BMJ Group Improving Health Awards: Entries Now Open!

January 2, 2013

Entries for the BMJ Group Improving Health Awards 2013 are now open with a range of exciting new categories designed to recognise excellence in medical practice.

A total of 14 categories are up for grabs and this year’s high-profile judges include Chair of Council at the Royal College of General Practitioners, Dr Clare Gerada and Clinical Vice President of the Royal College of Physicians Dr Linda Patterson. Plus, star of CBeebies Get Well Soon and paediatrician Dr Raj Singh.

Fiona Godlee, BMJ Editor in Chief, said: “In 2013 we are looking to reward people who are improving healthcare. We want to give recognition to the unsung heroes in healthcare. Improving Health is the BMJ Group’s commitment to the world of medicine and the Improving Health Awards is a very tangible way of demonstrating that commitment.”

The winners will be announced at a ceremony held at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge on Thursday 9th May 2013. For the fourth year, medical insurer, the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland (MDDUS) will be the headline sponsor of the awards.

New categories for 2013 reflect the changing world of healthcare and include teams of the year for: Diabetes, Cardiovascular medicine, Cancer Care, Child Health, Emergency Medicine, Renal medicine and Mental Health.

Also new for 2013 is the Doctor of the Year award, the winner of which will be selected from all short-listed entries following a nomination from their team.

These new categories are in addition to the usual: Research Paper, Improvement in Patient Safety, Primary Care Team, Excellence in Healthcare Education and Transforming Patient Care Using Technology.

A previous category, Clinical Leader of the Year has been amended to reflect clinical leadership teams and the Karen Woo award (introduced in 2012) will go to the best surgical team of the year. This award was set up in memory of Karen Woo, a general surgeon killed in Afghanistan in 2010 while working for a relief charity.

Previous winners have been inspired to take their initiatives forward. Since winning Junior Doctor of the Year, Dr Alexander Finlayson has received funding for his Somaliland project which gives students and medical graduates further education opportunities. This has now been expanded to more health workers and Alexander is hoping to begin engagement in places further afield.

He said: “Since winning the award we have been fortunate to receive funding enabling us to expand our programmes to new cadres of health workers such as nurses and healthcare administrators. With this funding we have also started to develop a more sustainable, robust and large scale platform helping to support our other programmes with Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda”.

Other winners who have reaped the benefits of an award are the Nottingham University NHS Hospitals Trust (winners of Transforming Patient Care Using Technology with their wireless communication system for use during out-of-hours). They say the award has helped them “achieve welcome recognition” which has led to further investment to support more use of the wireless task flow system.

Further sponsors already confirmed for 2013 are: MDDUS (headliners), Takeda, BUPA and univadis.

Entrants have until Friday 1st February 2013 to enter.

EU Open Data Portal Now In Public Beta

January 2, 2013

The European Commission has launched its open data portal, announced last year December, in public beta. While the site is already on-line, the EC has requested to not widely circulate the URL yet. In January 2013 the beta launch will be more widely announced.

The EC data portal, at launch provides access to 5800+ data sets, mostly coming from Eurostat. With this portal the EC intends to lead by example in opening up public sector information pro-actively for free re-use in Europe, as part of the European open data strategy.

The EC portal is for now aimed at publishing the EC’s own data, but is at the same time a first step towards a pan-European data portal that will provide access to all underlying national (and regional, local) data portals across the 27 Member States.

The beta portal has a SPARQL endpoint to provide linked data, and will also point to applications that help work with the data (currently one application listed).

The European Commission is asking for feedback from a circle of early reviewers amongst the European open data community on this new open data portal:

“Over the past months we have worked hard to make available a first operational version, offering an initial set of interactive features and an interesting, even if not yet complete, range of datasets and applications.

At the moment the Portal is not yet dimensioned for an important number of users, and some known issues regarding the GUI and the content still remain to be fixed in the coming few weeks. The application section also will very soon be restructured, and the current applications fixed. However, we address you as a professional and competent user, in order to show you the site in “avant-première” and receive from you feedback, critics, comments. For these reasons we will be grateful if you will take the time to use the portal and “play” with it. However, please do not communicate widely the URL yet; a more extended communication will be prepared by the Commission in January. ”

“We need your feedback to show us ways to improve the site. There are still some bugs to fix and many ways of improvement, we know, but we may not have thought of all of them. We would be particularly interested in hearing from you on:

How do you like the functionality? (data and applications section, search capabilities, metadata presentation, links to datasets and applications, user friendliness, …)
How do you like the content? (data granularity, quality/relevance of metadata, kind of needed applications, …)
What did you expect to find and what did you expect the portal could do for you – and can do for the wider open data community.
We will then be pleased to receive your feedback, on the subjects mentioned above but also regarding any issue you think might help us in providing a tool as much as possible fulfilling your needs and the needs of the community. “

New Senior Regional Corporate Sales Manager for Asia Pacific for IOP Publishing

January 2, 2013

Neil Byrne has today been announced as the new Senior Regional Corporate Sales Manager for Asia Pacific for IOP Publishing.

