AIP and NIST Make Semiconductor Research Freely Available Online

June 8, 2011

AIP Publishing, a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) (www.aip.org), announces that through an agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), proceedings papers from the entire International Conference on Frontiers of Characterization and Metrology for Nanoelectronics (formerly Characterization and Metrology for ULSI Technology) series are now freely available from both organizations’ websites.

“Publishing papers from these NIST conferences is the most effective way to disseminate the breakthroughs in semiconductor research presented at these meetings. To maximize the reach of these papers, we are now offering them to the public free of charge,” said John Haynes, AIP vice president, publishing. “We hope that our decision will help to bring this vital information to the desktops of researchers worldwide and speed the rate of innovation in semiconductor technology.”

David Seiler, chief of NIST’s Semiconductor Electronics Division, characterizes this agreement to make the proceedings freely available as a major breakthrough, as it will help professionals in the fast-paced semiconductor industry get up to speed on unfamiliar measurement and characterization issues. In addition, they can learn about new techniques and equipment being introduced to characterize semiconductors.

“These collected proceedings represent research and overviews of critical topics collected from worldwide experts in the field of semiconductor characterization and metrology,” says Seiler. “As there is frequent turnover in the industry, there is constant need for training and retraining of employees. Improved access to this background will ease that process dramatically.”

Proceedings volumes are available in PDF format, up to and including the 2009 conference, on AIP’s website at http://proceedings.aip.org/semiconductor_metrology, and on NIST’s website athttp://www.nist.gov/pml/semiconductor/conference/archives.cfm.

Thomson Reuters To Sell Its Healthcare Business

June 8, 2011

Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced its intention to divest its Healthcare business, which has been part of the company’s Healthcare & Science segment. The Healthcare business provides data, analytics and performance benchmarking solutions and services to companies, government agencies and healthcare professionals.

With leading assets and solutions such as MarketScan, Advantage Suite, Micromedex, CareDiscovery and ActionOI, coupled with expert services and analysis, the Healthcare business provides its customers with solutions to identify savings, improve outcomes, fight fraud and abuse and more efficiently manage their healthcare operations.

“Our Healthcare business is recognized for its innovative solutions, like incorporating cloud based phone system australia, and its expertise which are critically important to its customers,” said Thomas H. Glocer, chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters. “We are grateful for the hard work and dedication of our talented employees who have built the Healthcare business into a successful and profitable unit.”

“Thomson Reuters has strong positions in our chosen markets and we believe we will achieve better all-in returns for our shareholders by divesting the Healthcare business and re-deploying the proceeds in our core franchises. We have leading positions in global markets, including legal, tax and accounting, science and intellectual property, financial services and media, working with great services like Charlotte accountant which specialize in this. While a growing and profitable unit, our Healthcare business lacks the integration with and global scale of our other units, and our disciplined approach to capital allocation convinced us that the expected proceeds from a sale into a consolidating market could be better applied elsewhere in our portfolio,” said Mr. Glocer.

The Healthcare business in 2010 had revenues of approximately $450 million and an operating margin comparable to the company’s consolidated margin of 19.3%. Following adjustment for this divestiture by removing Healthcare’s results from ongoing businesses, no material impact is expected to the company’s previously announced 2011 outlook. The company expects the divestiture to close before the end of the year.

This divestiture will result in a realignment of the company’s existing Intellectual Property and Science businesses into a single operating unit of the Professional division. Both are global and support scientific research, discovery and innovation. Details related to the realignment can be found in the “Investor Relations” section of the Thomson Reuters website. Thomson Reuters will provide restated historical financial information on its website, which reflects this realignment and which excludes results from the Healthcare business, early in July and its second quarter reported results will reflect these changes.

Morgan Stanley and Allen & Company are acting as financial advisors to Thomson Reuters for the proposed divestiture.

