PeerJ Announces a Significant New Benefit for all Authors

November 12, 2013

PeerJ (an open access publisher of articles in the biological, life & medical sciences) announced that all authors can now make unlimited submissions to PeerJ PrePrints (https://peerj.com/preprints), entirely for free. Previously authors without a PeerJ publication plan could only publish one free preprint per year and so this represents a significant new benefit for authors.

PeerJ launched ‘PeerJ PrePrints’ (an innovative pre-print server for un-peer reviewed articles in the biological, health and medical sciences) in April 2013. Since that time, almost 100 preprints have been published, some of which have received more than 5,000 views. Reflective of the diverse ways in which preprints are being used by authors, many have been revised multiple times; several have gone on to be published as formal peer-reviewed articles in PeerJ (and other journals); several have received multiple instances of ‘review level’ feedback from readers; several have been submitted by ‘citizen scientists’; and one preprint was even used as a way to get work into the world despite the US Government shutdown. Preprints have also been used as a way for conferences to build up a complete record of their conference output.

Thus, PeerJ has demonstrated that there is a strong desire from the community to publish preprints. It is a core belief of PeerJ to maximize the ability of all authors to publish their work as freely as possible, and as a result this new policy ensures that as many people as possible are able to do so. Henceforth any author will be allowed to publish as many PeerJ PrePrints as they wish, without needing to take out a paid PeerJ publication plan.

Some examples of the diversity of PeerJ PrePrint adoption:

Thousands of views: https://peerj.com/preprints/16/ , https://peerj.com/preprints/1/

Multiple Revisions: https://peerj.com/preprints/50/ , https://peerj.com/preprints/72/

Gone on to be published in PeerJ: https://peerj.com/preprints/54/ , https://peerj.com/preprints/72/ , https://peerj.com/preprints/79/

Received strong ‘review level’ feedback: https://peerj.com/preprints/67/ , https://peerj.com/preprints/11/

Published by ‘citizen scientists’: https://peerj.com/preprints/57/

Used to circumvent the US Government Shutdown: https://peerj.com/preprints/79/ , See: http://blog.peerj.com/post/63718155224/

Conferences using PeerJ PrePrints: https://peerj.com/collections/3-whale-shark-conference-2013/ , https://peerj.com/collections/4-incob-2013/

F1000Research launch data plotting tool

November 11, 2013

F1000Research launch a novel data plotting tool at the Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, which enables referees and readers to visualise and manipulate the raw data within the journal’s articles. This is a significant step forward in enabling data peer review, which has typically been too time consuming for most article referees to contemplate.

A condition of publishing in the Open Access life sciences journal F1000Research (http://f1000research.com/) is that authors make the data underlying their findings publicly available alongside the article. Openly sharing data is an important step in helping tackle issues around the lack of reproducibility of much published research, as well as enabling data reuse. The new data plotting tool from F1000Research enables the data in the journal’s articles to be assessed and reviewed, by letting users replot, analyse and interpret the supporting data through an instant firstpass view.

The tool can plot all numerical values in a CSV file as a scatter plot, with the options of defining the xaxis, as well as selecting whole columns or specifying particular values within individual columns. For the first time, this simple visualization of the data set allows users to determine whether there are any obvious outliers, any correlations in the data that were possibly missed by the authors, and whether the authors’ summary results (and hence their conclusions) make sense from their raw data.

Commenting on the new tool, Dr Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director at F1000Research said: “We hope it will be particularly helpful for referees to quickly assess the underlying data and spot any obvious flaws in the data itself, or in the conclusions drawn. Readers and referees can then download their version of the data plot and share it with others.”

The tool has initially been launched in beta, and is available on two datasets from two different articles: http://f1000research.com/articles/2-150/v1#plot and http://f1000research.com/articles/1-70/v1#plot, and will shortly be rolled out across all numerical spreadsheet data published in F1000Research. In addition, the tool is currently being showcased at the Neuroscience 2013 meeting in San Diego on booth 222.

Dr Lawrence continued: “We think this is the start of a new way of thinking about articles and data, so we want to develop it so that it is as useful and flexible as possible for authors, readers and reviewers. With that in mind, we are keen to obtain feedback from the scientific community on the most useful additional features that they would like to see.” Any feedback can be left on the related blog post: http://blog.f1000research.com/2013/11/11/data-plotting/.

Announcing Zephir, HathiTrust’s New Bibliographic Metadata Management System

November 11, 2013

HathiTrust is pleased to announce the release of a new, state-of-the-art bibliographic management system for its 11-million volume digital repository. The new system, called Zephir, is developed and managed by the California Digital Library, and represents the first distributed development of a major repository component outside the University of Michigan.

