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Weekly News Digest

May 13, 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.

Coursera Announces Pilot Program With Publishers

The importance of rigorously developed pedagogical resources to learning outcomes has been well-documented, and today’s announcement will link Coursera’s content to this enhanced learning process. While professors teaching Coursera’s broad course offerings have until now been able to assign high-quality content freely available on the web, they will now be able to work with top publishers to provide an even wider variety of carefully curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student.

The involvement of several key publishers in this announcement aligns, for the first time, their long-standing commitment to and investment in online education with Coursera’s mission, which includes working within existing frameworks to improve educational access. In addition to gaining insight into worldwide usage data, publishers will be able sell full versions of their e-textbooks to students for continued personal learning.

Coursera’s collaboration with leading publishers and Chegg, such as its collaboration with top universities, is an innovative step forward for free online education. It provides students who previously might not have had easy access to textbooks with the deeper and more comprehensive learning experience that these resources provide.

Source: Coursera

Credo Releases 12 New Perpetual Access and Subscription Collections

News titles include the following:

• CQ Press Collection: With titles such as The Presidency A to Z, Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, and The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, the CQ Press Collection offers 16 reference works that cover key topics in U.S. History and Political Science. 
• CRC Press Collection: Offering 11 titles, including French’s Index of Differential Diagnosis: An A-Z, Clark’s Pocket Handbook for Radiographers, and Illustrated Pharmacology for Nurses, nursing and medical students at the undergraduate level as well as clinical professionals will find that this collection greatly enhances both research and practice.
• Economics Collection: The 18 titles included in Credo’s Economics Collection provide a well-rounded view of macroeconomics, economic decline, social economics, wealth, and international economics.
• Philosophy Collection: Credo’s Philosophy Collection presents 35 top-tier reference titles from five of the most notable publishers in the field of Philosophy: Routledge, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley, and SAGE.
• Leadership Collection: The Leadership Collection from Credo features 20 key titles from Business Expert Press and SAGE Reference on topics foundational to success in business and management.

Credo has also released updates to seven existing Subject and Publisher Collections, including the popular Focus Medica Health Animation Collection and the Omnigraphics Health Reference Series. By embedding these high-quality reference collections in the award-winning Literati solution, libraries are able to build deep, specific ebook collections and combine authoritative content with innovative, customizable technology that links users of reference through to all of their library’s resources.

“While Literati is significantly more than a reference database, the scholarly reference content that comprises Literati’s foundation is integral to its value as an information skills solution,” says Carol Helton, Credo’s executive vice president of Customer Solutions and Marketing. “Credo gives librarians the tools that they need to extend the learning moment so users can develop critical information literacy skills while addressing their immediate information and research needs.”

Source: Credo

IEEE Introduces Open Access ‘Mega-Journal’

“For authors, we’re providing an opportunity for increased citations through an open-access model, while also providing a home for subjects that are at the boundaries of traditional engineering fields, or that cross multiple disciplines of engineering, and thus don’t easily fit into more targeted journals,” says IEEE Access editor-in-chief Michael Pecht, a professor at the University of Maryland and IEEE Fellow.

“For engineers and technical professionals, we expect IEEE Access to develop into a tremendous resource for influential and practical ideas that can help bring new innovations to market faster, improve manufacturing, and help advance what are often complex, multidisciplinary engineering challenges,” Pecht says.

IEEE Access follows a binary peer-review process, which means submitted articles undergo the same rigorous editorial review, but the process ends with the article being accepted or rejected as opposed to undergoing multiple rounds of revisions. This results in faster publication while protecting the integrity and quality of the scholarly research.

IEEE Access is part of a growing portfolio of open access publishing options provided by IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association. IEEE also offers four fully open access, single-topic journals. EEE’s 425,000 members are increasingly asking for more OA options, as are organizations funding research such as the U.S. government and Research Councils UK. Under the model, authors pay $1,750 for each accepted IEEE Access article, and the public can then access the published article for free.

