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HighWire Renews Consortia Sales Support with Dragonfly

HighWire Press, Stanford University, and Dragonfly Sales and Marketing Consulting, led by Tom Taylor, have renewed their commitment to support scholarly publishers in their efforts to reach library consortia in accessing a collection of high-impact life science content from the Independent Scholarly Publishers Group (ISPG).

Working together with local sales agents during the past 18 months, Dragonfly, HighWire, and 23 HighWire-affiliated publishers have provided access to top research to over 950 institutions throughout the world: over 30 consortia from the United Kingdom (JISC) to Sweden (BIBSAM), and from Korea (KESLI) to Australia (CAUL).

“The Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) Library started a trial to the Independent Scholarly Publishers Group’s (ISPG) electronic journals in April, 2012. We chose to subscribe to the collection because 60% of our library’s total journal usage during the trial was from the ISPG publications,” said Wangqin, Librarian at CAMS. “Access to the ISPG journals is simple, they’re easy to search, and provide a valuable resource to our research community.”

Publishers who work with HighWire typically run separate subscriber databases. The ISPG cross-publisher consortia support project provides a seamless solution to the often complex nature of negotiating and managing titles from autonomous publishers. With this offering, librarians may negotiate titles collectively and gather their readers’ COUNTER usage reports across their entire consortium using a consolidated series of accounts on the HighWire portal.

“This combination of the right content, on the right host, with the right representation seems to be the magic of the success of ISPG,” said Bill Matthews, HighWire’s Director of Business Development. “We are pleased to offer this continued support to our publisher partners in their combined marketing efforts to reach the library consortia marketplace.”

Among the dedicated group of HighWire-affiliated publishers who benefit from this cooperative arrangement, are:

  • American Academy of Pediatrics
  • American Society for Cell Biology
  • American Society for Nutrition
  • American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
  • American Society of Animal Science
  • American Society of Clinical Oncology
  • American Society of Neuroradiology
  • American Society of Plant Biologists
  • American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
  • BioScientifica
  • British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery
  • Company of Biologists
  • Duke University Press
  • European Respiratory Society
  • FASEB
  • Genetics Society of America
  • Project Hope (Health Affairs)
  • Royal College of Psychiatrists
  • Society for the Study of Reproduction
  • Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging

RCN Publishing adopts DataSalon’s MasterVision to drive new business development

RCN Publishing 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 RCN Publishing a complete ‘single customer view’ of all their customers and contacts, incorporating subscribers, authors, members, alert and forum sign-ups, event attendees and advertisers. This ‘single customer view’ means that all of this valuable customer information is now very easy to interrogate, and accessible to a wide range of staff from different departments – so providing better workflows and greater efficiency.

Traditionally, RCN Publishing has been very much focused on nurses in the UK. Now, with the help of MasterVision, they plan to expand this focus, by gaining a better understanding of the institutions that nurses work with, and also by looking beyond the UK to gain a more global perspective.

Staff at RCN Publishing will use the new insights provided by MasterVision to increase revenues in several different ways. For example, the marketing team will use it to create highly targeted campaigns with selections that take into account a wide range of customer touch points, so driving subscriptions, article submissions and event attendance. MasterVision will also aid the development of new business, making use of the Ringgold database (which RCN have also incorporated into the system) to identify new international markets with significant numbers of potential institutional subscribers.

RCN management also believe that MasterVision will help to improve customer data quality across the organisation. The solution provides powerful tools for de-duplication, and for identifying the best and most up-to-date name, address, email and subject interests for each contact. Clean data together with an integrated customer view will support high-level management reporting to identify key customer trends over time, and so highlight the main opportunities and risks to be addressed in the future.

“RCN Publishing is delighted to be working with MasterVision”, commented Tony O’Rourke, Commercial Director. “We have licensed MasterVision to give us a better understanding of our universe – readers, authors, subscribers, users.  We expect MasterVision to provide new insights into opportunities with existing and potential subscribers and authors.”

“We’re very pleased to be working with RCN Publishing”, said Nick Andrews, Managing Director at DataSalon. “It’s great to be able to provide a single customer view so that they can now see the full extent of their customer relationships. This single view of RCN Publishing’s data, combined with MasterVision’s fast and friendly analysis tools, means that RCN Publishing can further strengthen their position both in the UK and in new markets internationally.”