“The release of Zephir embodies the deep collaboration that is at the heart of HathiTrust,” said Brian Schottlaender, chair of HathiTrust’s Board of Governors. “It is a tremendous example of the ways we are able to leverage the expertise of a broad range of institutions to achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

California Digital Library (CDL) receives and manages bibliographic records in Zephir that are associated with digital items to be deposited in HathiTrust. Zephir stores all versions of submitted records and selects the “best” record when records for a given title are submitted from multiple sources. The records are then exported for use in HathiTrust’s catalog, data feeds, and APIs.

Laine Farley, Executive Director of the California Digital Library, noted that decades of experience managing bibliographic data for distributed campuses made the University of California system, and the California Digital Library in particular, well suited to this work. “Bibliographic metadata is critical to users’ ability to find and use materials, but managing this metadata is challenging. We knew we could make a strong contribution that would enhance the user experience and maximize the potential for use and enhancement of HathiTrust bibliographic records.” As one of the founding institutions of HathiTrust, Farley remarked, the California Digital Library is “proud to bring its expertise to further our collective work.”

HathiTrust’s membership continues to grow, with 89 institutions currently participating from the United States, Canada, and Spain. 11 new institutions have joined in 2013.

“As our partnership grows and diversifies”, Schottlaender said “we must maintain our ability to be flexible and make continuous improvements to our infrastructure and services. HathiTrust is committed to doing this, and to doing it together.”

Thomson Reuters Collaborates with SHEDL to Advance Scotland’s Global Research Impact

November 11, 2013

The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced a five-year commitment between the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL) and Thomson Reuters to advance the global impact of Scotland’s research efforts through citation connections within the Web of Science^TM. Thomson Reuters Web of Science provides a single destination for the world’s largest collection of research data, publications, proceedings and patents to be utilized from the initial stage of discovery through the application of scholarly research. The unified web-based platform will provide researchers in Scotland with the ability to perform granular and big-picture analyses via a full range of data, tools and technology.

“Our strategic alliance with Thomson Reuters will provide Scotland’s universities and research institutions with a single unified platform to support and measure all research activities in an efficient manner,” said Richard Parsons, chair of SHEDL and CIO at the University of Dundee. “These tools will be critical in helping extend Scotland’s global research footprint and enabling common access throughout Scotland to ensure that our research collaborations can prosper.”

The collaboration between Thomson Reuters and SHEDL, a cooperative comprising Scotland’s universities and research institutions, will enable researchers in Scotland to uncover new theories, spot emerging trends and evaluate their work within the global research landscape with a comprehensive view into possible funding opportunities from one platform. Built upon a core collection of journal literature from the sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities, the citation connections within Web of Science build upon its foundation as the world’s most trusted citation index and provide users with access to more content to advance their workflow:

· Book Citation IndexSM

· Data Citation IndexSM

· Biosis Citation IndexSM

· Zoological Record®

· Derwent Innovations Index®

· Current Contents Connect®

The Web of Science also enables scholars to apply robust research metrics throughout the entire research process, to pinpoint the most relevant research, improve search, measure collaboration, and track impact of research by integrating data from the leading Thomson Reuters Research Analytics tools: Journal Citation Reports and InCites^TM.

Jisc Collections, an organization supporting the provision of digital content for education and research in the United Kingdom, worked with Thomson Reuters and SHEDL to facilitate this effective collaboration. “We were happy to work with Thomson Reuters and SHEDL on this exciting agreement,” said Carolyn Alderson, acting head of Licensing at Jisc Collections. “The ability to use the wealth of scholarly content and analytical tools from Thomson Reuters will help Scotland’s institutions expand their global reach and support their significant efforts in scientific research.”

“The Scottish Higher Education Digital Library, like many academic consortiums and institutions worldwide, recognizes the growing need to approach the research process, from discovery through application, in an efficient, unified manner,” said Gordon Macomber, managing director of Thomson Reuters Scholarly and Scientific Research. “We are pleased to work with this esteemed organization and honored to help Scotland’s universities and research institutions improve their search and discovery efforts.”

Learn more about the Web of Science.

World Scientific Publishing adopts DataSalon’s MasterVision for complete customer insight

November 11, 2013

World Scientific announced today that they have adopted DataSalon’s MasterVision service in order to gain a better understanding of their customer base and to further develop their business. MasterVision gives World Scientific a complete ‘single customer view’ of all their customers and contacts, incorporating subscribers, authors, books, article sales, usage and denials. This ‘single customer view’ means that all of this valuable customer information is now easy to interrogate, and accessible to a wide range of staff from different departments and locations – so providing better workflows and greater efficiency.

