ProQuest Boosts University Institutional Repositories With Historical Content

April 16, 2013

ProQuest is helping universities build robust institutional repositories (IRs) by sharing digital copies of their graduate works which have been converted from paper or microfilm and archived in the ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis database (PQDT). The move enables universities to build their own searchable, historical archives even if their IR programs are new.

“Our goal is to expand the reach and impact of graduate works as a driver of innovative research,” said Austin McLean, ProQuest director of dissertations publishing. “By teaming with our university partners, we can maximize the profile of dissertations and theses as an integral part of the scholarly communications landscape.”

The new program deepens ProQuest’s policy of sharing digital copies of dissertations with universities as they are submitted when authors allow broad dissemination. Any university that has participated in ProQuest’s Digital Archiving and Access Program (DAAP) is eligible to receive copies of their converted dissertations for loading into their IRs. Some nominal charges may apply. Additionally, the university must comply with any limits that the author has placed on posting and dissemination.

ProQuest has been showcasing innovative graduate works through multiple new programs. In 2007, it launched PQDT Open, an online repository of Open Access graduate works. This expanded service provides authors with the widest possible distribution of the official published version of their dissertation or thesis. ProQuest’s traditional publishing service is also included with rigorous quality assurance, assignment of an ISBN and permanent storage in the company’s microfilm and digital vaults. Breadth of dissemination is determined by dissertation authors within the context of institutional policies and ProQuest strictly adheres to author dissemination choices.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses is the world’s largest commercially available repository of graduate works. Chosen by the United States Library of Congress as the official archive of American dissertations, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, whose precursor was begun in 1939, now encompasses more than one quarter of a billion pages, creating a unique, continually growing trove of emerging research and landmark works. Researchers rely onProQuest Dissertations & Theses as both a source of enlightening information and as a pivotal component in making their own scholarly production available to the world’s intellectual communities. The archive is managed at ProQuest by a team of scholars and technologists, who combine their talents to make the archive accessible, reliable and supported by continually advancing technology.

ProQuest and ebrary content now discoverable in a single, integrated search

April 12, 2013

ProQuest is streamlining research by enabling ebrary® and ProQuest® content to be discovered within a single search experience. Now, researchers can surface e-books side-by-side with relevant reports, videos, journal and newspaper articles and more in one step. The advance in searching comes via linking technology that enables users to navigate seamlessly from search results to the platform that best supports the content they want to explore.

“Our research shows that e-books are important to both scholars and students, but there has been some frustration in trying to find them,” said Kurt Sanford, ProQuest CEO. “We’re addressing that barrier in a way that respects the nuances of different formats. E-book content is supported by the ebrary platform, which includes tools designed specifically for e-books and traditional scholarly content is supported by its own set of tools.”

ProQuest launched a beta of the linking technology in 2011, making ebrary’s flagship subscription database, Academic Complete™, discoverable alongside ProQuest Research Library, ProQuest Central and ProQuest 5000. Now, all ebrary e-books are discoverable on the ProQuest platform and cross-searchable with any ProQuest database. Users connect to full-text of any of the sources through the search results screen. In the case of e-book content, they move directly to relevant passages within the books via ebrary’s relevancy ranking by document and chapter.

Interoperability between the platforms is automatic for libraries that have ProQuest and ebrary content through any acquisition model.

“Format is increasingly irrelevant to research and search technologies need to reflect that,” said Mr. Sanford. “Flexible and interoperable models are essential for libraries to manage change in a dynamic environment.”

E-book discovery is being propelled by a variety of initiatives at ProQuest. In 2012, the company completed full-text indexing of ebrary’s vast collections of titles within the Summon® discovery service, enabling users to find relevant e-books as part of a broad search of their library.

Click here to learn more.

Improving Medical Research Productivity Drives Wolters Kluwer Health Partnership with Copyright Clearance Center’s Pubget Solution

April 12, 2013

Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information, business intelligence and point-of-care solutions for the healthcare industry, and Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading provider of licensing and content solutions, today announced a partnership to make available CCC’s suite of Pubget document management solutions—PaperStream, RightSphere and PaperStats—to simplify institutional content discovery, compliance and collection development.

Pubget’s comprehensive solution in partnership with Ovid allows global corporate institutional users—librarians, researchers, scientists, and other consumers of medical information—to search, download, organize, and share full text and PDF documents quickly, while automatically managing copyright permissions. Pubget’s time-saving productivity tools allow users to focus on their research and practice, while information managers can monitor and optimize their holdings and institutional e-resource costs.