The UK contributes over 6,500 digitised museum objects to provide a boost for online learning

About 6,500 newly digitised objects from University College London and the University of Reading’s diverse museum collections are now openly accessible to students, teachers and the public at large, thanks to funding from Jisc.

The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets. The digital artefacts encompass a range of disciplines from sciences to the arts.

In addition to the digitised objects, which can be freely viewed, downloaded and used on a Creative Commons licence, the two museums have also produced a range of Open Educational Resources (OER) such as videos and worksheets to support object-based learning.  The interdisciplinary nature of these resources makes them particularly versatile for online learning and suitable for the growing number of initiatives such as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Leonie Hannan, teaching fellow in object based learning at University College London says: “Teaching using museum objects is increasingly popular in universities, owing to the active and experiential nature of object-based learning. However, hands-on time with collections is always limited and the ability to provide access to our collections digitally overcomes barriers to independent student learning. By making these resources open access they will not only benefit our own teachers and learners, but also much wider audiences across the education sector. We are really fascinated to find out how others use these resources and we hope they can be adapted to meet a whole range of learning needs.”

Paola Marchionni, programme manager at Jisc says: “This project shows how digitisation can help institutions enhance teaching and learning while at the same time benefit the wider public by making a huge range of resources openly available for everybody to use and enjoy. We’re proud at Jisc to see how museum staff from the universities joined forces with their academic colleagues as well as students in an exemplary partnership which has ensured the resources created respond to the needs of the teachers and learners.”

The digitised objects, which will add to a bank of 150,000 already existing digital resources from the two museums, are available through Culture Grid, the UK gateway to heritage resources. The OERs can be accessed through JORUM, the online educational resource sharing site, using the search term OBL4HE.

BMJ Group wins contract to publish leading military medical title

International medical publisher BMJ Group will take over production and publication of the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps (JRAMC) from March 2013, it has announced.

The publisher fought off stiff competition to win the publishing contract for the quarterly title, which will add to the burgeoning number of specialist titles BMJ Group now publishes in partnership with other professional and academic bodies under its contract publishing programme.

The JRAMC has a long and distinguished history of publishing a wide range of material relevant to the practice of military medicine dating back to 1903. As such, it contains contributions from all ranks, services, and corps within the UK Defence Medical Services, both regular and reserve as well as those from civilian authors.

The title aims not only to further current knowledge and expertise in what is now a rapidly developing field, but also to act as an institutional memory for the practice of medicine within the military. It is distributed to members of the Royal Army Medical Corps as well as subscribers from other forces and institutions.

Its editor, Lt Col Jeff Garner, who is also a consultant colorectal surgeon at Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, has deployed to Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Afghanistan during his military surgical career. He was the journal’s assistant editor for five years before taking the helm as editor in 2008.

“Despite the hi-tech machinery at the military’s disposal, its most valuable assets are the people in it, and anything we can do to maximise their health is important. I am delighted that the Journal is now going to be able to reach out to a wider audience to share the many medical advances that have been made during the past decade and a half of conflict,” he said.

He added: “The Defence Medical Services are leaders in trauma care, mental health and preventive medicine research and sharing our hard won expertise to help maintain the health of servicemen and women everywhere is crucial, particularly as the Armed Forces reshape after Afghanistan, with an increasing focus on the Reserves and their particular medical needs.”

Commenting on the new partnership, BMJ Group’s Journals Director, Peter Ashman said: “We are delighted that Royal Army Medical Corps has chosen to work with BMJ Group. This is an excellent journal which provides a vital service to military personnel and we look forward to developing and bringing it to a wider audience through our international connections.

This will be helped by improving its online presence as well as exploiting synergies with our successful journal porfolio, specifically Emergency Medicine Journal.”

Elsevier Announces the Launch of a New Journal: Anthropocene

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, is pleased to announce the launch of a new journal, Anthropocene.

As a quarterly journal Anthropocene will publish research focusing on the effect of human activity on landscapes, oceans, the atmosphere, cryosphere, and ecosystems. Effects are measured over a range of time and space scales – from global phenomena over geologic eras to single isolated events – including changes to the exchanges, linkages, and feedbacks among the systems. Articles included will aim to address how human influence on earth may produce a distinct geological record, and how these signals may compare with the great perturbations in history. In addition, theoretical and empirical contributions linking societal responses to human-induced landscape change are also published.

