The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced a collaboration with ULisboa, a merger of the University of Lisbon and Technical University of Lisbon, to demonstrate the efficacy and global impact of its scientific research.

In July 2013, University of Lisbon and Technical University of Lisbon merged, becoming the largest Portuguese higher education institution, now known as ULisboa. ULisboa is using the trusted indicators of Thomson Reuters InCites^TM, the company’s flagship, web-based research evaluation tool, to measure the institutions’ combined research output and impact, monitor trends, and benchmark its performance against peers at the individual, departmental and global levels. The initiative has already uncovered that ULisboa is globally excelling in agricultural sciences, space science, physics and engineering research.

The strategic relationship between Thomson Reuters and ULisboa supports the University’s plans to analyze its newly integrated framework and develop new research strategies, retain talent and identify new opportunities for collaboration through InCites indicators, which provide analytics on authors, journals and fields, as well as connections to the proprietary university research management and profiling systems for full workflow integration.

“The University de Lisbon (ULisboa) is a major player in Portugal, Iberia and Ibero-American higher education,” said Professor Rogério Gaspar, vice-rector of University of Lisbon. “There is tremendous potential for interdisciplinary collaboration within our new, integrated structure, making our university one of the potentially fastest growing universities. ULisboa crosses interdisciplinary knowledge areas and competencies with integrated platforms from arts and humanities, law and public policies, and social sciences, to higher and differentiated technologies in engineering, information and communication technologies, as well as health, marine sciences, agro-food, business and management.”

InCites is a customized, web-based evaluation tool that enables universities, funding bodies and policy makers to analyze their research productivity and compare their output against that of their peers. The solution provides normalized metrics for repeatable analysis of outcomes, cross-regional impacts, discipline comparisons and standardized, accurate reviews for promotion and tenure processes. InCites can also serve as a support solution in ongoing quality assurance activities

“The expanded University of Lisbon recognizes the growing need to measure performance within its new framework by analyzing and promoting the impact of its research,” said Gordon Macomber, managing director of Thomson Reuters Scholarly and Scientific Research. “We are pleased to work with the university by providing the necessary tools to help establish its presence on top of the latest global research trends, while improving the global impact and performance of its efforts.”

Blackboard Inc. and Pearson, two of the largest providers of technology and services to K-12 education, today announced a collaboration that will improve the integration and flow of data between their complementary K-12 solutions, in direct response to requests from educators.

With this partnership, the companies are looking to improve the integrity, security and flow of data between Blackboard’s comprehensive product portfolio that offers a range of K-12 solutions for teaching, learning, communication and parent engagement, and PowerSchool®, Pearson’s leading K-12 student information system (SIS).

Massachusetts’ Danvers Public Schools’ illustrates the ways that districts around the country will benefit this partnership. Database manager Lisa Zaia said, “Danvers Public Schools uses both PowerSchool and Blackboard solutions and ends up having to manage several daily changes. We are thrilled that Blackboard and Pearson have agreed to improve their product integration to provide better accuracy of our student and staff information.”

“We are pleased to announce this collaboration as a sign of our strong investment in the K-12 market and dedication to ensuring the success of our customers,” said Mark Strassman, senior vice president of industry and product management for Blackboard. “Through our work with Pearson, we will be able to provide better access between two systems many faculty and administrators rely on daily to drive critical activities such as parent engagement and Common Core initiatives.”

The first Blackboard solution that will benefit from PowerSchool integration is Blackboard Connect™, the leading mass notification provider in the country. Planned enhancements include the ability to send notifications from within PowerSchool and greater flexibility with automated notifications to parents. The companies are also actively working to enhance PowerSchool integration with other Blackboard K-12 solutions over the next year.

“Through this enhanced collaboration with Blackboard, we hope to make it easier for K-12 educators to use our solutions to access the information they need to engage students and parents and, ultimately, improve learning outcomes,” said Oliver Wreford, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Pearson.

With the rapid increase in the use of electronic resources in libraries, managing access to online information is a constant challenge for librarians. Written by experts in the field, “Access and Identity Management for Libraries: Controlling Access to Online Information,” published by Facet Publishing and available through the ALA Store, is the first book to explain the principles behind access management, with coverage of the available technologies and how they work. Authors Masha Garibyan, Simon McLeish and John Paschoud also include an overview of federated access management technologies, such as Shibboleth, that have gained increasing international recognition in recent years. This book provides detailed case studies describing how access management is being implemented at organizational and national levels in the UK, USA and Europe, providing a practical guide to the resources available to help plan, implement and operate access management in libraries.

Key topics include:

what is access management and why libraries do it;
electronic resources: public and not so public;
principles and definitions of identity and access management;
current access management technologies;
authentication technologies;
authorization based on physical location;
authorization based on user identity or affiliation;
federated access: history, current position and future developments;
internet access provided by (or in) libraries;
library statistics;
the business case for libraries.

Garibyan has been involved in access management since 2004, when she joined the London School of Economics Library Projects Team. She also worked as part of the JISC Access Management Team for two years helping UK education institutions and service providers adopt federated access. She currently works at the University of Worcester as part of the Library Academic Services Team.

McLeish is resource discovery architect at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, UK, and previously worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and as an independent IT professional, specializing in Identity and Access Management.

Paschoud has been an IT professional since 1972. As Projects Manager at the LSE Library he led a series of projects which identified and established the technologies for federated access that are now most widely used by academic libraries. As a consulting information systems engineer he now specializes mainly in government and education fields, and is a member of the Technical Advisory Group to the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research.

Facet Publishing, the commercial publishing and bookselling arm of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, is the leading publisher of books for library and information professionals worldwide. ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library professionals worldwide. Contact us at (800) 545-2433 ext. 5052 or editionsmarketing@ala.org.

The open, universal and inclusive nature of the Internet is not a natural phenomenon. It is a major achievement that has to be actively defended and fostered. In particular, IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) considers the integrity of the underlying technical standards, including security protocols, to be the lifeblood of the Internet. Any intentional weakening of such standards is a very serious and politically unacceptable violation of personal and professional ethics, and poses a major threat to the future of the Internet. A universally open, fully transparent and broadly consensual standards development process, as exemplified by the OpenStand  principles, is the solution to many of these challenges.

By contrast, fragmentation of the Internet infrastructure, including regionalization of its norms and standards, does not provide the answer, but rather constitutes a further threat against the universal character of the Internet. In particular, we explicitly support the position of the IEEE 802 leaders regarding security protocols related to IEEE 802 standards.

Finally, we would like to use this occasion to announce that IEEE, with its unique position and potential among vast, global communities of scientists, engineers and experts in all pertinent technical fields, is planning to significantly augment its global engagement in the Internet arena. Meanwhile, for those who are interested to learn anything related to the internet, they may want to read pages such as the one about EnableIT brand.

– See more at: http://standards.ieee.org/news/2014/position-open-internet-standards.html#sthash.7vwC3s2b.dpuf