“We’re pleased to partner with CCC to offer our corporate users a powerful, complete document management solution in Pubget to complement their Ovid subscriptions,” said Andrew Richardson, Vice President Business Development, Wolters Kluwer Health, Medical Research. “Pubget’s suite of document management tools seamlessly manages content rights and compliance allowing corporate researchers to focus on their work and collaborations and provides statistics for holding optimization essential to institutional libraries today.”

With Pubget’s PaperStream, users can search journal articles—OvidSP, subscribed holdings, internet and institutional and pay-per-view article repositories—and quickly download and save PDFs articles in one online environment. They can access and organize files according to licensing permissions and copyright policies. RightSphere advises all users across an organization on their rights to freely share and collaborate around the content, while providing librarians and other information managers with a compliant institutional repository. Plus, users can purchase access rights while they search.

PaperStats gathers usage statistics of all of the e-resources at an institution so librarians and information managers can make informed e-resource development decisions, such as eliminating duplicate resources and underperforming resources, to more effectively control costs.

“We’re delighted to be working with Wolters Kluwer Health to provide Ovid’s global corporate user base with a reliable, time-saving document management solution that allows them to focus on their research and practice, while minimizing costs,” said Miles McNamee, Vice President, Licensing and Business Development, CCC.

Five New Databases from Accessible Archives Inc. Available in EBSCO Discovery Service™

April 12, 2013

A new agreement between EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and Accessible Archives, Inc. will enable additional primary source content to be discoverable within EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS). Metadata from five new Accessible Archives’ databases will be added to EDS, the most comprehensive and robust collection of metadata from the best content sources. The addition of this content will serve as a valuable resource for EBSCO Discovery Service users with an interest in American history and culture.

The new databases from Accessible Archives include:

· Frank Leslie’s Weekly

· The National Anti-Slavery Standard

· National Citizen and Ballot Box

· The Revolution

· American County Histories IV: West

Frank Leslie’s Weekly is an illustrated literary and news publication that ran from 1852 until 1922. Frank Leslie’s Weekly provided reports of wars from John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry and the Civil War until the Spanish-American War and the First World War. It also included extensive coverage of events such as the Klondike gold rush of 1897, the laying of the 1858 Atlantic Cable and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

The National Anti-Slavery Standard was the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Established in 1840, the Standard sought to extend the rights of slaves across the country and also advocated suffrage for women.

The National Citizen and Ballot Box was a monthly journal edited by American women’s rights advocate, Matilda Joslyn Gage that published essays on a wide range of issues, including regular columns about prominent women in history and female inventors.

The women’s suffrage movement was also the subject of The Revolution, a weekly women’s rights newspaper that was the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Published between 1868 and 1872, The Revolution’s influence on the national woman’s rights movement was enormous and it confronted subjects not discussed in most mainstream publications of the time.

American County Histories IV: West is one of four geographic groupings of American County Histories an essential resource for local historical and genealogical research. American County Histories IV: West includes county histories with regional overviews and general community conditions for Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Accessible Archives, Inc. is an electronic publisher of primary source full-text historical databases encompassing rich, comprehensive material found in leading historical periodicals, books and newspapers. Accessible Archives content also provides unique historical elements reflecting broad views of American history and culture. Information includes: eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements and genealogical records.

EBSCO Discovery Service users will have the ability to search the full text of Accessible Archives resources bringing an extended list of results alongside additional library resources. EDS creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

Accessible Archives, Inc. is part of a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal & book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.

EBSCO Discovery Service is quickly becoming the discovery selection for many libraries (www.ebscohost.com/discovery/eds-news), and an obvious partner for content providers. Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost^® platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching. There’s simply more to discover on the familiar EBSCOhost platform, and the same can be said for library administrators who can leverage their previous work with EBSCOadmin^™.

Waseda University first in Asia to acquire the Springer Book Archives

April 12, 2013

Today, Springer announced that the Waseda University Library, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan, acquired the English-language Springer Book Archives (SBA). Members of the university community now have online access to Springer content dating back to 1842 via SpringerLink (link.springer.com), Springer’s online platform. This is the first such purchase, not only at a Japanese university or research institute, but in all of Asia.

The SBA is an eBook collection of newly digitized historic titles published by Springer since its foundation. Currently, the English collection comprises more than 43,000 eBooks, which will increase to 50,000 when the SBA project is completed at the end of 2013 as planned. “Counting the German-language books, which are also being added, 100,000 significant scientific works will be available, preserving the scholarly record and linking the past, present and future of research,” said Olga Chiarcos, Director of Production for Germany, and project manager for the SBA.