AMA Names Dr. James Madara New EVP/CEO

June 6, 2011

The American Medical Association (AMA) today named James L. Madara, M.D., as its new Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Madara will assume leadership of the nation’s oldest and largest physician group on July 1.

Dr. Madara, 60, is an accomplished academic medical center physician, medical scientist and administrator who served as Timmie Professor and Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine before assuming the Thompson Distinguished Service Professorship and deanship at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where he was the longest serving Pritzker dean in the last 35 years. Subsequently, he added the responsibility of CEO of the University of Chicago Medical Center, bringing together the university’s biomedical research, teaching and clinical activities. As CEO, he engineered significant new affiliations with community hospitals, teaching hospital systems, community Federally Qualified Health Centers on Chicago’s South Side, as well as with national research organizations including the Janelia Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda and the Ludwig Foundation of New York.

“The AMA is a venerable institution, and I am honored to lead it during this challenging and exciting time,” Dr. Madara said. “The AMA has been at the forefront working to improve public health, physician practice, patient care and our American health care system for the past 164 years. Today more than ever, America’s patients and physicians need a strong and vibrant AMA to tackle the many challenges facing them. I look forward to leveraging my skills and experience to help the AMA succeed and fulfill its core mission to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.”

While at the University of Chicago from 2002-2009, Dr. Madara oversaw a significant renewal of the institution’s biomedical campus, including the Comer Children’s Hospital, the Gordon Center for Integrative Science, a new adult hospital pavilion, and the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery. His deanship also extended to the University’s renowned Biological Sciences Division.

“The American Medical Association is thrilled to have a proven medical leader like Dr. Madara serve as our next EVP/CEO,” said Ardis D. Hoven, M.D., chair, AMA Board of Trustees. “Dr. Madara is a strong strategic thinker and planner who has a track record of bringing people together to accomplish significant, ambitious, health-related goals and projects. Having overseen a $1.6 billion integrated academic medical center, Dr. Madara understands many of the complex clinical, academic and business-related issues confronting medicine and health care today. His insight and perspective will be invaluable in helping the AMA tackle its agenda.”

Dr. Madara is a noted academic pathologist and an authority on epithelial cell biology and on gastrointestinal disease. He has published more than 200 original papers and chapters, making important contributions to understanding the biology of the cells that line the digestive tract. His work has garnered both national and international awards.

Dr. Madara has served as President of the American Board of Pathology, as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Pathology, has received a prestigious MERIT Award from the NIH, has been elected to membership in the Association of American Physicians, and recently received the Davenport Award for lifetime achievement in gastrointestinal disease from the American Physiological Society.

Most recently, Dr. Madara served as senior advisor with Leavitt Partners, a highly innovative health care consulting firm started by former Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt.

Dr. Madara earned his medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. He completed his internship and residency at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. He subsequently completed a fellowship in anatomy and cell biology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital). Following his fellowship, Dr. Madara joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School where he rose to a full tenured professor and served as director of the Harvard Digestive Diseases Center.

IBM Releases Cloud Services Designed For Educational Institutions

June 6, 2011

IBM today announced new cloud services to deliver advanced software, computer lab resources and services to students and researchers at schools, colleges and universities, without the need for advanced IT expertise at those locations.

The IBM SmartCloud for Education is a set of cloud services and offerings designed to help education systems leverage predictive analytics to get real-time insights on student and institutional performance, enhance researcher effectiveness, and alleviate constrained lab resources for learning.

By using the IBM SmartCloud for Education services, K-12 schools and higher education institutions can address significant challenges they face: student retention, graduation rates, grant funding, and demands for IT resources for learning and research. Schools can analyze their own data using new SPSS models and tools running in a cloud to identify at-risk students at an early stage. Additional cloud-based social networking tools help discover and recommend funding opportunities and collaborators to researchers. Students and educators can also benefit from self-service reservation of and seamless access to virtual computer resources both on campus and on the IBM public cloud.

