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Weekly News Digest

July 3, 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.

Taylor & Francis Group Releases OA Survey Results

The survey showed that positive attitudes toward OA increased since last year. Respondents noted that OA offers higher visibility for authors than traditional subscription journals and provides other benefits. However, the largest group of respondents (47%) was unsure about publishing more gold OA articles, and 41% were unsure about publishing more green OA articles. The biggest reported reason for not choosing OA was a “[l]ack of understanding of publishers’ policies on repositories.”

“We clearly have much work left to do in simplifying our policies and documentation so that our author communities are in no doubt as to what their OA options are,” says David Green, Taylor & Francis Group’s global journals publishing director. “We will also continue to inform and work with global research funders and those societies for whom we publish, so that we can continue to improve the services and products that author communities require of a professional research publisher.”

Source: Taylor & Francis Group

NISO's Recommended Practices Focus on DDA and Discovery Transparency

Demand Driven Acquisition of Monographs is intended for publishers, vendors, aggregators, and libraries that use a demand-driven acquisition (DDA) model. It provides a set of best practices for using DDA with print books and ebooks, including recommendations regarding how to choose DDA program parameters, manage MARC records, and provide long-term access to content not owned by the library. Consortial considerations and cross-aggregator implementations of DDA are also addressed.

Open Discovery Initiative aims to increase transparency across all aspects of indexed discovery services by offering guidelines to discovery service providers on linking practices, supported methods of transfer, usage statistics, and other practices. It also guides content providers on topics such as disclosing their level of participation, the minimum set of metadata elements used for indexing, and technical formats. A set of standard terms and definitions add to the proposed transparency practices.

Source: NISO

LexisNexis Provides Audio and Video Legal Sources

CVN offers more than 2,000 audio recordings of judicial opinions, thousands of hours of videos of U.S. legal proceedings, and training videos on 87 topics such as evidence and appellate advocacy.

Source: LexisNexis

Supreme Court Ruling Upholds Individual Privacy

The opinion also states the following:

Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and generally constituted only a narrow intrusion on privacy. But cell phones can store millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos. … It is true that this decision will have some impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. But the Court’s holding is not that the information on a cell phone is immune from search; it is that a warrant is generally required before a search.

“These decisions are huge for digital privacy,” says Hanni Fakhoury, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) staff attorney. “This should have implications for other forms of government electronic searches and surveillance, tightening the rules for police behavior and preserving our privacy rights in our increasingly digital world.”

Source: Supreme Court of the United States

Library Crowdfunding Site Offers OA Digital Collections

“In contrast to mass digitization efforts and commercially driven projects, we are putting complete control of collection creation in the hands of the libraries,” says Jeff Moyer, REVEAL DIGITAL’s founder.

The company’s business model allows the costs associated with producing a collection to define its funding threshold, and the collection becomes OA when that threshold is reached.

Source: REVEAL DIGITAL

GPO Plans to Downsize Workforce

“Unlike most Federal agencies, GPO operates like a business, covering most of its costs through the income we earn for the provision of information products and services,” said public printer Davita E. Vance-Cooks. “As the Government’s publisher, we’re committed to ensuring that our staffing and other requirements match our customers’ needs in this digital age.”

Employees may be offered payments of up to $25,000 to voluntarily leave the GPO. These funds would come from the GPO’s existing budget, so the buyouts/early outs would need to be finalized by the first quarter of fiscal year 2015 in order to achieve the necessary savings.

Source: U.S. Government Printing Office

SirsiDynix Introduces New BLUEcloud Suite Platform

“BLUEcloud Campus leverages the EDS API for mutual customers, providing a powerful and tightly integrated solution,” says Neil Block, EBSCO’s VP of discovery innovation, academic libraries. “The combination of EBSCO content, products, and services with SirsiDynix BLUEcloud modules will provide great value to both staff and end user.”

Source: SirsiDynix