Anthropocene will be edited by Professor Anne Chin of the University of Colorado, who will be supported by a distinguished team of Associate Editors and an Editorial Board, including leading researchers in stakeholder fields such as climate change, ecology and land use.

“How earth will continue to evolve under increasing human interactions will undoubtedly represent one of the major challenges in the coming decades. As such, there is a growing need for a new, interdisciplinary area of research on understanding and predicting these changes. The importance of this new field in maintaining a sustainable earth for future generations provides the impetus for launching this journal,” said Professor Chin”.

The study of human influences on earth’s systems has been on the agenda in many scientific fields for some time now. In addition there is a need to foster academic studies at greater levels of integration across these fields,” said Dan Lovegrove, Geology Publisher at Elsevier. “With the launch of Anthropocene, Elsevier aims to stimulate and support both goals by providing a dedicated forum for a much more efficient exchange of ideas within this wide spectrum of disciplines.”

For more information or to submit a paper, go to: www.elsevier.com/locate/ancene

Semantico, ALPSP to hold seminar on strategies for building author-focused functionality

Semantico are working with ALPSP on a seminar, entitled: “Ignore your authors at your peril. Strategies and tactics for building a strong author-focused proposition.” Semantico Strategy Director, Rob Virkar-Yates will be chairing the event which takes place on 28 February 2013, Institute of Physics, London. 

As the ‘author pays’ model gains traction, it will be imperative that scholarly publishers deploy author-centric content and functionality, and treat authors as their highest value customers. Publishers need to offer high quality integrated services and experiences across all touch-points from submission to publication and beyond, to both build and sustain loyalty. The key message of the event is: authors are customers too, and this seminar aims to provide practical, strategic and tactical ways in which scholarly publishers can foster good author relationships.

The seminar is targetted to senior managers who want to understand how they can build a stronger author-focused proposition into their organisation, senior marketers and technologists who would be responsible for deploying campaigns and technologies to deliver the proposition.

For more information on the event, see the ALPSP website.

RSC launches new materials science journal

Researchers from across the materials science community have an exciting new option for reporting the latest ground breaking developments in their field, with the launch today of a new RSC journal – Materials Horizons.

The latest addition to the RSC Publishing portfolio will disseminate research across the extensive breadth of materials research, spanning multiple scientific disciplines.

Materials Horizons will publish first reports of exceptional significance at the cutting-edge interface of materials science with chemistry, physics, biology and engineering.

The RSC will provide free access to the new peer-reviewed journal until the end of 2015, ensuring authors’ work has maximum visibility.

Announcing the launch, James Milne, Executive Director of RSC Publishing, said: “Materials science is an expansive and rapidly evolving field of real relevance to the chemical sciences. Only last week, the UK Science Minister, David Willetts, announced £73 million of investment for new facilities and equipment to support research in advanced materials in the UK.”

“We are delighted to support the breadth of the global materials research community with this new journal. Materials Horizons will be a world class journal characterised by the quality, ease and speed of publication, and innovative technology for which RSC Publishing is renowned.

“As a not-for-profit publisher, this new addition to our portfolio will also go towards facilitating the RSC’s aim to advance the chemical sciences for the benefit of society.”

Materials Horizons will open for submissions in April 2013 and the first issue will be published in late 2013.

Authors submitting to Materials Horizons will benefit from easy online submission, rapid peer review and publication with no page charges, and free colour. Authors have the option of publishing their research as an Accepted Manuscript and, as with all RSC journals, authors may choose to publish their paper as an Open Access article.

Published research will have very high visibility: from launch until December 2015, all content will be freely available online for readers via the RSC website.

Seth Marder, Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, has been appointed chair of the Materials Horizons editorial board.

He said: “It is a very exciting opportunity for me to work with the team at the RSC to help launch Materials Horizons – a new kind of society journal geared to rapid publication of truly top calibre, first reports of materials research, broadly defined.

“Importantly, while published by a chemical society, the journal will seek to serve the broader materials community, by welcoming papers that cover the gamut of materials research.

“The new journal will provide a forum for editorials on the status and future of materials research and content geared specifically to educating and engaging younger researchers in the field. With this, we hope to make Materials Horizonsan indispensable resource for all researchers in the materials community.”