“Cloud computing offers educational institutions the ability to transform learning processes to be more student-centered, as well as the potential to reduce costs through shared services,” said Michael King, vice president, IBM Global Education Industry. “Our announcements today lay the groundwork for institutions, systems, and states to begin creating these integrated cloud services for their constituents.”

The new set of services in the IBM SmartCloud for Education include:

Decision Management for Education

This software-as-a-service solution uses all available information within the institution to make real time, informed decisions using leading edge predictive analytical technologies from IBM SPSS. The solution can greatly help administrators and teachers identify individuals with greatest propensity to succeed as well as at-risk students, apply resources and interventions most effectively and then qualify timing and nature of funding initiatives.

One higher education institution has used IBM’s Decision Management for Education to address student retention issues, and can now predict with 80% certainty whether a student is going to drop out. The system uses pre-defined, user-friendly, and web-based modeling to answer common questions about K-12 and higher education performance by deriving insights from available data about students, faculty, community or donors.

IBM Cloud Offerings for Virtual Computing Lab

The IBM Virtual Computing Lab Cloud Solutions for Education provide enhanced services and tools to enable a cloud computing environment as an on-campus private cloud or a ‘hybrid’ cloud connected to the IBM SmartCloud.

Beginning with a collaborative project with North Carolina State University in 2002, IBM has worked with institutions around the world to enable the award-winning Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) open source software platform that was built by and for education. Today over a half million students and educators have access to this cloud platform on IBM hardware servers. These announcements broaden IBM’s solutions to build on that success to include:

Quickstart services to accelerate the migration from traditional to cloud computing
VCL integrated server environment built on the IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud
Advanced VCL image management through Tivoli Provisioning Manager
Integrated access to IBM SmartCloud compute resources from campus-based VCL system
Pricing for SPSS software in a hosted virtualized environment for students or faculty members on or off campus, in accordance with the institution’s license agreement

As part of these announcements, IBM is donating the application program interface (API) code for the hybrid cloud connection to the IBM SmartCloud to the Apache Foundation project for VCL.

“At NC State, VCL cloud serves more than 40,000 users and delivers 250,000 resource reservations and over 11 million HPC CPU hours per year and our partnership with IBM has been the key to its development and success. VCL has transformed the way we deliver computational and educational services to our students,” said Dr. Mladen Vouk, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. “VCL provides countless opportunities to better serve our constituency and implement numerous savings and advantages – from provisioning a broad variety of software packages and applications for use by our students in classrooms, teaching laboratories and at home, to customized desktops, to support for researchers, to reduced cost of operations and maintenance that can offer an HPC CPU hour for pennies, to prolonged life-time of equipment.”

Sharon Pitt, Executive Director of the Division for Instructional Technology at George Mason University, has seen a dramatic improvement in services to students and faculty as a results of their VCL implementation. “IBM’s services for VCL has helped GMU accelerate the migration to virtual labs for students and faculty, and deliver direct value to the university in reduction of costs and staff time.”

Academic Research Collaboration and Analytics

In a related announcement, IBM has established a collaborative research effort with the University of Rhode Island to use cloud-based analytics and social networking tools to help researchers more easily find funding opportunities; identify collaborators around the world; and locate the latest published research findings in their fields.

The research project between IBM and URI’s College of Pharmacy is a “First-of-a-Kind” (FOAK) project based on a patented IBM invention aimed at helping academic researchers quickly find the resources they need to better plan, manage and measure the progress of their research projects. The college, for example, is managing a $42 million federal biomedical science research program, and needs fast, reliable information on scientists and their work.

The Academic Research Collaboration and Analytics system relies on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture to analyze textual research data; the same technology was used in IBM’s Watson project to enable computers to compete with humans in answering complex questions.

