News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

March 21, 2013 — 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 Bowker Study on Ebook Markets

E-retailers market share increases come at the expense of chain booksellers in the U.S., where their market share has dropped from 32% to 19% of volume. This sector has proved more resilient in the U.K., but even there, the bookshop share as a whole fell from 43% during January-November 2010 to 37% in the equivalent months in 2012.

“It is clear that the ebook format has really come of age in the U.S.,” said Jo Henry, director of Bowker Market Research, a service of ProQuest affiliate Bowker. “Ebooks’ market share has seen steady growth since January 2009, with steep rises after each Christmas.”

In November 2012, 28% of all book purchases in the U.S. were in ebook format—a dramatic rise from 6% in November 2010. In the U.K., the ebook share of the market reached a peak of 13% in July 2012, at the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, but it fell back to about 9% in November 2012.

Supporting data is available on Bowker’s Bookconsumer.com site.

Bowker, a ProQuest affiliate, is the leading provider of bibliographic information and management solutions designed to help publishers, booksellers, and libraries better serve their customers.

Source: Bowker

Ex Libris Primo Central to Search SwetsWise Online Content

SwetsWise Online Content covers the metadata and abstracts of more than 40 million articles and 14,500 full-text scientific periodicals from more than 5,700 publishers. The Primo Central Index, provided as a cloud-based service to hundreds of libraries around the globe, is an integral part of the Ex Libris Primo discovery and delivery solution. As a one-stop service, Primo enables users to fulfill their information needs by exploring their library’s locally managed collections along with global and regional resources indexed in Primo Central, and to obtain one blended, relevance-ranked result list.

David Beychok, vice president for discovery and delivery solutions at Ex Libris, remarked, “We are thrilled to be the first discovery index offering the comprehensive metadata and abstracts covered by SwetsWise to mutual customers of Ex Libris and Swets. Through Primo Central, users in the Primo community of over 1,300 institutions obtain instant access to their institutions’ local collections and global resources, benefiting from a seamless discovery experience. SwetsWise content is an important addition to the extensive scope of materials in Primo Central and one that will provide substantial value to Ex Libris customers.”

Source: Ex Libris Group

Reprints Desk Launches Document Delivery Service for Academic Institutions

"Document delivery has always been a part of our services for UW libraries users, and this service gives us added benefits of both speed and effective use of funds,” said Heidi Nance, head of Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery services at University of Washington Libraries.

The collection, comprised of content from leading publishers, includes more than 14,000 journal titles and single chapters from more than 10,000 books. Reprints Desk provides a high-quality PDF within minutes for each document delivery request that the company receives. Reprints Desk makes the service available for a low transactional service fee, plus a special academic copyright royalty charge that is normally between $15 and $25.

“The A-Z Academic Document Delivery Collection is an important addition to academic institutions’ collection management mix, offering significant cost savings over commercial document delivery rates and in many cases ILL,” said Ian Palmer, head of sales and marketing. “As part of our ‘no hassle’ approach to customer engagement, academic institutions can sign up and start ordering the same day without pressure to buy any additional services from Reprints Desk. Customers can also count on us to get the scholarly papers they need when time is of the essence since we’ve now integrated our flagship document delivery service capabilities featuring no collection limitations and 24-hour a day fulfillment.”

Source: Reprints Desk, Inc.

Semantico to Redesign Access Science for McGraw-Hill Professional

Scolaris is engineered to manage the complexities of journals, ebooks, reference works, and dictionaries. Scolaris promotes discoverability by providing intelligent, full-text search that allows for rich taxonomy support for faceted search and browse.

AccessScience is part of a family of Access products in McGraw-Hill Professional’s portfolio, delivering a rich compilation of science and technology information ideal for all university and advanced secondary school students. The new AccessScience platform will continue to offer a wealth of trusted and engaging material from more than 8,000 scientists and specialist sources.

The new platform aims to bring the study of science alive for students with rich, engaging contributions created by noted scientists specifically for AccessScience. The new AccessScience platform will give users access to a wider array of information and will include the very latest technologies including sophisticated search functionality, content enhancements and more.

Laura Friedman, publisher of digital initiatives at McGraw-Hill Professional, said, “Consolidating AccessScience and AccessEngineering onto the same platform will be a real benefit to our customers. Our goal is to offer the best possible experience to our users and this new platform enables us to keep doing just that.”

The project is in the initial planning phases with completion and launch planned for 4Q 2013.

Source: Semantico

Reprints Desk, Inc. Announces New Open Access Filter

The OA filter sends customers to the source and supplements other Reprints Desk order filtering capabilities for subscription, token, print collection, and workgroup repository content, employing a dynamic process-driven approach to identify OA content rather than a data-driven one that may have limitations in coverage and accuracy.

“The first rule of document delivery is to help customers avoid unnecessary document delivery expenditures. We have made significant system improvements over the last year with those customer savings specifically in mind,” said Peter Derycz, Reprints Desk President and CEO. “The new service feature for finding Open Access articles on the Internet does just that for larger research-driven companies who switch to Reprints Desk. It aids smaller organizations in the same way, but also delivers much needed cost controls and time savings so they can safely transition to end user self-servicing.”

OA is the practice of providing unrestricted online access to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles and increasingly other content types. According to the results of one study, OA is responsible for roughly 20% of the total output of peer-reviewed articles published. Other recent developments include Research Councils UK (RCUK) announcement that beginning in April 2013, scientific papers must be made free to access within 6 months of publication if they come from work paid for by one of the U.K.’s seven government-funded grant agencies, which spend billions of dollars each year on research.

Source: Reprints Desk, Inc.

Serials Solutions Partners With Wolters Kluwer Health

“Working with Serials Solutions supports our mission to broaden the reach of our content to support end-user information needs, and the Summon service is widely recognized for increasing usage of resources,” said Jayne Marks, vice president publishing, Wolters Kluwer Health, Medical Research. “Also, researchers recognize the benefits of precision discipline-scoped searching—and students value contextual research assistance.”

The LWW journal collection is one of the most authoritative medical, nursing, and allied health peer-reviewed resources in the world. Healthcare practitioners, researchers, and students at medical, academic, and corporate institutions globally access this content every day to make important decisions. “This announcement marks a milestone in building the most comprehensive collection of highly valued medical content in a discovery service,” said John Law, vice president discovery services, Serials Solutions.

Source: Serials Solutions