

Elsevier Launches Ebook Legacy Collection on ScienceDirect

Librarians at academic, corporate, and government research institutions now have the option to rapidly expand their book collections and researchers can access additional context for existing material, complementing current content across a rich range of sources. Usage patterns for existing deep backlist books on ScienceDirect provide ample evidence that researchers continue to use books published before 2000 in their work.

The Legacy Collection content on ScienceDirect provides additional scientific strength in the following subject-based collections:

• Agricultural and Biological Sciences
• Biochemistry, Genetics, and Molecular Biology
• Chemical Engineering
• Chemistry
• Engineering
• Materials Science
• Physics and Astronomy

Title-by-title lists can be found here. The Legacy Collection marks a significant expansion of the ebook content available on ScienceDirect, which features more than 15,000 books and 2,500 journals along with more than 11 million articles, a content base that is growing at a rate of almost 0.5 million additions per year, with archives that reach as far back as 1823.

Source: Elsevier

Thomson Reuters Launches Sustainability Website

Sustainability will provide multiple perspectives on energy and environmental issues, including on-topic news, analysis, and opinion from Reuters news; content and analysis for professionals from Thomson Reuters businesses; insight from outside experts working in specialist fields such as climate, energy, health, law, and corporate governance; reporting on the efforts of The Thomson Reuters Foundation and the company’s own corporate responsibility initiatives; and aggregated news content from other sources. Future plans for the site include tools and unique resources, which will be introduced as they become available. 

Thomson Reuters has long been a leader in professional information and insights, and it has a number of products to support customers in their efforts to comply with regulations and grow their businesses in a sustainable and responsible manner, including BoardLink, Asset4, Accelus, World-Check, Point Carbon, and Lanworth.

Source: Thomson Reuters

EBSCO Releases 2013 Serials Price Projections Report

Within the academic library and academic publishing markets, this past year in many ways represented the continuation of trends previously addressed by EBSCO in previous Serials Price Projection reports. Expected trends for the 2013 subscription year include the following:

• Library budgets will continue to be under pressure
• Large publishers will continue to aggressively push the Big Deal, while smaller publishers will work hard to maintain their share of the remaining funds
• Packaged content remains preferred over individual subscriptions, but the share of budget demanded by packages plus annual price increases will result in modest acceleration of package cancellations

The open access (OA) movement appears to be gaining momentum. While the concept of OA publishing has been in the market for the past decade, the model has gained traction in recent years due to a confluence of factors, including improvements in technology and digital publishing, governmental and funding policies regarding the broadest possible access to scientific research, and the budget crisis within academic libraries for subscription content. Evidence that OA has gained a significant foothold in the market include the following:

• Approximately 8% of all articles published in peer-reviewed journals in 2009 were OA, and the number is growing.
• Almost all of the top science, technology, and medical (STM) publishers now offer an OA platform or an OA option within certain subscription journals.

Most library budgets are not expected to rise by the same annual percentage as publisher price increases. As a result, the following trends are likely:

• Librarians will continue to prune their content purchases.
• Content-purchasing evaluations will increasingly be based on usage analytics.
• Librarians will increase exploration and testing of alternative purchasing methods, such as patron driven-acquisition and content lease and/or rental.

Source: EBSCO

Microsoft Introduces My Bing News on Facebook

Integration with Facebook makes it easy to check the news while you’re checking in on your friends, and easy to share what you find with others. You’re in control over what and how you share. You can share and comment on an individual article, or, if you choose, enable sharing as you subscribe to topics and read stories. It’s also simple for your friends—they can read what you share without needing to install the app or seeing any prompts for permission.

Source: Bing 

Access Innovations Announces New Initiative: Access Integrity, Inc.

“Utilizing Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software suite, Access Integrity employs a natural-language, rule-based taxonomy application—Medical Claims Compliance—to search, analyze, and verify electronic medical records (EMRs), procedure notes, and submission forms simultaneously to improve billing compliance, identify discrepancies for over and under billing, and speed the submission and reimbursement process with fewer errors and rejections,” said Marjorie M.K. Hlava, president of Access Innovations and co-founder of Access Integrity.

Medical transaction integrity is one of the most important challenges facing healthcare professionals today. Errors can mean audits, lost revenue, and legal penalties. As technology and new legislation continue to change healthcare, Access Integrity is committed to providing technology solutions to help navigate today's healthcare environment. John Kuranz, CEO and co-founder of Access Integrity, says applying cutting-edge data management technology to the healthcare industry will revolutionize and revitalize the processing of medical transactions. 

Access Integrity, Inc. provides patented technology for complete and compliant EMR analysis. From diagnoses to coding to claims submission, Medical Claims Compliance plays an important role in medical transaction processing by extracting concepts from a patient's EMR using rule-based datasets—increasing coding accuracy and improving clinical decision support and overall understanding of a patient encounter. The application suggests appropriate ICD-9 and CPT codes and supplies providers with a claim discrepancy analysis, allowing corrections to be made prior to submission. By increasing medical claims acceptance rates and boosting coders' efficiency, providers generate more cash flow for their businesses.

Source: Access Innovations, Inc. 

Diverse OA Coalition Issues New Guidelines to Make Research Freely Available

Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers. “The reasons to remove restrictions as far as possible are to share knowledge and accelerate research. Knowledge has always been a public good in a theoretical sense. Open Access makes it a public good in practice,” said professor Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Harvard University and a senior researcher at SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). 

The OA recommendations include the development of OA policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as OA repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for OA publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving OA as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within 10 years’ time.

Today, Open Access is increasingly recognized as a right rather than an abstract ideal. The case for rapid implementation of Open Access continues to grow. Open Access benefits research and researchers; increases the return to taxpayers on their investment in research; and amplifies the social value of research, funding agencies, and research institutions.
 
The OA recommendations are the result of a meeting hosted earlier this year by the Open Society Foundations, on the 10th anniversary of the landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first defined OA.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. 
 
The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. Working with local communities in more than 100 countries, the Open Society Foundations support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education. 

Source: Open Society Foundations and SPARC