World Scientific staff will use the new insights provided by MasterVision to increase revenues in several different ways: upselling and cross-selling related publications; focused renewal activities based on consolidated subscription data; identification of strong new prospects by demonstrating unmet demand for World Scientific content based on denials and editorial activity; and helping libraries to make informed and evidence-based purchasing decisions. In addition to an extremely friendly interface for searching, analysing and exporting customer data, MasterVision also provides a range of reports enabling staff to explore and visualise their customers in a variety of different ways. Management dashboards are included, combining charts and tables into a single view to provide one-click access to essential statistics and trends.

“World Scientific is delighted to be working with DataSalon”, commented Ken Lillywhite, Journal Director. “We have licensed MasterVision to give us a clearer understanding of the relationships between our individual customers and their institutions. We expect MasterVision to provide extremely valuable insight to enable us to carry out more targeted sales and marketing campaigns.” “We’re very pleased to be working with World Scientific Publishing”, said Nick Andrews, Managing Director at DataSalon. “It’s great to be able to provide a single customer view so that they can clearly model their customer relationships. This single view of World Scientific’s data, combined with MasterVision’s fast and friendly analysis tools, means that World Scientific can further strengthen their position both in the Asia-Pacific region and in new markets internationally.”

Springer will publish lecture series with the Mathematical Biosciences Institute

November 8, 2013

Springer and the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) in the US have signed a publishing agreement to collaborate on theMathematical Biosciences Institute Graduate Lecture Series. The lecture series consists of readable, up-to-date collections of authored volumes that are tutorial in nature and are inspired by annual programs at the MBI. Publication will commence in early 2014.

The purpose of the MBI Graduate Lecture Series is to provide curricular materials that illustrate the applications of the mathematical sciences to the life sciences. The collections are organized as independent volumes, each one suitable for use as a two-week module in standard graduate courses in the mathematical sciences. They are written in a style accessible to researchers, professionals and graduate students. The MBI Graduate Lecture Series can also serve as an introduction for researchers to recent and emerging subject areas in the mathematical biosciences.

All books in the lecture series will be available as eBooks on Springer’s online platform, SpringerLink (link.springer.com), and in print. The Mathematical Biosciences Institute has editorial oversight of the series and Springer will publish, market and sell the books. Approximately five to eight books are planned each year.

Marty Golubitsky, Director of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute, said, “Interaction between the mathematical and life sciences is rapidly expanding to the benefit of both disciplines. TheMBI Graduate Lecture Series aims to accessibly showcase some of the recent and exciting research at this interface.”

Achi Dosanjh, Senior Editor Mathematics at Springer, said, “Springer is delighted to be working with the Mathematical Biosciences Institute to provide professional publishing, international marketing and distribution services for the MBI lectures.”

The Mathematical Biosciences Institute (www.mbi.osu.edu) fosters innovation in the application of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods in the resolution of significant problems in the biosciences. In addition, the institute encourages the development of new areas in the mathematical sciences motivated by important questions in the biosciences. To accomplish this mission, MBI holds many weeklong research workshops each year, trains postdoctoral fellows and sponsors a variety of educational programs.

Professor Martin Hall appointed new Jisc chair

November 7, 2013

Professor Martin Hall has been appointed as the new chair of Jisc, succeeding Professor Sir Tim O’Shea after his very successful tenure.

The appointment, announced today by UUK,GuildHE and AoC following an open and competitive selection process will see Professor Hall taking up his position in January 2014. He has been closely involved with Jisc a member of the board since 2011 and became a trustee in December 2012 when Jisc was incorporated and became an educational charity.

Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, vice-chancellor and principal at the University of Edinburgh has provided exceptionally strong leadership, guiding Jisc through a challenging time for higher and further education. He has overseen a series of changes in the organisation, notably its move to charitable status and the development of a more focused, impactful and clear customer-focused ethos.

Professor Hall has been vice-chancellor of the University of Salford since August 2009. He joined Salford from the University of Cape Town where he was deputy vice-chancellor for six years. His career has been characterised by a passion for innovative research, teaching and learning – particularly through the use of advanced digital and new media.

Professor Martin Hall said:

“Sir Tim will be a very hard act to follow, but I am looking forward to the challenge. Under his leadership and direction Jisc has developed into an organisation with greater customer focus. He has also secured successfully the next generation of digital connectivity and national infrastructure for UK education and research with the implementation of Janet6.

“I am very much looking forward to working with the board of trustees and the Jisc team across the UK. I recognise this role will be key in overseeing the change and continuing development of Jisc to ensure it makes its crucial contribution to the UK higher education, further education and skills sectors most efficiently and effectively.

“Jisc has a crucial role, as a trusted partner, in helping the education and research sectors to embrace the use of digital technologies for advantage.”

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of UUK commenting on behalf of UUK, Guild HE and AoC said:

“We are delighted that we have been able to name Professor Hall as the next chair of Jisc. He has huge strategic leadership experience and knowledge in areas such as open access and digital technologies. This expertise will be invaluable in continuing Jisc’s already impressive progress towards achieving its strategic vision and mission.”

Elsevier and the University of Birmingham Launch First Large Scale Investigation Analysing Discourse Used in Interdisciplinary Research

November 7, 2013

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and the University of Birmingham, UK, the Times University of the Year in 2013, announce the launch of an Investigation of the Discourse of Interdisciplinary Research (IDRD). It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).

Research is increasingly bringing together scientists from different fields and this investigation aims to analyse how this development is reflected in the language used in scholarly articles and how trends in the discourse used can support research policy development.

IDRD was launched on 30 August 2013 and will run for two years under the direction of Dr Paul Thompson, Director of the Centre for Corpus Research at The University of Birmingham. The investigation will be based on content published in Elsevier’s journal Global Environmental Change, a highly interdisciplinary journal, and a group of selected control Elsevier journals. Corpus linguistics, a relatively new area of analysis for applied linguistic research, will be used to examine the discourse employed in the journals. Elsevier will provide free access to the journals’ content allowing for full text mining of the papers published. Elsevier will also provide analytical support and will help contact journal editors, reviewers, and authors for additional qualitative surveys and interviews.

“I am delighted that Elsevier are providing access to the content required for this study, including the complete holdings of Global Environmental Change. This will allow us to conduct corpus linguistics analyses of research articles on a scale never attempted before,” said Dr Paul Thompson.

“We are excited and proud to support the University of Birmingham in this investigation. Interdisciplinarity in research is changing the ways in which both scholars and publishers work, and we welcome this initiative to analyze and better understand it,” said David Clark, Senior Vice President of life sciences and social sciences journal publishing at Elsevier.

With the results of the investigation both Elsevier and the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Corpus Research aim to provide research councils with a fuller understanding of the distinctive features of discourse practices in interdisciplinary research. They hope to be able to deliver insights into the nature of communication between researchers from different disciplines so that interdisciplinary research can be better promoted and managed.

The IET partners with Publishers Communication Group for sales representation in Europe

November 7, 2013

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Europe’s largest multidisciplinary professional engineering institution, has selected Publishers Communication Group (PCG) for a new sales representation agreement in Europe. With this arrangement, PCG will support institutional sales of the IET’s collection of digital resources, including the IET Inspec database, across key European markets.

PCG, a division of Publishing Technology plc, is a sales, marketing and research firm providing audience development strategies for over 100 scholarly publishers each year. The IET’s portfolio of research journals, books, and monographs in electronics, electrical engineering and related subjects is available online through the IET Digital Library, recently re-launched by Publishing Technology’s pub2web platform. The IET Digital Library serves the institution’s 150,000-plus international members and houses content from 128 journal and magazine titles, 400 eBooks and 1,300 conference publications, comprising 255,000 articles ranging back to 1872, 5,000 eBook chapters, and 36,300 conference papers

PCG will be responsible for selling the full IET portfolio as the publisher’s exclusive sales agent in Europe, served by PCG’s established sales and marketing team based in Oxford.

Doug Wright, Director of PCG commented: “PCG has been selling content in Europe for over two decades. The connections we have with European libraries will ensure the IET stays close to its customers in addition to reaching new ones. We are confident that our specific experience promoting digital collections will allow us to execute a sales plan tailored to the IET’s growth strategy.”

Chris Grandy, Regional Sales Director EMEA IET, said “We believe that PCG complements our existing IET key account team and Inspec vendor channel, helping to reinforce our position as a premier engineering and technology resource.”

ProQuest Automates ebrary and EBL Holdings In Its Summon and 360 Services

November 7, 2013

ProQuest is streamlining librarian workflows by automating holdings updates for its ebooks businesses, ebrary and EBL – Ebook Library in the knowledgebase supporting the Summon® service as well as its 360 discovery and management services. The process, which is currently in beta testing, eliminates the need for librarians to manually load records and set holdings. Data that supports Demand-Driven Acquisition models will be automatically updated, making it simple for libraries to improve “just in time” collection development strategies.