IBM has been collaborating with a community of leaders to create innovative approaches with cloud computing to help transform education. For instance, the IBM Cloud Academy is uniquely designed for K-12 schools and higher education institutions actively integrating cloud technologies into their infrastructures to share best practices and work together on this transformation. By encouraging collaboration among members and with IBM researchers, developers, and IT architects, the IBM Cloud Academy includes participating institutions in a community that helps maximize the benefits of cloud computing investments. For more information about the IBM Cloud Academy, please visit:www.ibm.com/solutions/education/cloudacademy.

SAGE Journals Going Mobile With HighWire

June 6, 2011

SAGE is pleased to announce that their entire collection of online journal sites will soon be available in a mobile-optimized format, taking advantage of the HighWire Mobile Web interface. Readers visiting a SAGE journal site on their iPhone, Android or other smartphone device will automatically be redirected to the mobile version.

“We’ve been observing an increasing amount of mobile usage of our journals online. At the same time, our librarian customers are looking to improve web browsing for their patrons who access their online content using a smartphone,” said Jayne Marks, Vice President and Editorial Director, Library Information Group at SAGE. “HighWire’s mobile web design is perfectly suited for those who read on the go. We’re excited to better serve and engage those readers across all the SAGE journals in the coming months.”

“HighWire designed the mobile-optimized sites to serve the ‘looking up and keeping up’ habits of mobile users,” noted John Sack, HighWire’s Founding Director. “Our goal is to help readers find the information they need quickly, offering them a streamlined set of features and tools. When you only have a reader’s attention for a short period of time, in a small space, you want every minute to count.”

“HighWire, in collaboration with SAGE, identified an opportunity to provide better mobile tools for end users,” said Tom Rump, Managing Director of HighWire. “We devised a series of innovative, mobile solutions to meet the needs of the scholarly community and are delighted that SAGE is taking advantage of this product offering.”

Each of SAGE’s 600+ mobile journal sites will soon deliver an optimized experience designed for the smaller screen of a smartphone. The sites will feature the essential aspects of the onlinesite, including the full-text content of the current issue, archives, and OnlineFirst articles, and will offer a simplified search, authentication, and sharing tools, all the while maintaining a sense of continuity with the desktop version of the sites.

Springer Offers Free Access To Research Articles On E. Coli Bacteria

June 6, 2011

Springer Science+Business Media is offering all journal articles and book chapters which deal with the E. coli bacteria free of charge on its online information platform www.springerlink.com. The articles can be found by using the search terms “Enterohaemorrhagic and Escherichia and coli” or by using the link www.springer.com/ehec. A total of over 400 scientific articles are available to print out or download from now until 1 September 2011.

The E. coli strain of bacterium has the potential to cause severe diarrhea, followed by serious organ system damage. During the past few weeks, a significant increase in the number of patients with the disease has been reported in Europe, especially in Germany. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control says transmission of the strain of bacterium, commonly found in cattle, usually occurs through contaminated food or water and contact with animals.

Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Executive Vice President Corporate Communications of Springer Science+Business Media, said, “As a global scientific, technical and medical publisher, Springer plays a major role in the distribution of scientific information and access to knowledge and research. Therefore we are making all studies, published up to now on the E. coli bacteria, freely available online on SpringerLink. By doing this, we hope to play a small part in helping researchers and medical professionals solve, or at the very least alleviate, this crisis.

”The articles which are available free of charge concern the better-known and less aggressive strain E. coli 0157:H7. For further information and daily reports on the E. coli infection, please visit the website of the Robert Koch Institute (www.rki.de). Information is available in English.

SpringerLink is the world’s most comprehensive online collection of scientific, technological and medical journals, books and reference works. Originally launched in 1996, SpringerLink (www.springerlink.com) provides students and researchers with electronic access to more than 45,000 eBooks, 2,000 peer-reviewed Springer journals, as well as 23,000 protocols for laboratories.