Source: IEEE

EBSCO Introduces Civil War Primary Source Documents

Civil War Primary Source Documents represents both Northern and Southern perspectives. The archive focuses on the war as it was fought from 1861 to 1865 and includes important contextual documents in the crucial years leading up to the war and after the fall of the Confederacy.

The collection comprises more than 110,000 pages and includes information from more than 400 individual collections. The invaluable primary resources include original manuscripts of letters, diaries, administrative records, photographs, illustrations, and artifacts. Personal accounts appear in various scrapbook journals and family portraits, and strategic initiatives are evident in maps featuring details of troop movements and local landmarks.

Highlights include letters and first-person accounts from such well-known leaders as Ulysses S. Grant; the papers of David Cronin, a famous soldier and artist; soldiers’ diaries chronicling daily life and experiences as prisoners of war; Union Defence Committee records and Confederate Army records.

EBSCO provides access to these materials via its Historical Digital Archives Viewer. The viewer brings content alive and allows users to explore, manipulate, collect, and export content. The unique functionality of the Historical Digital Archives Viewer enables it to reproduce the best aspects of the physical library research experience while incorporating the advances in modern digital technology.

EBSCO has continued to significantly increase the number of resources offered in its collection of digital archives. For more information on the complete collection, go to http://www.ebscohost.com/archives.

Source: EBSCO

New dtSearch Covers More Data Types

Supported Data Types

dtSearch’s document filters support a broad range of data formats:

• Web-ready static data: covers integrated image and text support in HTML, XML/XSL, and PDF
• Web-based dynamic data: through the dtSearch Spider, covers integrated image and text support in PHP, ASP.NET, SharePoint, etc.
• Other databases: through the dtSearch Engine APIs, covers SQL-type databases along with the full-text of BLOB data; all products support Access, XBASE, XML, CSV, etc.
• MS Office documents: covers integrated image and text support in Word (DOC/DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), and Access (MDB/ACCDB)
• Other “Office” documents and compression formats: covers PDF with integrated image and text support, RTF, OpenOffice, ZIP, RAR, GZIP/TAR, etc.
• Emails and email attachments: covers MS Exchange, Outlook (PST/MSG), Thunderbird (MBOX/EML), and other popular email types, including nested email attachments
• Embedded image support: covers images in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, and RTF files, as well as Outlook and Thunderbird emails, including images in recursively embedded files

For all supported formats, the document filters support data parsing and optional extraction, as well as conversion to HTML for browser display with highlighted hits.

In addition to the dtSearch Engine versions, the new release also covers dtSearch Web with Spider for quickly publishing instantly searchable data to an Internet or Intranet site, dtSearch Network with Spider for instantly searching across a network, dtSearch Publish for publishing searchable data to portable media, and dtSearch Desktop with Spider for desktop search.

Source: dtSearch Corp.

F1000Research Aims to Reduce Publication Bias

Many manuscripts based on carefully designed and executed experiments are turned down by traditional journals simply because they don’t report an exciting new finding. F1000Research seeks to reduce this publication bias by encouraging the submission of all sound science.

F1000Research publishes a range of article types across the life sciences, using a transparent model of post-publication peer review and an open and inclusive approach to data sharing. The journal’s aim of opening up scientific research extends to supporting the publication of research that otherwise often goes unpublished, which particularly includes a large corpus of high-quality but negative data. This is why F1000Research is now announcing a grace period until Aug. 31, during which researchers can submit their negative results at no cost. F1000Research has already published some significant null or negative studies that were rejected by other journals.

All articles submitted to F1000Research are first subject to an in-house editorial check. Those that pass this check are then published online immediately and sent to selected peer reviewers. The peer review process is transparent, with all referee names and reports visible. Only articles that receive sufficient positive reviews from referees will be indexed in external databases such as PubMed.

Researchers wishing to take advantage of the offer to have the article processing fee waived for negative results papers submitted before Aug. 31, 2013 can use code NR13 when submitting their manuscripts.

Source: F1000Research