Mr Byrne will take up his role at the beginning of January 2013 and will be based in Sydney, Australia. He will take responsibility for corporate customers based in the Asia Pacific region, maintaining relationships with customers and developing journals sales in these privately funded, for-profit organizations. He will work closely with Mark Sauter, Vice President, Global Corporate Sales.

With over 10 years’ experience in the science, technical and medical publishing industry, Mr Byrne previously worked at ICE Publishing as Publishing Sales Manager for 5 years, and prior to that worked within sales at McGraw Hill.

British Library welcomes announcement on copyright exceptions

January 2, 2013

The British Library today (20 December 2012) welcomes the announcement by Rt Hon Vince Cable MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, outlining new exceptions to the UK’s copyright framework.

In particular, the Library welcomes the exceptions that will now allow:

Digital preservation of its collections including, for the first time, sound and film
Non-commercial research copying of in-copyright sound and audiovisual content
Non-commercial text and data mining of content that an organisation has purchased or has lawful access to
The digitisation of its analogue collections for access on the premises
Roly Keating, Chief Executive, said: “The exceptions announced today will allow us to stay at the forefront of research services and collection preservation in an increasingly digital and networked world.

“An updated, balanced copyright framework, which puts us on a level playing field internationally, will benefit the UK economy as a whole.

“We look forward to ongoing discussions with our partners in the research, publishing, creative and technology sectors on the careful implementation of these exceptions.”

The exceptions were recommended in the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, commissioned by the Prime Minister in 2010.

Stichting Bibliotheek.nl selects Serials Solutions to provide new interface for library catalogue

January 2, 2013

Stichting Bibliotheek.nl (BNL), the national foundation for public libraries in the Netherlands, has selected ProQuest business Serials Solutions® to adapt AquaBrowser® as an additional custom end-user interface to BNL’s new national catalog (NBC) for print,digital and electronic collections. Based on a single unified index, the NBC will enable patrons to seamlessly search the local collections (books, journals, e-books, games, CDs, etc.) of member libraries as well as commercial and open source electronic data sources provided by the BNL. Serials Solutions was chosen to provide the interface for the new catalog based on its success with the similarOpen Vlacc project with Bibnet, an organization of the Flemish government.

“We are committed to delivering a uniform search and discovery experience for our patrons and it was critical to secure a technology partner that could develop a compelling solution,” said Diederik van Leeuwen, Directeur, Stichting Bibliotheek.nl. “The latest version of AquaBrowser and the successful Bibnet project demonstrates Serials Solutions’ user experience and search expertise – and why the company is the best choice for this strategic initiative.”

“The flexibility of the AquaBrowser architecture enables us to develop customized solutions for libraries,” said Jim Miesse, director of product management, Serials Solutions. “This project and the solution we developed for Bibnet exemplifies our ability to deliver a superior end user experience, whether it is using the AquaBrowser search engine or interoperating through APIs to other search engines and systems.”

Thomson Reuters forms integrated Reuters business unit

December 20, 2012

Thomson Reuters today announced the formation of a new business unit that will combine the company’s existing editorial and news-related sales and marketing operations. Stephen J. Adler, who became editor-in-chief of Reuters in February 2011, has been appointed to run the new unit as president and editor-in-chief. Adler joined the company’s Professional Division in 2010 after five years leading BusinessWeek and 16 years at The Wall Street Journal.

In his new role, Mr. Adler will be responsible for the team that produces and markets Reuters news and commentary to more than a billion users around the world every day. These users comprise three groups: professionals who subscribe to news and information products from Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk, Legal, Tax & Accounting, and Intellectual Property & Science businesses; news organizations that license text, video, pictures and multimedia solutions; and consumers who visit Reuters.com and the Reuters NewsPro app.

Within the new Reuters unit, Steven Schwartz will become managing director, News Agency, the business-to-business news provider serving media professionals around the world with source material, as well as packaged and branded ready to use content from Reuters and third parties. Mr. Schwartz, who joined the company as global head of Media Strategy, Marketing and Business Development in 2011, previously ran business development for Multex.com, was Wenner Media’s first chief digital officer, and earlier, general manager, Digital, for Readers Digest. If such a business needs more enhancements or tools, they can read blogs like bloom growth login.

