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Weekly News Digest

June 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.

ProQuest Dialog Launches With Enhanced Features

Dialog’s upgrades also include the removal of “pricing barriers to search and browsing and [it] also supports document sharing within R&D workflows, enabling more users to participate in mission-critical projects,” says Tim Wahlberg, ProQuest senior vice president and ProQuest Dialog senior manager. Payment plans now have transactional and subscription packages. Users no longer need to be trained to use ProQuest Dialog; searchers at any skill level can use the service.

Customer support will not change—customers will still be able to have search consultations, alert set up, technical support, and specialized training.

Dialog will begin the transition to ProQuest Dialog in July, and the original service will be retired at the end of 2013. At the Migration Center, the support team will import existing Dialog accounts into ProQuest Dialog, and when that is finished administrators will be able access their accounts. “Dialog customers can begin preparing for migration now by reviewing and requesting cancellation for any user IDs or bill-tos that are no longer required,” according to the website.  

Source: ProQuest

NISO Publishes Recommended Practice on OpenURLs

Library patrons use OpenURLs to connect to the full text of research materials they find in library databases. When a patron clicks on a resource, an OpenURL is displayed that links to a link resolver knowledgebase, which then checks the OpenURL’s metadata against the link resolver. If the two match, the patron can access the resource. With some libraries receiving thousands of weekly requests for full-text content, the OpenURLs need to work and their metadata needs to be properly coded.

The NISO IOTA Working Group conducted a 3-year study analyzing the quality of millions of OpenURLs using a Completeness Index, the standard with which providers of link resolvers can monitor their OpenURLs and improve their metadata.

The IOTA Working Group noticed a pattern in OpenURL failures, says Adam Chandler, the group’s chair. “The Completeness Index was developed as a method of predicting the success of OpenURLs from a given provider by examining the data elements that provider includes in the OpenURLs from its site. This metric can serve as a tool to help determine which content providers are more likely to cause linking problems due to missing data elements in their OpenURLs and can identify exactly what the problems are.”

Source: National Information Standards Organization 

SAGE Adds Royal Society of Medicine Journals to Its Collection

RSM is based in the U.K., but it provides professional development titles to medical practitioners and students worldwide. Its main objective is to promote connections and idea exchange on the topic of medicine between the medical community and the public.

Journals now on SAGE’s platform include Acta Radiologica, Annals of Clinical Biochemistry, Clinical Ethics, Experimental Biology and Medicine, Handbook of Practice Management, International Journal of STD & AIDS, Journal of Medical Biography, Laboratory Animals, and Tropical Doctor.

Until July 13, 2013, every journal in the archive is available for free viewing so that interested parties can peruse titles before deciding on a subscription. Current subscribers have continuous access to journal articles dating from 1999.

In the November announcement, SAGE reported that it would begin digitizing its journal archives. While the process is slow, SAGE intends to finish the project later this year.

Source: SAGE Publications

ResearchGate Raises Funds for Open Science Initiatives

ResearchGate, founded in 2008 by physicians Ijad Madisch and Sören Hofmayer and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher, allows researchers to distribute their publications and make a name for themselves among their peers. Anyone with an institutional or research company email address can become a member. There are currently more than 2.9 million members, and 30% of them access the site monthly.

Bill Gates is using his own money to invest in ResearchGate, not the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation account. His work fighting diseases such as malaria and polio depends on “major scientific advancements and making knowledge accessible for all,” says Madisch, ResearchGate's co-founder and CEO. “These goals are perfectly in line with ours.” He believes that Gates understands “the relevance of what we are doing—not only for science, but for society.”

ResearchGate’s mission is to “lead science into the digital age,” according to its website. Madisch says he hopes to “free knowledge from the ivory tower, to digitalize it, and make it accessible for everyone in order to accelerate scientific progress.”

The funding will help improve online sharing and searching of scientific data, raw data, and failed experiment data. Madisch feels strongly about the importance of failed data: Scientists shouldn’t be afraid to publish negative results, because others can learn from them.

The site’s job board will also get an upgrade—there are more than 12,000 postings that are freely available, but premium features can now be added.

Source: ResearchGate

CCC Partners With HFA on Music Licenses

“Our relationship with HFA further ensures our customers effortless access to the rights they need without interruption to their workflow,” says Roy Kaufman, managing director of new ventures at CCC. One of CCC’s major goals is to branch out into rights licensing for all different types of content, while HFA intends to reach a bigger userbase.

Source: Copyright Clearance Center

Elsevier Announces Digital Services Upgrade

“The priorities for this investment reflect what Elsevier has heard from its journal subscribers as well as what societies have expressed as their top digital platform priorities,” says Glen Campbell, executive vice president of society business development.

Elsevier’s Smart Content, a semantic taxonomy tool, will power the new web services. The content tagged by Smart Content feeds into a new editorial collection tool that creates automated or curated topic collections so readers can find relevant articles for the topics they search. Smart Content has more than 1 million concepts and 3 million synonyms saved, in areas such as diseases, drugs, procedures, anatomy, clinical findings and symptoms, organisms, and substances.

For better mobile functionality, websites will be able to recognize when users view them on mobile devices and automatically optimize the content accordingly.

Source: Elsevier B.V.