ProQuest to digitise 70,000 volumes from BnF’s collection of European books as part of Early European Books programme

ProQuest and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris are joining forces to expand access to the Library’s rich historical treasures. As part of its Early European Books program, ProQuest will digitize about 70,000 volumes from BnF’s collection of European books printed before 1700. The collection, which is world renowned for its breadth and quality, includes 3,000 works printed before 1501, providing researchers with simple, online insight into early European history and culture.

“When we speak to users of Early European Books around the world, the Bibliothèque nationale de France is one of the most-requested sources of content,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest Vice-President, Information Solutions. “This collection represents centuries of effort to acquire and preserve books on all manner of subjects. It is thrilling for us to be able to work with such a prestigious institution and to make this content easily available to researchers across the globe.”

The BnF’s collection is vast and wide-ranging, containing many rare or obscure texts on subjects from literature and history to science and engineering, from law to aesthetics and art criticism, from politics to philosophy and theology. The books themselves come in many forms, with popular chapbooks (which were widely distributed but rarely preserved) at one end of the spectrum and luxury editions aimed at a wealthy, courtly audience at the other. Landmark works include early editions of French writers such as the poet Clément Marot and the historian Philippe de Commynes; the first editions of major scientific texts including Christiaan Huygens’ Horologium oscillatorium (Paris, 1673) and Pierre de Fermat’s collected works (Toulouse, 1679), among many others. Many important printers and booksellers will be covered by this project, such as Sébastien Cramoisy, Antoine Vitré, Augustin Courbé, Claude Barbin, and the houses of Coignard and Ballard.

The BnF is the fifth major library to participate in ProQuest’s groundbreaking Early European Books. The company launched the initiative with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitization operations are currently also underway at the National Library of the Netherlands and at the Wellcome Library in London. In each case, ProQuest has set up a scanning studio on site at the library and uses state-of-the-art technology to create high-definition color images of every page, including the often-lavish bindings and covers.

Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is building an increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitizing and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries.

Early European Books collections are available for purchase by libraries worldwide and are delivered via a multilingual interface which allows powerful searching of the detailed indexing, as well as cross-searching of the well-known Early English Books Onlinedatabase, with its facsimiles of 125,000 books printed in English or in the British Isles between 1473 and 1700. Books from the Bibliothèque nationale de France will be included in a number of Early European Books collections, starting with the newly released Collection IV.

Elsevier Launches New Open Access Journal: Molecular Metabolism

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, is pleased to announce the launch of Molecular Metabolism in affiliation with the German Research Center for Environmental Health(Helmholtz Zentrum München, Munich, Germany) and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD, Germany). Molecular Metabolism is a new, open access journal devoted to the rapid publication of breakthroughs in mechanistic metabolism research.

Metabolic diseases including obesity, diabetes and related co-morbidities remain on the rise. Impaired cellular metabolism is emerging as an etiological factor for an increasing number of illnesses, such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases or neurodegenerative disorders. Molecular Metabolism aims to publish hypothesis-driven research from leading scientists, thus paving the way to a better understanding of metabolic physiology, and enabling progress toward the development of personalized medicines for preventing and curing these metabolism-related diseases.

Matthias Tschöp (Helmholtz Zentrum München and Technische Universität München) founded the journal together with Jens Brüning (University of Cologne), Tamas Horvath (Yale University), and Martin Myers (University of Michigan). Their vision for Molecular Metabolism is an open access journal with a fast track publication process aiming for peer review-based decisions within one week. Molecular Metabolism will be able to offer online publication of accepted manuscripts within 14 days of submission in order to be able to disseminate breakthrough discoveries in mechanistic and translational metabolism research with unprecedented speed.

“Translational research is an integral part of the research approach for investigators around the world. It enables the transformation of knowledge into medical progress and the realization of the translational potential of basic research findings for medical applications,” said Matthias Tschöp. “Molecular Metabolism has been launched to provide a home for translational metabolic disease research, and we welcome submissions from all metabolism researchers.”

Articles published in Molecular Metabolism are freely available to anyone and are published online on ScienceDirect.

For more information or to submit an article, go to Molecular Metabolism.