“This integration of our news capabilities is an exciting step and one that I am sure will deliver extraordinary value to our customers and company,” said James C. Smith, chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters.

“With our editorial and media-business operations under one roof, we will be able to enhance both the creation and marketing of our world-class journalism, to benefit our professional and media customers and all our readers and viewers,” said Mr. Adler. “Journalistic excellence remains paramount,” he added, saying, “we will continue to innovate in news gathering, news delivery and customer service to extend the power, usability and appeal of news for current and potential customers.”

2012 Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science winners announced

December 20, 2012

Staffan Normark, Anders Hagfeldt and Jens Nielsen were today announced as the winners of the 2012 Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science (Nordic countries). The three scientists, all based in Sweden, were honored today for their outstanding efforts to mentor young researchers, during a seminar at the Nobel Forum, Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm, Sweden.

The prizes were presented by Dr Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature, and Professor Hans Wigzell, chair of judges for the 2012 Awards, and former President of Karolinska Institutet.

Staffan Normark received the lifetime achievement award for his “capacity to take care of and bring forward not only early research students, but also post-doctoral scientists to do pioneering research in new fields,” said Wigzell. Professor Normark is Professor of Infectious Disease Control at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Permanent Secretary of The Royal Swedish Academy of Science, an independent and non-governmental scientific society responsible for selecting the Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry. Professor Normark was presented with a €10,000 prize as part of his award. “Staffan Normark comes forward as a true visionary,” continued Wigzell. “His students claim they have never heard him complain of problems, but talk only of possibilities.”

Anders Hagfeldt and Jens Nielsen were declared joint winners of the mid-career award and share the €10,000 prize.

Anders Hagfeldt is a Professor in Physical Chemistry and the Dean of Chemistry at Uppsala University. Hagfeldt’s citation record led Times Higher Education to rank him in the top 50 material scientists of the past decade. He also co-ordinated the 2011 International Year of Chemistry in Uppsala. “A most important attribute is the trust Anders Hagfeldt places in his students and researchers,” said Wigzell. “He has been able to create vibrant teams, linked together by sharing laboratory techniques and heated scientific discussions in the coffee room.”

Professor Jens Nielsen heads the Systems and Synthetic Biology group at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg. He has supervised 50 PhD students and co-supervised more than 20 others. Nielsen has also been actively involved in the design of new undergraduate and Masters teaching programs. “Jens Nielsen is an extremely supportive, innovative and solution oriented mentor,” said Wigzell. “Many research projects provided to students have been of the high risk-high reward type, requiring collaboration over several competence fields and allowing the students/scientists to rapidly enhance their national and international networks.”

“I congratulate Professors Normark, Hagfeldt and Nielsen on their awards,” said Campbell. “These scientists have an unusual ability to be on top of their own demanding research while stimulating high standards of scientific creativity in those around them. Nature is delighted to celebrate such an important contribution to science, and to the inspiration and guidance of the lab heads and professors of the future.”

Launched in 2005, the annual Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science recognize outstanding scientific mentorship and focus on a specific country or countries each year, and 2012 focused on the Nordic countries.

More information about the Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science is available atwww.nature.com/nature/awards/mentorship/. Details of the seminar at the Nobel Forum are available here.

Kevin Cohn Named Chief Operating Officer of Atypon

December 20, 2012

Atypon® today named Kevin Cohn its Chief Operating Officer. Cohn, who has been Atypon’s Vice President of Operations since 2010, will continue to report to Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s CEO.

Cohn will continue to be responsible for all of the company’s client operations, including end-to-end management of Atypon’s services and support. In addition, he will assume responsibility for business development and administration.

Cohn joined Atypon in 2006 as Product Development Manager, and was promoted to Director of Client Services in 2009. He joined the executive team in 2010. Cohn earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Redesigned PLOS Journals – now launched

December 20, 2012

On the eve of our tenth anniversary, we’re pleased to announce that the redesign of all PLOS journals is now live. The three goals of this initiative were to:

Ensure that readers can quickly assess the relevance and importance of an article through a figure browser and highly visible Article-Level Metrics
Improve site navigation to help users discover content more easily
Launch a flexible platform from which to build out future innovations
This refresh offers users more effective ways to access and read content, updates the overall appearance of the sites and harmonizes them with our new PLOS look announced earlier this year.

Many of you will have noticed some ongoing enhancements to the journals this year, for example figures and Article-Level Metrics (ALM). You can expect similar developments to continue to roll out starting in early 2013 and into the future as we continue to adapt to meet user needs.

After extensive research into how researchers find and use content, we’ve focused our attention on refining and improving our article layout and functionality so that we can help you to locate relevant articles more quickly and enrich your reading experience. Here’s a short video, and a brief rundown of the new user features that you can see from today:

More prominent figures – featured throughout articles and search so that you can quickly determine if an article is relevant
Enhanced Discovery – Search now reflects our new expanded taxonomy of subject categories
Metrics Signposts – sub-sets of ALM data, provide at-a-glance measures of article reach and impact
Custom Saved Search – log in, enter your keywords and save, then receive new content that precisely meets your interests via email
Author data – clear presentation of affiliations/attribution for each author as well as grouped by institution
Abstract and Figure viewer – providing new ways for you to get around and find what matters
Faster navigation – persistent (so you never get lost) and floating (follows you down the page)
Clearer Tabs – easier to see and use, providing enriched article information
To find out more about our new features and get tips on navigating the new site please visit our updated Help page.

PLOS is taking advantage of the most powerful web technologies to improve our reader experience, promote Open Access and encourage conversation around the latest research to accelerate progress in science and medicine and lead a transformation in research communication.

We’re proud to have self-funded this project using revenue generated from our publishing business. It’s of prime importance for us as a non-profit that we give back to the researchers who publish with us and what better way to say thank you than with an improved journal experience.

Here’s what Kristen Ratan, PLOS’ Chief Products and Publications Officer, had to say about this project. “PLOS’ top priority is meeting the needs of our researcher community and the new sites focus on accessing and assessing the article content and data as quickly as possible. The enhanced publishing platform will also allow us to quickly deploy new functionality and take our reader experience to a whole new level. We look forward to continuing to roll out improvements over the coming year and enriching our content still further”.

EU-funded project EU BON will build the European gateway for integrated biodiversity information

December 20, 2012

On 1st December 2012, 30 research institutions from 15 European countries, Brazil, Israel and the Philippines, and more than 30 associated partners started EU BON – “Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network”. This €9 million, EU-funded research project aims to advance biodiversity knowledge by building a European gateway for biodiversity information, which will integrate a wide range of biodiversity data – both from on ground observations to remote sensing datasets – and make it accessible for scientists, policy makers, and the public.

The project plans to advance the technological platform for GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network) to improve the assessment, analysis, visualisation and publishing of biodiversity information, and to enable better linkages between biodiversity and environmental data. EU BON will ensure a timely provision of integrated biodiversity information needed to meet the global change challenges and to contribute for next generation environmental data management at national and regional levels.

“Global problems arising from rapidly changing environmental conditions and biodiversity loss require internationally coordinated solutions” said the project coordinator Dr. Christoph Häuser from the Museum für Naturkunde – MfN, in Berlin, Germany. “Current biodiversity observation systems and environmental data are unbalanced in coverage and not integrated, which limits data analyses and implementation of environmental policies. A solution seems impossible without real integration of biodiversity data across different spatial, temporal, and societal scales”, added Dr Häuser.

EU BON will deliver several important products, including a European integrated biodiversity portal, a roadmap for EU citizen sciences gateway for biodiversity data, an open data publishing and dissemination framework and toolkit, a policy paper on strategies for data mobilisation and use in conservation, a prototype of integrated, scalable, global biodiversity monitoring schemes, strategies for EU-integrated national and regional future biodiversity information infrastructures, and a sustainability plan for regional and global biodiversity information network.

The cooperation for data integration between biodiversity monitoring, ecological research, remote sensing and information users will result in proposing a set of best-practice recommendations and novel approaches with applicability under various environmental and societal conditions. A key task of EU BON is to harmonise future biodiversity monitoring and assessments and to engage wider society groups, such as citizen scientists and other communities of practise.

Although focussing primarily on European biodiversity and collaborating with major EU initiatives (e.g. LifeWatch and others), EU BON will also collaborate closely with worldwide efforts such as GEO BON, GBIF, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and others. EU BON will be a valuable European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), and be built on the GEO principles of open data sharing.

The kick-off meeting of EU BON will take place on 13-15 February 2013 at the Museum für Naturkunde – MfN in Berlin, Germany and will be preceded by a symposium “Nature and governance: biodiversity data, science and policy interface” on 11-12 February 2013.

Helicon books reader, the first andorid reader to fully support all EPUB3 features and more.

December 20, 2012

Helicon books markets the first fully compliant EPUB3 reader for the Andorid operating system.
The reader developed by Helicon books development partner Creatve studios, is the first reader to fully support all EPUB3 features and more.

People today expect more and more Multimedia in the Internet and in Digital books.
The IDPF has responded to this with the EPUB3 standard published in 2011.

However, although the new standard is a year old, most readers applications are are still EPUB2 compatible, some of them with some extensions to support the new capabilities of the new standard.

Some people claim there is no need for all these advanced features. We think the world is advancing to reacher content and readers expect their digital books to also contain reach content.

We can parallel this to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) the first versions of web sites contained only texts and images (many still do) but new W3C standards have enabled web designers to deliver reacher content and today users expect web sites to contain rich contents with animation, videos, sometimes sound etc.

The EPUB3 standard by the IDPF has added and standardized the following features:

Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) – a vectorized graphic format that enables resizing of images without loss of quality
Interactive SVG – Similar to SVG but interactive that enables the user to click part of the image and see it moves or zoom
MathML – A markup language (based on XML) for rendering mathematical formulas
JavaScript – A programming language that enables developers add interactivity to websites or digital book pages
Support for Complex text layout languages – Language such as Hebrew or Arabic that are written from right to left. (the previous standard had partial support for these languages, the new standard fully support these languages including page progression direction)
Support for top to bottom languages – Languages such as Chinese or Japanese written from top to bottom are now fully supported
Fixed layout pages (mainly for children books and/or comic books)
Media Overlay (speak aloud as it is called by Apple) – A features adding a layer of audio on top of text or images, that the reader hightlights the words (or images) the audio is talking about, uses a special markup language (SMIL)
Support for video inside pages
The new standard uses HTML5 and CSS3 for pages and thus includes many design features such as round corners opacity, CSS animation etc.

Non of the EPUB readers we know of today, supports all these features. Helicon books reader supports all the above features and more. It also supports more advanced features such as interactive 3d images that can be rotated in order to view the object from different directions.

The reader is available for white labels licensing and customer specific customization.

White label licensing means that you get the reader with your own logo and no mention of Helicon books.

Customer specific customization means that you can hire us to modify the reader to your specific needs. We will seat with you to define your specific requirements, then issue a quotation for your specific customization so you get an application that fully suites your needs.

The reader currently support Android platform only but will soon support also iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod etc.)

ebrary Expands Non-English Offering with New Publishers and Products

December 20, 2012

ebrary®, a ProQuest business, today announced that it is forging ahead with its efforts to support non-English language programs for customers around the world. The company is launching a new e-book subscription database, ebrary Nordic Collection™, as well as recently acquired content from renowned German publishers including Verlag C.H. Beck, W. Bertelsmann Verlag (WBV), and Frank & Timme.

ebrary’s new subscription database, the Nordic Collection, includes more than 1,300 titles from over 30 publishers at launch but will grow to offer over 2,000 e-books. It contains content from, and about, the Nordic Region in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.Contributing publishers include Aarhus University Press, Copenhagen Business School Press, Folkuniversitetets Akademiska Press, Nordic Academic Press, Nordic Council of Ministers’ Publishing House, Roskilde Universitetsforlag, Stockholms universitets förlag, and University of Wisconsin Press. Libraries may combine this collection with ebrary’s flagship subscription database, Academic Complete™, to provide full academic coverage, and then strategically apply budget in other models such as patron driven acquisition, short-term loan, and perpetual archive.

“We strive to serve both our librarian and end-user customers in the most effective ways possible. This not only entails aggregating vast amounts of content but also packaging it in a way that is digestible and makes sense for the researcher,” said Leslie Lees, ebrary’s Vice President of Content Development. “The Nordic Collection is another step forward in opening more avenues to learning; we will continue to extend our local language programs to provide the most appropriate content to our customers worldwide.”

Additionally, to add another layer of support for strategic e-book acquisition in libraries worldwide, the new German publishers’ scholarly monographs, including those from distinguished publisher Frank & Timme, are all available under a perpetual archive model and through YBP. Frank & Timme provides researchers with a breadth and depth of Germanlanguage content with a focus on humanities and social sciences.

“We are delighted to make our e-books available to libraries through ebrary in order to meet the research needs of our end-users,” said Dr. Karin Timme, Publisher at Frank & Timme. “By partnering with ebrary, we are able to grow our business by leveraging the various business models and their other partnerships, which enable both companies to ultimately provide greater accessibility to libraries around the world.”