Springer Science+Business Media is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 7,000 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,500 employees. In 2010, it generated annual sales of around EUR 866 million

Google, Publishers Seek More Time To Reach Agreement To Digitise Books

June 6, 2011

A judge in New York has agreed to give lawyers for Google and the book industry more time to decide how to proceed after he rejected their deal to create a massive online library.

Federal Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan said Wednesday that it was fine for lawyers for Google and authors and publishers to return to his courtroom on July 19 to discuss how they want to proceed.

An attorney for the publishers, Bruce Keller, said he was speaking for all parties when he said they needed several more weeks to figure out all the issues.

Chin said the issues are complicated. In March, he ditched the deal that would have established a universal online library. He cited antitrust concerns and the need for involvement from Congress.

Sage Acquires Three Education Journals

June 4, 2011

SAGE, the world’s leading independent academic and professional publisher, today announced the purchase of three journals currently owned and published by Prufrock Press. The three titles, Gifted Child Today, Journal of Advanced Academics, and Journal for the Education of the Gifted, will move to SAGE in late 2011.

Gifted Child Today offers timely information about teaching and parenting gifted and talented children, and includes articles about topics such as teaching strategies in gifted education, building a more effective gifted and talented program, and working with gifted children with learning disabilities.

Journal of Advanced Academics publishes articles that feature: strategies for increasing academic achievement, programs that promote high levels of academic achievement and engagement, and programs that prepare students to engage in high-level and rigorous academics.

The Journal for the Education of the Gifted offers information and research on the educational and psychological needs of gifted and talented children. Committed to the analysis and communication of knowledge and research on gifted children, the journal acts as a highly respected voice for those involved with gifted and talented children. The Journal for the Education of the Gifted is the official publication of The Association for the Gifted (a division of the Council for Exceptional Children).

“SAGE is delighted to add these quality journals to our education collection,” said Jayne Marks, SAGE Vice President and Editorial Director, Library Information Group. “In particular, we are happy to be expanding upon our offerings in gifted education.”

SAGE is currently the leading publisher in the area of special education and gifted education. These journals join titles such as Gifted Child Quarterly to make up a collection of more than 40 global education and special education titles.

Prufrock Press will continue its 20-year history of providing award-winning products focused on gifted education, gifted children, advanced learning, and special needs learners. The company publishes more than 300 products that enhance the lives of gifted children and the teachers and parents who support them.

“The Prufrock Press journals will be right at home with those published by SAGE,” said Joel McIntosh, Prufrock Press President. “It was SAGE’s reputation for their expertise in publishing education and special education journals, as well as their relationships with the organizations behind those journals, that made them the right fit.

ProQuest Acquires BNI Nursing & Midwifery In The UK

June 1, 2011

ProQuest has acquired BNI, a cornerstone database for nursing and midwifery in the U.K. BNI — shortened from British Nursing Index — has been compiled through a partnership of the libraries at Bournemouth University, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the Royal College of Nursing and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust. ProQuest has built a long-term relationship with BNI through its distribution via Dialog, its business unit serving the professional market. Now, as the founding organizers seek to ensure the long-term health of the index, acquisition by ProQuest will ensure it continues to flourish.

“BNI provides a unique access point to information and is widely valued by health professionals,” said Marty Kahn, ProQuest CEO. “Not only will BNI continue, it will also be nurtured. We intend to retain its core identity and customer base, while expanding its appeal.”

“The sale to ProQuest represents the start of an exciting new chapter for BNI. We’re confident ProQuest can take this pivotal information resource to the next level,” said the BNI founding organizations in a joint statement.

Indexing more than 240 English-language titles — including essential international nursing and midwifery journals and selective content from medical, allied health and management titles — BNI is renowned for reliability and precision. Its editorial process relies upon indexing by librarians with experience in providing information services to nurses and midwives. The database is updated monthly, making it one of the most current bibliographic resources of its kind. ProQuest plans to invest in BNI, making it a full-text resource that expands well beyond the U.K. market. