News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

October 18, 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.

New FOIAonline Platform Launched

For agencies, FOIAonline provides a secure website to receive and store requests, assign and process requests, post responses, generate metrics, manage records electronically, create management reports, and electronically generate the annual report required from each agency by FOIA.

EPA began looking at the feasibility of a FOIA portal in 2010 with the idea of leveraging Regulations.gov, the federal rulemaking portal that allows people to comment on federal regulations and other agency regulatory actions. EPA administers Regulations.gov, which has helped FOIAonline avoid many startup costs, resulting in a total of $1.3 million to launch and an estimated cost avoidance of $200 million over the next 5 years if broadly adopted.

Six federal agencies now have partnered to develop and deploy FOIAonline along with EPA, including the Department of Commerce, NARA, the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Merit Systems Protection Board, each of which will deploy on its own schedule.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration

ProQuest Continues to Upgrade Health and Medical Databases

The new Journal Watch content comprises an edited clinical series covering 13 specialties, including cardiology, hospital medicine, pediatrics, and women’s health. Journal Watch Physician Editorial Boards survey the medical literature, select the most important research and guidelines, distill them into focused summaries, and frame them in a clinical context. In addition, they cover the most important medical news, drug information, and public health alerts. New articles will be available 90 days after their original publication date.

Just 15 months after acquiring the BNI, ProQuest released a full-text version of the product. BNI Full-Text is available for the first time in the new ProQuest research environment, enabling it to be cross-searched with such resources as ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health and supported with advanced content management tools. BNI focuses on titles published in the U.K., Australia, and Canada; it also includes a selection of important international nursing titles. It is updated monthly. Its full-text version encompasses more than 600,000 records and more than 190,000 indexed records, plus links to other sources.

The addition of APA’s PsycTESTS database provides descriptive summaries, full text, and relevant citations on the development and assessment of more than 6,000 tests and measures used in research and teaching.

Source: ProQuest

HarperCollins, Publishing Technology to Build Global Product Manager

By integrating systems and assets across the globe, the new centralized system will provide the company with the long-term infrastructure needed to maximize its catalog of books, ebooks, and apps. It will transform the way staff members view, manage, and share product information throughout the publishing life cycle.

Built on Publishing Technology’s advance platform, Global Product Manager will empower HarperCollins staff to explore current and future content delivery types and business models while enabling better metadata management that will improve the discoverability of its products. Other expected benefits include the following:

• Greater visibility, consistency, and reliability of product data
• Best-in-class metadata maintenance to drive marketing strategies
• Ability to better leverage rights, aggregate content, and create new business models
• Robust scheduling and tracking capability to monitor cost and performance
• Improve relationships with retailers and authors through improved access to data
• Best-practice sharing of information across geographical regions

The advance system is a publishing operations software package supporting product and relationship management, contracts, rights, royalties, permissions, content monetization, and fulfillment. With advance applications, publishers can manage processes from end to end, maximize all revenue streams, and transform from print to digital business models.

The HarperCollins system will be rolled out first in the U.S., followed by the U.K., and subsequently Canada, Australia, and to the Christian Publishing Division through 2013.

Source: Publishing Technology, LLC

Summon Adds Content From Elsevier Scopus, International Sources

Serials Solutions’ unique “match and merge” technology brings together information from multiple sources to create a single record optimized for discovery. The inclusion of Scopus content in the Summon unified index—and the advanced capability of match and merge—will aid in the discovery of full-text content from other providers, as well as valuable Scopus citation-only results. Also, using Scopus cited-by counts as a factor in Summon relevancy ranking will ensure users surface the most scholarly and relevant content in their results. The Scopus abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature contains more than 47 million records and 19,500 titles from 5,000 international publishers.

Serials Solutions also signed agreements with AskZad, ciando GmbH, the European Patent Office, and Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA. Content from all participating providers is normalized to a common search schema in the Summon index.

AskZad offers an extensive collection of Middle Eastern digital resources. Metadata and content will be indexed from Pan-Arab E-Books, Pan-Arab Academic Journal Index, and Pan-Arab Dissertations.

ciando GmbH is a provider of fiction and nonfiction ebooks, as well as literature from all areas of science. Metadata for 155,000 ebooks from 600 publishers will be added to the Summon unified index. Nearly 90% of the ebooks are in German, and the company works with a number of major German universities and institutional libraries.

The European Patent Office publications include material about inventions and technical developments dating from 1836. About 70 million patent documents from Espacenet will be discoverable through Summon.

Wydawnictwo Naukowe is one of the largest scientific publishers in Poland and includes metadata for more than 3,000 ebook titles in Polish.

Another Serials Solutions agreement with Hyweb Technology will enable the discovery of Serials Solutions Chinese journal content from Summon. The inclusion of metadata for Hyweb’s more than 900 journals represents 90% of Taiwanese journals published. The Summon service offers advanced native language searching capabilities for 17 languages, and a new Chinese-language searching enhancement enables users to search Chinese titles and authors with Pinyin separated spaces at the character level.

Source: Serials Solutions

Apress Offers Open Access Platform for Technical Book Publishing

Apress has also announced that it is working with Intel Corp. to publish at least 10 books under the ApressOpen brand. Intel is providing assistance with content architecture with resources from its Industry Education Office. “Our aim is to publish content that is strategically aligned with industry-leading companies and globally recognized, topic-expert authors who are on the cutting edge of innovative technologies. Making the resulting content free and available to the widest possible audience will assure great, favorable impact for the computer industry and other industries over time. We’re excited to work with Intel on some of our first ApressOpen titles, so that the computer industry may quickly benefit from Intel’s unique insights in computer innovation,” says Jeffrey M. Pepper, assistant publisher at Apress.

ApressOpen content will be distributed on SpringerLink with more than 122 million unique visitors per year as well as on Apress.com, Intel.com, and all major ebook and database platforms.

Source: Apress Media, LLC

Science.gov Adds Multimedia, Spanish Translations, and More Search Features

In addition, a Spanish version of the site has been launched. Ciencia.Science.gov provides the same breadth and depth in scientific search as does Science.gov, covering more than 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information. This includes free access to R&D results from 17 organizations within 13 federal science agencies and more than 55 scientific databases and 2,100 selected scientific websites. Integrating Microsoft’s Translator, Spanish-language queries to Science.gov initiate searches of U.S. databases and websites with results appearing in Spanish.

Science.gov includes key DOE R&D databases of full-text documents, citations, patents, eprints, accomplishments, multimedia, data, software, and more, all covered in the DOE Science Accelerator. OSTI conceived and helped launched Science.gov in December 2002 to get DOE R&D results out to the scientific community and beyond—and to get the community’s results into DOE. Traffic to the site has grown enormously over the past 10 years; while there were some 750,000 Science.gov page requests in its first year, these grew to more than 34 million in the 2012 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance, which includes the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Library of Congress; NASA; the National Archives and Records Administration; and NSF. These agencies represent 97% of the federal R&D budget.

Source: Science.gov