“We are consistently looking for ways to simplify librarians’ tasks by integrating within ProQuest and with other organizations,” said Kevin Sayar, ProQuest Senior Vice President, Workflow Solutions. “This initiative has a dual benefit: it relieves the burden for librarians to maintain holdings and also enables more efficient marketing of collections by shortening the time between title availability and its discoverability. It’s an important step in achieving the ultimate goal of completely seamless holdings management and future services such as Intota will expand on this concept, delivering even more value.”

In addition to titles acquired through ebrary subscription and both businesses’ perpetual archive models, ebrary® and EBL® demand-driven titles will be automatically updated, simplifying access to ebooks within the Summon service, the most popular discovery layer in ARLs. The Summon service has a track record of innovative collaborations that enable rich, precise discovery of library collections. The service is the first and only service to work directly with publishers to build a single, unified index for delivery of fast, unbiased search results.

Optimization of ebook processes is also occurring on another front at ProQuest as it creates a single, unparalleled ebook solution encompassing both ebrary and EBL. Leveraging ebrary’s and EBL’s 24 years of combined experience helping libraries, publishers and researchers around the globe, the new solution will offer robust content selection, paired with the most flexible and innovative acquisition models. Libraries will have many options, making the best use of their budgets while effectively serving users.

Springer will publish lecture series with the Mathematical Biosciences Institute

November 7, 2013

Books in tutorial series demonstrate applications of mathematical sciences to life sciences

Springer and the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) in the US have signed a publishing agreement to collaborate on the Mathematical Biosciences Institute Graduate Lecture Series. The lecture series consists of readable, up-to-date collections of authored volumes that are tutorial in nature and are inspired by annual programs at the MBI. Publication will commence in early 2014.

The purpose of the MBI Graduate Lecture Series is to provide curricular materials that illustrate the applications of the mathematical sciences to the life sciences. The collections are organized as independent volumes, each one suitable for use as a two-week module in standard graduate courses in the mathematical sciences. They are written in a style accessible to researchers, professionals and graduate students. The MBI Graduate Lecture Series can also serve as an introduction for researchers to recent and emerging subject areas in the mathematical biosciences.

All books in the lecture series will be available as eBooks on Springer’s online platform, SpringerLink (link.springer.com), and in print. The Mathematical Biosciences Institute has editorial oversight of the series and Springer will publish, market and sell the books. Approximately five to eight books are planned each year.

Marty Golubitsky, Director of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute, said, “Interaction between the mathematical and life sciences is rapidly expanding to the benefit of both disciplines. The MBI Graduate Lecture Series aims to accessibly showcase some of the recent and exciting research at this interface.”

Achi Dosanjh, Senior Editor Mathematics at Springer, said, “Springer is delighted to be working with the Mathematical Biosciences Institute to provide professional publishing, international marketing and distribution services for the MBI lectures.”

ProQuest Appoints John Law to Lead Enterprise Product Strategy

November 7, 2013

ProQuest has named John Law to the newly created position of Vice President, Enterprise Product Strategy. In this role, Mr. Law will lead initiatives that enable coordination among ProQuest’s business areas, leveraging the company’s breadth of expertise and assets to create product and service innovations.

“John’s passion for our business and its potential to empower researchers and librarians has been evident in every position he’s held at ProQuest,” said Kurt Sanford, ProQuest CEO. “I’m confident his creativity and strategic insight will energize our efforts to collaborate across the enterprise and drive powerful new solutions for our customers.”

Credited with the invention of the Summon service, Mr. Law has spent the past five years guiding it from initial development through its most recent advances as Vice-President of Discovery Services at Serials Solutions. The Summon service’s genesis is in Mr. Law’s landmark “Student Research Behaviors Study,” which examined the discovery process and identified common barriers in access to library resources. The study provided critical information on the competitive advantages libraries hold, insights into how students choose databases, the most powerful influencers on those decisions and the environment in which students conduct research.

Prior to leading Discovery Services, Mr. Law managed the ProQuest platform, with responsibility for strategic planning, user research and definition of new features. He played a key role in the creation and implementation of ProQuest® Smart Search, an advanced technology that has sustained a differentiated benefit, along with a variety of innovations supporting search and discovery.

Mr. Law is a popular speaker on topics related to technology, user-centered design of applications, and product development, both from a library market perspective and in relation to new product management practices. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in Technology Management from Columbia University.

Mr. Law is based in ProQuest’s Ann Arbor headquarters.