Beginning in 2012, Springer and the Korea Concrete Institute (KCI) will partner to publish the International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials (IJCSM). As a fully sponsored open access journal, it will be part of the SpringerOpen portfolio, available on www.springerlink.com.

The International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials is the official journal of the KCI. It covers the various aspects of concrete, including material research, construction, structure analysis and design, manufacturing methods, repair and strengthening, and the latest analytical and modeling methods. Published twice a year, the goal of this interdisciplinary journal is to serve as a forum providing state-of-the-art information on concrete-related subjects. The international editorial board, made up of experts and scholars from over 15 countries, guarantees the high academic quality of the articles.

“It is a great pleasure for us to collaborate with Springer in the publication of IJCSM. With the continuing interest in concrete technology around the globe, our aim is to publish the latest research and make it widely available. As an open access journal, we believe Springer will offer the distribution channels and academic publishing expertise we need,” said Editor-in-Chief Professor Haeng-Ki Lee from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology.

Professor Jongsung Sim, President of the Korea Concrete Institute, said: “We are delighted about the cooperation with Springer. The journal will further spread cutting-edge research in this growing field and help to keep concrete materials in harmony with humans and nature.”

Mark de Jongh, Senior Publishing Editor and coordinator of the Korean publishing program for Springer, stated: “It is a great honor for Springer to publish the International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials. The journal has a good reputation with academics all over the world and I look forward to working together with the editorial board and the KCI to make this journal even stronger internationally.”

As an open access journal, all research results from IJCSM will be freely available online. SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights.

The Website for Small Libraries project, which began as an OCLC Innovation Lab experiment in 2011, is now available as a beta service for any library wishing to set up its own website.

By participating in the project, libraries will be able to quickly and easily set up a website that provides basic functionality for making small collection information available on the Web, setting up users, checking materials in and out, placing holds, and providing library contact, location, service and event information.

“The goal of the Website for Small Libraries project was easily stated, but not so easily realized,” said Mike Teets, OCLC Vice President, Innovation. “We wanted small libraries with collections of 20,000 items or less to be able to have a simple, inexpensive yet functional presence on the Web.”

Four South Dakota libraries, as well as the South Dakota State Library, were part of the project’s pilot. “Many of our libraries have a staff of just one or two, and small budgets,” said Dan Siebersma, South Dakota State Librarian. “A product that makes it easy for these libraries to have a website with a minimum amount of effort and at a low cost is very desirable. The inventory feature that would allow people to access a library’s collection from the comfort of their home is the icing on the cake.”

In order to make the site as easy to use as possible, the site relies on simple editing of predefined templates to populate the Web presence. It can take just a few minutes to have a library site up and available to patrons on the Web, as well as on mobile and tablet devices. The service uses a set of wizards to import collection and user information in a wide variety of formats. It uses statistical algorithms and WorldCat to determine structure and field contents to ease the import processes. Complexity is kept to a minimum by focusing on the minimum fields necessary to make collections accessible.

Tip House, Chief Architect, Global Infrastructure for OCLC, and one of the lead programmers on the project, explained the basic features: “Libraries can provide and promote basic information about their locations, content, events and services using a set of easily updated templates and widgets. Users can create an account, search for materials, place and delete holds, and see their history. It is, essentially, a very basic inventory model for libraries.”

Mr. Teets stressed that this is not a full-featured library management service, but an option for those small libraries that have not been able to take advantage of traditional library systems due to size, cost or technological restrictions.

“If a library already has an ILS, this will not replicate that kind of system. It’s not meant to,” said Mr. Teets. “Our research suggested that as many as half of the libraries with one or two employees had, essentially, no Web presence. This project hopes to positively impact those libraries and their users.”

“WebJunction has worked with small and rural libraries since its inception,” said Jennifer Peterson, WebJunction Community Manager. “Many of these libraries don’t have the time, money or technical background to implement a full-scale, online management service. This project will enable them to reach their users on the Web in an entirely new way. And because the sites are optimized to run well on mobile devices, they’ll be able to connect to users for whom the mobile Internet is now the main way of getting online.”

“We hope this is a useful, affordable option for small libraries that want to establish a Web-based connection to their communities,” said Mr. Teets.

Libraries interested in signing up can do so at http://beta.worldcat.org/lib/. Participation in the project costs $500 per year and comes with a 90-day trial period. Libraries are free to import and export their collection and patron data as they try the service, as well as through the product life.

State library organizations, consortia and other library groups interested in group rates should contact their OCLC Library Services consultant.

The Royal Society of Chemistry is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr James Milne as Managing Director, Publishing.

Dr Milne is a publishing professional with more than 20 years experience in Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishing. After completing his PhD in computational structural engineering at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, he joined Pergamon Press as a publishing editor responsible for a portfolio of engineering books and journals.

Pergamon had been acquired by Elsevier and, over the next seventeen years, Dr Milne held a number of editorial positions within Elsevier. From 2001 to 2008 he was responsible for Elsevier’s most significant chemistry portfolio of products, before taking a role in Elsevier’s innovation and product development team.

In May 2009, Dr Milne joined the RSC as Editorial Director, Publishing, helping shape the considerable growth and development of the journal and book portfolio published by the learned society. During this period, the RSC launched 12 new journals, including the flagship title Chemical Science and the innovative journal RSC Advances.  In March 2011, he was appointed acting Managing Director, Publishing. He was confirmed as Managing Director, Publishing earlier this month.

Dr Milne said he was delighted to be appointed to the role. “My vision for RSC Publishing is to develop the portfolio of products and services to place the RSC at the forefront of the information profession, while truly satisfying the information needs of the international chemical science community.

“The development and progress achieved by RSC Publishing has been significant, with considerable growth in usage, citations and submissions to our broad range of products and services. This is all down to the fantastic contribution made by staff throughout the organisation, without whom, this could not be possible.”

RSC Chief Executive, Dr Robert Parker said: “Jim’s experience as Editorial Director with the RSC, and before that as a chemistry publisher at Elsevier, gives him the breadth of knowledge and expertise to successfully lead our dynamic publishing operations. He is poised to build on the remarkable growth in RSC’s publishing activities over the last four years.”

RSC Publishing is pleased to announce new agreements for our content to be indexed in Serials Solution Summon™, EBSCO Discovery Service™, ProQuest Illustrata™ and OCLC Worldcat, aligned with our key priorities for discoverability of content.

RSC Publishing is taking major steps in partnering with third party solutions to make our content more discoverable. We have seen significant growth in high quality content – over 150% in the last three years and an average increase of 26% for content usage in 2011.

To accommodate this growth,  we have made considerable technical advancements in the last few years including the newRSC Publishing Platform to help users search content, our award winning semantic technology and developments toChemSpider (our free chemical database). Working with these third parties on the discoverability of content, helps us maintain the level of standard that our customers and users expect in accessing this high impact scientific content.

Stephen Hawthorne says, “RSC is fully committed to meeting the needs of our customers.  By supporting these discovery solutions and integrating RSC content into their service of choice, we are ensuring researchers, faculty and students can effectively reach our world-class scientific content“.

We will be announcing more agreements in 2012, sign up to the RSC Publishing Innovation blog RSS feed to receive the latest developments.