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Weekly News Digest
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April 1, 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.
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NISO Publishes Recommended Practice on Ejournals
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the publication of a new Recommended Practice: "PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals" (NISO RP-16-2013). This recommended practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of ejournals—particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of ISSN, and citation practices—to publishers and platform providers, as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials, collections, and electronic resources librarians.In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers’ online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices. “Citations form the basis for much scholarly research. Unless journal websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished,” explains Cindy Hepfer, continuing e-resource management and cataloging librarian at the State University of New York at Buffalo and co-chair of the NISO PIE-J Working Group. “For example, many e-journal publishers and aggregators now place digitized content originally published under an earlier title on the website for the current title, using the current ISSN, thus seriously impeding the researcher’s ability to find or identify the content being sought. The PIE-J project was initiated to address these issues.” The PIE-J draft Recommended Practice and a brochure summarizing the recommendations are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom website at niso.org/workrooms/piej/. Source: NISO
ACS Introduces ACS ChemWorx, a New Research Collaboration System
The American Chemical Society (ACS) announced the launch of ACS ChemWorx, a new research collaboration system designed to integrate all facets of the researcher's work life. Every step of the research process—from forming an initial concept, to exchanging documents and literature references with a network of global collaborators, to assembling the resulting research findings with coauthors—can now be performed within the secure and interoperable ACS ChemWorx environment.The ACS also announced its strategic investment in colwiz, Ltd. (colwiz), an early stage company established by Oxford University scientists that is providing much of the underlying technology for ACS ChemWorx. Under the terms of the development agreement, ACS and colwiz will combine the society’s trusted information services and membership benefits for chemistry professionals with the power of cloud-based social collaboration technology developed by colwiz, Ltd. ACS ChemWorx enables researchers to quickly create online profiles with comprehensive messaging and social communication features, as well as to organize secure workgroups and projects, share document libraries, manage calendars and group task lists, and maintain private discussion areas. Integrated web, desktop, and mobile applications provide powerful capabilities for content discovery, reference and document management, coordinated storage and retrieval of data, and collaborative manuscript preparation and editing, as well as personal publication tracking with ACS Publications. ACS ChemWorx is being offered free to any ACS-registered user, and to faculty and students based at any of the society’s institutional customers worldwide. Coinciding with the launch of ACS ChemWorx, ACS Publications is also introducing notable feature enhancements to the digital editions of its entire portfolio of peer reviewed research journals. These include ACS ActiveView PDF and Add to ACS ChemWorx.
ACS ActiveView PDF is an interactive full-text format that enables researchers to attach highlights and notes to ACS journal articles of interest, explore referenced abstracts via the CAS SciFinder-powered Reference QuickView, make and save annotations in their ACS ChemWorx library, share links with colleagues and lab group members, and sync their libraries across smartphone, tablet, and desktop environments.
With the Add to ACS ChemWorx feature, researchers can export citations from any ACS article to their ACS ChemWorx reference libraries through a single click via links found on search results, and on table of contents, abstract, and full-text page types. Source: American Chemical Society
Credo Adds Text-to-Speech Through Partnership With ReadSpeaker
Credo announced it is integrating technology from ReadSpeaker, a provider of online text to speech, into its Literati solutions. ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech technology is one of many recent additions to the innovative learning technologies that Literati combines with authoritative scholarly content and customizable services to help libraries do more.The new text-to-speech technology is now available to the growing number of libraries that subscribe to Literati Public, the SIIA CODiE 2013 winner for Best General Reference Service. Text-to-speech will soon be added to Literati Academic, a CODiE award finalist for Best Education Reference Solution, as well as to Literati School and Literati Student Athlete, which were both launched earlier this year. “At Credo, we’re focused on making authoritative information accessible to all users. Text to speech removes barriers for auditory learners, learners who are visually impaired and those who are learning English as a second language,” said Carol Helton, Credo’s executive vice president of marketing and customer solutions. “ReadSpeaker pioneered online text to speech in 1999, so we are very excited to leverage their experience, expertise, and technologies to make Literati an even stronger solution for libraries and the diverse user base that they serve.” In 1999, ReadSpeaker pioneered the first-ever speech-enabling application for websites. Today, the company’s web-based text-to-speech services are used by thousands of websites/mobile apps and millions of users worldwide every month. ReadSpeaker speech-enables online content on the fly in 35-plus languages and 100-plus voices. The company provides a portfolio of web-based text-to-speech solutions for websites, mobile sites, mobile apps, RSS feeds, online documents and forms, and online campaigns. More than 5,000 corporate, media, government, and nonprofit customers around the world use ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions. Source: Credo
New ACRL White Paper: 'Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy'
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announced the publication of a new white paper, “Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment,” written by a working group of leaders from many areas of the association. This white paper explores and articulates three intersections among scholarly communication and information literacy: - Economics of the distribution of scholarship (including access to scholarship, the changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the education of students to be knowledgeable content consumers and content creators)
- Digital literacies (including teaching new technologies and rights issues, and the emergence of multiple types of nontextual content)
- Our changing roles (including the imperative to contribute to the building of new infrastructures for scholarship, and deep involvement with creative approaches to teaching)
After elaborating on each intersection, the paper provides strategies for librarians from different backgrounds to initiate collaborations within their own campus environments between information literacy and scholarly communication. After articulating these intersections and exploring core responses, the paper recommends four objectives, with actions for each, which ACRL, other academic library organizations, individual libraries and library leaders could take. The overarching recommendations are the following: - Integrate pedagogy and scholarly communication into educational programs for librarians to achieve the ideal of information fluency
- Develop new model information literacy curricula, incorporating evolutions in pedagogy and scholarly communication issues
- Explore options for organizational change
- Promote advocacy
This white paper is issued as both a downloadable PDF and an interactive online format. Readers are encouraged to add comments and reactions in order to help further the conversation. This white paper complements the recently published ACRL book Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication, edited by Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley. Source: ACRL
De Gruyter to Offer 100 Titles for Open Access Through Unglue.it
De Gruyter, the academic publisher based in Berlin, will be offering 100 titles from its e-dition series at the crowdfunding platform Unglue.it. Each individual title that raises $2,100 at the site will be made available worldwide as open access (OA) content.Unglue.it is making ebooks free and universally accessible to libraries and book lovers alike. It works by users contributing an amount of their choosing to the book titles offered at the platform by publishers. If the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher will release the book under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND). “The demand for open-access books at De Gruyter has been increasing continuously,” said De Gruyter CEO Sven Fund. “This has motivated us to offer select e-dition titles at Unglue.it and see if users are willing to help increase the number of open access works available.” De Gruyter will offer books from 1958 to 2003 that currently can no longer be ordered. These books are in both English and German and cover a wide range of subjects, including law, linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. Unglue.it users can help determine which titles are offered first by putting De Gruyter titles on their “wishlists.” The De Gruyter page on Unglue.it is at https://unglue.it/pid/popular/4311. “We’re really excited and honored to be working with De Gruyter. Their broad commitment to both Open Access and to high quality publishing really distinguishes them from their competitors,” says Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar Inc., the company behind Unglue.it. Source: Unglue.it
Springer and Chemical Abstracts Service Collaborate to Accelerate Chemistry Research
Springer Science+Business Media and Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) will collaborate on a project to include thousands of new experimental procedures for chemical reactions reported in Springer journals in the CAS databases. This collaboration will increase the visibility of articles with experimental procedures published in 165 Springer chemistry journals from 1985 to the present.The addition of experimental procedures from Springer journal articles provides important information that helps scientists evaluate search results. Using “SciFinder, The choice for chemistry research,” a tool that allows scientists to explore the CAS databases, critical full-text articles that are essential to scientists in their research can be identified quickly. CAS provides access to more than 62 million single- and multistep reactions and synthetic preparations, as well as associated experimental procedures for reactions, through SciFinder. The information in CAS is provided by journals from prestigious publishers and patents issued by major patent offices. CAS has long recognized how important global chemical publications are to research and will continue adding relevant chemistry content throughout 2013. Christine McCue, vice president of marketing at CAS, said, “CAS is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive and authoritative chemical information. The addition of experimental procedures from the respected Springer collection compliments the millions of procedures already available from other esteemed publishers and patent authorities. The information will help scientists using SciFinder identify the preferred synthetic methods, and is an integral part of the research cycle as they seek the original published research.” Source: Springer
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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