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Weekly News Digest
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January 7, 2014 — 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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INFOMEDIA Acquires Vringo, Inc.
INFOMEDIA, a U.K.-based provider of customer relationship management and monetization technologies, signed an agreement to acquire Vringo, Inc.’s mobile partnerships, application businesses, and a portfolio of its internally developed patents related to those technologies by March 31, 2014. The agreement is designed to help INFOMEDIA reach a worldwide audience with an integrated product for mobile content publishers, carriers, and device manufacturers.INFOMEDIA will combine its existing operations with the research and development center of Vringo, which develops and monetizes intellectual property (IP) and mobile technologies. Vringo will license a selection of IP assets and work with INFOMEDIA to identify and protect new IP. “This acquisition will accelerate our growth by providing Infomedia with a global distribution network for our expanded product portfolio. Our partnership with Vringo will enrich our ability to cultivate and protect new technology by leveraging Vringo’s intellectual property rights expertise,” says Michael Tomlins, INFOMEDIA’s CEO. Source: INFOMEDIA
ProQuest Flow Now Free for Individuals
ProQuest launched a free version of Flow, its cloud-based document management platform. Now individual researchers may access Flow for free to manage their research and share citation data, regardless of whether their institutions subscribe to Flow.Flow users can discover and manage content; store, share, and organize documents; and use Flow for Word to write papers and generate citations. Flow imports references and annotations, full-text articles, and reference metadata into its platform to create a single, web-based access point for research materials. Users may annotate and review articles with up to 10 people for free. Flow also has features for libraries: It gathers usage statistics so librarians can track what their patrons are researching and what resources they’re using. “Broadening access to Flow via free individual accounts is expected to yield richer analytics and content usage data,” according to the press release. Library subscribers receive 10GB of storage, and individual users get 2GB with the free account. Source: ProQuest
OASPA Releases Scholarly Publishing Principles
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) posted a set of 16 principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing on its website. Topics range from the peer-review process and author fees to archiving and direct marketing. The principles are a work in progress, and OASPA invites feedback on them via a comments section.OASPA collaborated with the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and WAME (World Association of Medical Editors) to draft the principles in response to an increase in their membership applications. The organizations’ goal is to separate legitimate journals and publishers from nonlegitimate ones by using the principles as criteria for evaluating the applications. Each organization reserves the right to judge applications using its own separate criteria along with the principles. The organizations plan to jointly develop lists of legitimate journals and publishers for their own uses. “We do not intend to develop or publish a list of publishers or journals that failed to demonstrate they met the criteria for transparency and best practice,” according to the OASPA website. Source: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
Google Glass Gets Facial Recognition App
FacialNetwork.com announced NameTag, the first real-time facial recognition app for Google Glass. The app is currently in beta, with an expected launch in 1Q 2014.Google Glass wearers can view a person’s face through Google Glass’ camera and send the image wirelessly to NameTag, which compares the image to millions of records in its database. Once it finds a match, NameTag returns the person’s name, occupation, interests, and social media profiles. “It’s much easier to meet interesting new people when we can simply look at someone, see their Facebook, review their LinkedIn page or maybe even see their dating site profile. Often we were interacting with people blindly or not interacting at all. NameTag on Google Glass can change all that,” according to Kevin Alan Tussy, NameTag’s co-creator. NameTag users may customize their entries so only information they decide to display is shared. Information options for NameTag include business skills, relationship status, and a personal bio. “It’s not about invading anyone’s privacy; it’s about connecting people that want to be connected,” says Tussy. FacialNetwork.com is also working on a program for matching dating site photos to entries in criminal databases such as the national sex offender registry. Source: FacialNetwork.com
NISO Recommended Practice Open for Public Comment
A draft of “Open Access Metadata and Indicators” from the Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group is open for public comment until Feb. 4, 2014. This National Information Standards Organization (NISO) recommended practice was created to develop standardized bibliographic metadata and consistent visual displays to indicate journal articles’ levels of open access (OA) and reuse rights.The current draft proposes the adoption of the metadata tags <free_to_read>, which indicates that a work is freely accessible during a specified time frame, and <license_ref>, which links to a set of license terms for the work. “It is unclear to readers when an article is freely accessible and what their re-use rights are. Funders are unsure if the publication of an article complies with their open access policies. Aggregators and platform or knowledgebase providers have no consistent mechanism for machine-processing metadata and identifying the accessibility or rights status,” according to Cameron Neylon, co-chair of the Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group. “Adoption of these two common metadata designations will allow both humans and machines to assess the status of content.” Source: National Information Standards Organization
Wiley Online Library Makes Reporting COUNTER-Compliant
Wiley Online Library’s usage reporting now complies with Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources. The COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) Code of Practice facilitates the recording and reporting of online usage statistics. Release 4 covers journals, databases, books, and multimedia content.The updated interface has new features such as the selection of flexible reporting periods up to 12 months, reports that include the journal’s DOI (digital object identifier) and Wiley’s journal code, extra formatting options for reports, and queued reports that download while users perform other tasks. Wiley also updated its WAYFless URLs to streamline access to users’ licensed holdings. Wiley will support the previous version of WAYFless URL syntax until Jan. 31, 2014. Wiley Online Library has a multidisciplinary collection of more than 4 million articles from 1,500 journals, 14,000-plus ebooks, and hundreds of other reference works, laboratory protocols, and databases. Topics include social science, the humanities, and the life, health, and physical sciences. Source: Wiley
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Brandi Scardilli
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