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Weekly News Digest

June 3, 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.

EasyBib, Project Information Literacy Team Up on Student Research Habits

EasyBib recently collaborated with Project Information Literacy (PIL), a prominent nonprofit research venture, and posted PIL’s latest information literacy survey on  EasyBib's website to explore the research habits of high school and college students during the final weeks of the term.

PIL, a large-scale and collaborative national research initiative, investigates how students from colleges and universities nationwide find information and conduct their research for coursework and in their daily lives.  Since more than 40 million student writers use EasyBib’s citation and research resources annually, it was a natural fit for PIL to post the survey on EasyBib's site, according to Alison Head, PIL’s director and lead researcher and a research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We were able to survey over 2,000 students at the end of the academic year, which gives us even more useful results,” she says. PIL and EasyBib plan to collaborate on other education- and information literacy-related projects, such as professional development webinars and content creation.

According to Neal Taparia, EasyBib co-founder, “We have been a consistent supporter of PIL, having referenced their reports in our professional development webinars for educators and we’re looking forward to additional collaboration with them in the future–all to help further the cause of information literacy among students.”

Source: EasyBib

DeepDyve, Inc. Offers Free, 5-Minute Preview of Journal Articles

DeepDyve, Inc., an online rental service for scholarly and professional research articles, announced a new preview tool on June 5. The full text of any article on the site is now available free to users for 5 minutes each day.

DeepDyve provides access to more than 8 million articles from 3,000 peer-reviewed journals. All of DeepDyve’s more than 100 publishers have agreed to make their articles available as part of the 5-minute service. The service also allows DeepDyve users to share articles with their colleagues, which will increase recommendations within professional circles.

Users taking advantage of the service will be able to read and buy more articles than they normally would, says DeepDyve CEO William Park. He believes that reading an abstract is not enough to determine an article’s validity, which can sometimes lead to researchers passing over something they could have used.

DeepDyve users do not have to be affiliated with an academic library to sign up at the site. There are professional subscription plans available as well as rental tokens any researcher can use to rent out one article at a time for 30 days.

Source: DeepDyve, Inc.

IngramSpark Service Debuts Publish-on-Demand Platform

Ingram Content Group, Inc. reported that it is planning to launch IngramSpark, an innovative publish-on-demand platform, in July. This online publishing tool grants independent publishers easy-to-use, cost-effective access to Ingram’s global distribution network for print and ebooks.

The new platform builds on the foundation of comprehensive services that Ingram extends to independent publishers. The platform gives publishers tools so they can manage their print book and ebook collections all in one location. Publishers will find that it's a cost-effective way to publish; it’s free to open an account. When the platform is launched, print titles can be managed via an on-demand, low-risk inventory model; ebook distribution will be available in August 2013.

The platform integrates Ingram's best-of-class print-on-demand and digital distribution technologies. Publishers that use IngramSpark will have access to Ingram’s extensive distribution network, which distributes content to thousands of booksellers and online retailers worldwide.

“Through the IngramSpark platform, independent publishers will now have access to Ingram’s reach, enabling them to affordably print copies, distribute books to global retailers, make titles available to all major e-readers and connect with more customers  worldwide,” according to Mark Ouimet, vice president and general manager of Ingram Publisher Services. “We wanted to make it easy for publishers to create an account and start uploading their content in just a few minutes.”

Ingram also plans to further IngramSpark's reach to include Ingram’s MyiLibrary  academic library platform, wholesale and full-service options for Ingram Publisher Services, file conversion services, and sales and marketing programs.

For more on IngramSpark, or to register for an account and begin uploading content for distribution after the publishing portal goes live in July, visit ingramspark.com.

Source: Ingram Content Group, Inc.

CrossRef Launches FundRef to Track Scholarly Funding

FundRef, CrossRef’s funder identification service, is now available after the completion of a successful pilot phase in 2012. CrossRef, operated by the Publishers International Linking Association, Inc., provides reference linking services to scholarly books, articles, conference proceedings, and other reference materials. Publisher members can now add funders’ names and grant or award numbers to the metadata they submit to CrossRef.

FundRef is an extension of the search capabilities CrossRef already has in place: Members can access FundRef for free through CrossRef’s search engine. Searchers can also parse their queries using CrossRef Metadata Search.

Through FundRef, organizations can see which scholarly publications receive their funding, publishers can analyze which sources of funding are most successful, and readers can see what organizations sponsored the articles they search.

Providing funding data as a search result is a “key step forward,” according to Walter Warnick, the U.S. Department of Energy office of science and technical information director. The Department of Energy can offer a new level of transparency in showing where its funding goes so that both Congress and the public can view its contributions to scholarly materials.

“CrossRef’s existing metadata collection and distribution infrastructure has been leveraged to provide a missing piece of the research funding puzzle. … Readers will be able to view funding information in a standard way,” says Ed Pentz, CrossRef's executive director.

Source: Publishers International Linking Association, Inc.

Wolters Kluwer Health Partners With Amirsys on Two Databases

Wolters Kluwer Health and Amirsys, Inc., international providers of healthcare solutions, added two new clinical reference databases to their portfolios in late May: the Amirsys Pathology Reference Center and the Amirsys Anatomy Reference Center. The Pathology Reference Center features visual diagnostic tools containing 36,000 high-quality disease-related images and 2,100 other learning tools, such as summary tables, immunohistochemistry lists, staining patterns, and diagnosis comparisons.

The Anatomy Reference Center offers anatomical images from CT and MRI scans, films, and ultrasounds; photos of cadavers; and cell-level pictures of anatomical spaces, locations, and disease states. Students and other healthcare industry workers who are interested in continuing education will benefit from the databases and the “comprehensive selection of thousands of images, contextualized for specific clinical situations, to help with diagnosis and treatment,” according to Andrew Richardson, vice president of business development at Wolters Kluwer Health. Both databases are available on OvidSP, Ovid's medical research platform.

Source: Wolters Kluwer Health 

Zoho Debuts Two Online Tools for Businesses

Zoho Corp. Pvt. Ltd. recently introduced two new business productivity tools: Zoho Vault for managing passwords and Zoho Pulse for the social network.

Zoho Vault stores businesses’ passwords in a secure central repository. It features a one-click login to websites and password sharing between colleagues. Users can log in to outside websites by clicking on the connection to the desired site from inside Zoho Vault. Colleagues who share passwords can decide on each person’s level of access, and those settings can be changed to add or subtract new members. Other features include password grouping, the ability to transfer password ownership if a user leaves the company, and secure access to saved passwords while offline.

“Organizations are drowning in a sea of passwords … because passwords are still the dominant form of user authentication,” says Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “Zoho Vault solves these password problems” because it is simple and secure. Submitted passwords are encrypted, and the password used to access Zoho Vault is stored on a separate server so that all of the information exchanged is private.

Zoho Vault is available for the iPhone as a free personal edition for one user and as an enterprise edition for unlimited users at a monthly subscription rate.

Zoho Pulse is a private social network for businesses that want to improve collaboration. It is accessible online and as an app for iPhones and Android phones.

Having a private, companywide source for interaction can “serve as a virtual water-cooler and keep employees informed,” says Vegesna. Zoho Pulse has the features of typical social media sites: a main newsfeed for topic discussions (called an activity stream), a notification center, group discussions that can be restricted to specific members, user profiles and contact information, private messaging, and the ability to follow others’ posts. In addition, users can access other Zoho applications such as Zoho Docs directly from the social network.

Zoho Pulse is available as a subscription, which includes the app purchase and 500MB of file storage per user. The free edition does not support groups.

Source: Zoho Corp. Pvt. Ltd. 



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