This unprecedented collection of historic scholarly content is available without digital rights management and allows for full-text searchability. The eBooks offer a wide variety of reading options since they can be used across devices, and can even be ordered through print on demand (POD). By offering a POD option for most of the titles, Springer is also bringing books unavailable for decades back to bookshelves.

“We are thrilled to be able to add the SBA to the Springer content that we already offer to students, researchers and faculties at our university and library,” said Makoto Nakamoto, the administrative director of Waseda University Library. “We are also proud to be the first university in Asia to offer such an extensive amount of historical content, and we imagine that there will be high demand for such a useful resource across the region.”

When Springer launched its first eBook collections in 2006 (containing books published since 2005), Waseda University Library acquired all collections, in all disciplines. With the purchase of the SBA, all English titles from Springer, ranging from rare books that were out-of-print in the past, to titles just published, will be available at the Waseda University Library.

PeerJ Announces the First Institutions to Provide PeerJ Memberships to their Faculty

April 12, 2013

PeerJ Inc. (https://PeerJ.com), the publisher of PeerJ (a peer reviewed Open Access journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (a preprint server) today announced the first four universities to enter into an institutional arrangement to centrally fund PeerJ membership fees for their faculty.

“We have seen a lot of interest from institutions in the PeerJ model”, said Peter Binfield, Publisher and Co-Founder of PeerJ. “Our membership fees are already very low for individual authors, and so this means that an institution is able to centrally fund the memberships of a large number of faculty and authors for a very low outlay. Literally, for the price of one year’s access to two or three subscription journals, a library can make a single payment and provide PeerJ memberships to hundreds of their faculty. And those memberships are for life, meaning that the faculty can then publish with PeerJ for free, forever.”

Universities who have already entered into these arrangements for their faculty include Duke University, the University of Nottingham (UK), the University of Birmingham (UK), and Arizona State University.

“The University of Nottingham is a longstanding advocate of open access publishing, and we are delighted to be working with PeerJ” said Rob Johnson, of the University of Nottingham. “Their publication model offers a genuine and affordable alternative to authors and academic institutions seeking to secure free access to their research.”

Anali Perry of Arizona State University Libraries said that “PeerJ is breaking ground with an innovative publishing platform and business model, presenting an affordable, high quality option for researchers in the biological, medical, and health sciences. The Arizona State University Libraries are pleased to support PeerJ’s creative effort in scholarly publishing.”

PeerJ emphasizes research integrity; high ethical standards; constructive peer-review; exemplary production quality; and leading edge online functionality. The journal is indexed by PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Scopus and Google Scholar. There is an Editorial Board of over 800 world class researchers, and a 20-member Advisory Board which includes 5 Nobel Laureates. In addition, PeerJ members benefit from the ability to publish articles in PeerJ PrePrints.

Institutions can choose to purchase individual memberships for their authors in advance (and distribute them as they choose), or they can pre-pay for memberships which are then used by their faculty as and when they come to publish at PeerJ. Both options allow an institution to provide an Open Access option to a large number of their authors, in an extremely cost effective way.

Any Institution, Library, Consortia, Foundation or Funding Body interested in discussing one of these arrangements can contact PeerJ at info@peerj.com or via their website at https://peerj.com/pricing/institutions/

Springer signs eBook deal with the Virtual Library of Virginia and the Washington Research Library Consortium

April 12, 2013

Springer announced that it has signed a major deal with the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) and the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC). The agreement gives students and researchers from across more than 80 campuses access to Springer eBook content.

“We are very happy that we could come to an agreement with these two important organizations,” said David Celano, Springer’s Vice President of Library Sales for the Unites States and Canada. “We know deals of this sort serve library users well while allowing us to offer the best price possible for this amount of content. This is why Springer always actively pursues agreements with state-wide and major consortia.”

With the completion of this deal, users at the private and public institutions belonging to VIVA and WRLC will have access to tens of thousands of Springer’s eBooks via SpringerLink (link.springer.com), Springer’s online platform. The schools covered by this agreement include Georgetown University, The University of Virginia, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Tech, to name a few. And with Springer’s liberal usage policies (no digital rights management and inter-library loan rights), libraries will be able to share these resources with each other easily and efficiently.

For more information on eBooks and eBook packages, please contact your Springer representative or visit springer.com/ebooks.