Ex Libris launches self-registration service, expands support for OA

Ex Libris® Group, a world leader in the provision of library automation solutions, is pleased to announce that it has launched a self-registration service enabling institutions to easily add the contents of their institutional repository (IR) to the Primo Central Index of scholarly electronic materials and thus expand the breadth of IR content in the index.
Institutional repositories play a key role in the open access movement. They often contain articles that are as yet unpublished or are freely available in the repository as part of an institution’s green open access mandate. Once indexed in Primo Central, this content becomes widely discoverable to users in over 1300 institutions, thereby significantly increasing the usage and impact of an institution’s research output.
Institutional repositories contain a wealth of otherwise hard-to-find material such as research data, manuscripts, and course notes. This new initiative will benefit institutions, researchers, and users of scholarly material—who will enjoy timely and easy access to material they might not have found otherwise—and, as a result, will further the open access movement itself.
Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libris chief strategy officer, explained: “This simple registration service enables institutions to easily offer their scholars increased visibility and speedier exposure for their research output, thus creating one more incentive for researchers to endorse open-access publication. With the growing interest in usage-based impact measurements and altmetrics to complement traditional methods of assessment, publication in institutional repositories presents an additional way to maximize the usage and impact of research.”
Registration of institutional repositories in Primo Central is another strand of the company’s open access strategy. Ex Libris endorses both green and gold open access methods and is involved in a number of initiatives to maximize the visibility of open access materials, including exposing the availability of open access articles that are published in subscription journals (hybrid journals).
Institutions who wish to add their repository to the Primo Central Index should register athttp://dc02vg0047nr.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com:8080/IRWizard/wizard.html.

Science investment plans need to be supported by long-term research funding

The Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) said David Willetts’ announcement today on the government’s spending plans for capital investment in science was good news for the chemical sciences, but called for a long-term increase in research funding to ensure that new facilities don’t go to waste.

Dr Robert Parker said: “The RSC welcomes this additional investment in science at a time when the government is facing tough decisions on spending. This is a real, positive sign that the government recognises the importance of a strong, high-tech and innovative science base as the key to driving economic growth and maintaining the UK’s international competitiveness.

“The RSC has identified a number of the areas announced to receive investment today, such as energy storage and advanced materials, as important technology opportunities for the UK – and innovation in these areas will be heavily reliant on strength and excellence in the chemical sciences.

“However, we need to ensure that the UK can capitalise fully on these investments. To do this, we also need to have sufficient funding available for the maintenance and day-to-day running of new and existing capital equipment.

“But more importantly, capital investment must be complemented by a long-term increase in research funding, to enable our world-class scientists to use this new infrastructure to carry out excellent research for the UK’s maximum benefit.”

EBSCO Publishing Increases E-book Content for Academic Libraries

eBooks onEBSCOhost®from EBSCO Publishing(EBSCO) continues to grow as thousands of e-books have been added to the eBook Academic Collection™  — increasing the number of e-books to more than 112,000. eBook Academic Collectionsupplies full-text e-books covering a broad spectrum of academic subjects from technology, science and engineering to the humanities and social sciences.

Since its release, eBook Academic Collection has continued to grow and offers academic institutions a vast array of e-books to complement their collections. The breadth of multidisciplinary e-book titles available in this collection enables students and researchers to find information relevant to their research needs.

EBSCO Publishing’s Senior Director of eBook Products, Ken Breen says this collection is re-inventing the e-book subscription model in the academic space with its size and more importantly, the quality of publishers and titles. “We know there is a large demand for e-books at the academic level and we wanted to create a collection that would meet the needs of every student. For this reason we have, and will continue to, expand the collection. We also have a librarian-informed selection policy in place that ensures that each title is of high quality and relevant to the academic market. As a result, eBook Academic Collection has been very well received in the marketplace today.”

eBook Academic Collection is offered on an annual subscription basis with unlimited access to the content, and unlimited downloads if the library makes them available. Each title is offered with unlimited users allowing more users access to each title in the collection. As with all e-books available from EBSCO, eBook Academic Collection is integrated and works seamlessly with all EBSCOhost® content. Users will be able to search the collection on its own or side-by-side with other EBSCOhost databases.

Annual subscription is one of the ways EBSCO enables libraries to add e-books to their collection. Libraries are also offered a growing number of purchase and lease options as well as patron driven options. E-books are available on an individual basis as well as in Subject Sets, Featured Collections and Custom Collections. eBooks on EBSCOhost represents a deep collection of e-book content that is accessible via a variety of devices. eBooks on EBSCOhost are provided with no markups and no fees and can be ordered through the EBSCOhost® Collection Manager or YBP’s GOBI3 allowing libraries more freedom to make purchasing decisionsMore information about eBooks on EBSCOhost is available at: www.ebscohost.com/ebooks.

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