Wolters Kluwer Health Global Customer Support Awarded Omega’s NorthFace ScoreBoard AwardSM for Customer Service Excellence

April 10, 2013

Wolters Kluwer Health is pleased to announce that its Global Customer Support team supporting the Ovid and LWW Journals business has received the NorthFace ScoreBoard AwardSM from Omega Management Group Corp for achieving excellence in customer service and support in 2012. The award is presented annually to companies that exceed expectations in customer satisfaction scores—based solely on direct customer feedback. Omega is an expert in customer experience management (CEM) strategy, and helps companies boost revenue and profits by consistently exceeding customer expectations for service quality. Wolters Kluwer Health received a top score of 4.7 (out of 5.0) in receiving its second consecutive NorthFace ScoreBoard Award.

“We are delighted with this honor for the second consecutive year from one of the leading pioneers in customer service assessment,” said Neil Schmidt, Vice President and General Manager, Global Operations with Wolters Kluwer Health, Medical Research. “Our teams are passionate about delivering unmatched service to our customers—you could say it’s the DNA of our business to be customer-centric in all that we do. The Omega award validates the team’s efforts to support our global Ovid customer base and LWW journal subscribers and members.”

“We were very impressed with the Wolters Kluwer Health Support team as a repeat recipient of our NorthFace Award,” said John Alexander Maraganis, president & CEO of Omega. Wolters Kluwer, like many of our participating companies are repeat award recipients, which shows that, despite the tough economy, implementing a CEM strategy is a reliable, proven way to achieve business success and value creation for customers.”

This award recognizes excellence in customer satisfaction scores over the last calendar year across the Ovid and LWW customer service, technical support, training, sales engineering, and integration support services teams assisting customers in 117 countries. The audit includes a quarterly review of customer survey process and ratings. Companies must achieve a customer satisfaction rating of 4.0+ out of a possible 5.0 score (or equivalent rating system), over a 12-month calendar period.

Omega’s methodology measures customer satisfaction and loyalty levels on a 5-point scale (or equivalent) regularly during the year in such categories as technical support, field service, customer service and account management.

“Due to its unique ‘customer-only vote’ criteria, the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award has been viewed from its inception as the only objective benchmark for excellence in customer service,” Maraganis said. “Our research indicates that companies that consistently achieve a 4.0 rating or above, which we call the ‘Loyalty Zone,’ are succeeding in locking in profitable, long-term customer relationships, and this significantly raises the bar on their competitors.”

Future Science Group launches Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing

April 9, 2013

Future Science Group has announced the launch of Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing, a new bimonthly peer-reviewed online and print publication dedicated to addressing all aspects of bioprocessing for the development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical healthcare products. The journal is the latest addition to the internationally recognized Future Science portfolio.

Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing captures the latest key innovations and debate emerging in this burgeoning field and will serve as an essential ‘one-stop shop’ for researchers and other stakeholders. It is supported by a multidisciplinary, international editorial board comprising leading researchers and opinion leaders from academia and industry.
The journal fills an important gap in literature with its exquisite focus on this field, providing readers with concise, high-value information, enriched with expert commentary and analysis. “Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing will serve as a new engine of activity for exchanging ideas between bioprocessing scientists and technologists”, said Distinguished Professor Mike Butler, of the University of Manitoba (Canada), who is on the journal’s editorial board.
Elisa Manzotti, Publisher at the Future Science Group, said, “We are delighted with this launch issue. Biotechnology is now really delivering products for the pharmaceutical industry and, ultimately, the patient. However, novel biological therapies often present major challenges in terms of consistent, reproducible production. The launch of this high-quality, peer-reviewed resource to support these efforts is therefore extremely timely, and I’m sure this will be a welcome forum for those at the sharp end of biological drug development and manufacture. Our and our thanks go to everyone involved with its inception”.

Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing provides an authoritative forum for the publication of original research articles, reviews and perspectives covering all areas of advanced bioprocess science and technology – from manufacturing to purification, through to the assessment and preparation of the final product for patient delivery. Each issue also features news updates along with regular editorial and opinions on hot topics and pressing areas of debate, and Interviews with international experts.

The full content of the launch issue is free-to-access on the journal’s website:
http://www.future-science.com

The Springer Book Archives now contain 72,000 titles

April 9, 2013

Today at the British UKSG Conference in Bournemouth, Springer announced that the Springer Book Archives (SBA) now contain 72,000 eBooks. This news represents the latest developments in a project that seeks to digitize nearly every Springer book ever published, dating back to 1842 when the publishing company was founded. The titles are being digitized and made available again for the scientific community through SpringerLink (link.springer.com), Springer’s online platform.
By the end of 2013 an unprecedented collection of around 100,000 historic, scholarly eBooks, in both English and German, will be available through the SBA. Researchers, students and librarians will be able to access the full text of these books free of any digital rights management. Springer also offers a print-on-demand option for most of the books.

Notable authors whose works Springer has published include high-level researchers and Nobel laureates, such as Werner von Siemens, Rudolf Diesel, Emil Fischer and Marie Curie.Their publications will be a valuable addition to this historic online archive.

”Creating the product we envisioned, with the high standards of quality our customers need, was no easy undertaking,” said Olga Chiarcos, Director of Production for Germany, and project manager for the SBA. “Locating the books was a particular challenge, made easier by the cooperation of our library partners. And scanning and digitizing these titles was a meticulous effort requiring a painstaking attention to detail. But in the end, we know users and customers will be happy with what we have created.”

When complete, the SBA will contain roughly equal numbers of titles in English and German. The archives include around 50 different imprints, the majority of which are scientific publications, reflecting Springer’s long publishing tradition. Some well-known specialist book imprints include the long-standing German engineering publisher Vieweg (now SpringerVieweg), the U.S. computer book publisher Apress and the U.S. science publisher Copernicus.
For more information visit the SBA section on Springer’s website at www.springer.com/bookarchives.

Wiley Selects TEMIS for Semantic Big Data Initiative

April 9, 2013

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE: JWa and JWb), a leading publisher serving the global Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly (STMS) communities, today announced it has signed a major license and services agreement with TEMIS, the award-winning provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions.

Wiley will use TEMIS’s Luxid® Platform to enhance its STMS content, providing more sophisticated search and discovery tools to professional and academic researchers. Wiley will also leverage Luxid® to identify similar and related documents promoting greater user engagement with one of the largest scientific archives of its kind.

“In an age where online resources play a central role in new research, it is of paramount importance that users are able to quickly identify and access the content they need”, said Patrik Dyberg, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wiley. “Wiley hosts one of the world’s broadest and deepest multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering STMS research, and this partnership offers researchers new tools for using this knowledge.”

In addition to indexing Wiley’s massive research archive, Luxid® will be used to annotate current and future information sources, including reference works, databases and Wiley’s collection of 1,500 journals.

“We are proud to be selected by Wiley to extract tremendous value from their content across products and disciplines and help them deliver actionable knowledge to their customers”, said Guillaume Mazieres, Executive Vice President, North-America Operations, TEMIS. “Wiley and TEMIS share a passion for innovation that materializes in this semantic big data initiative.”

SAGE to publish The Journal of Inborn Errors of Metabolism and Screening (JIEMS)

April 9, 2013

SAGE today announced that it will publish The Journal of Inborn Errors of Metabolism and Screening (JIEMS), a new open access, online-only journal in 2013, with manuscripts being accepted in mid-April. JIEMS will be the official journal of the Latin American Society of Inborn Errors of Metabolism and Neonatal Screening (SLEIMPN).

Published continuously, JIEMS will disseminate peer-reviewed original research articles, short reports, clinical cases, and reviews that will advance clinical and experimental research on inherited genetic disorders and on screening activities. Topics will include basic and applied research findings that have implications for the understanding of disease pathogenesis, development of diagnostic strategies and of innovative therapies, as well as screening of diseases in populations and in selected groups.

The journal will be edited by Dr. Roberto Giugliani, Chief of the Medical Genetics Service of Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre and Professor of the Department of Genetics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Dr. Giugliani, who is a Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, is also Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for the Development of Medical Genetics Services in Latin America, is the Coordinator of the Brazilian National Institute of Population Medical Genetics (INAGEMP) and Chair of the Administrative Council of SLEIMPN.

“This partnership between SLEIMPN and SAGE will fill a gap in the field of metabolic diseases, as the new journal will offer to the international research community an open-access alternative for the scientific communication in the area of inborn errors of metabolism and screening. It will be managed with a user-friendly web-based platform and peer review system,” stated Dr. Giugliani.

JIEMS will publish papers from a variety of different health, life, and biomedical science researchers including geneticists, genetic counselors, dietitians, biochemists, molecular biologists, reproductive medicine researchers, obstetricians/gynecologists, neonatologists, pediatricians, and pathologists.

“SAGE is happy to grow its global portfolio of strong medical and scientific journals with the addition of JIEMS,” stated Bob Howard, SAGE’s Executive Director of journals. “We look forward to working with the Latin American Society of Inborn Errors of Metabolism and Neonatal Screening to provide an outlet for scientists and physicians to publish their quality, peer-reviewed research in an open access format.”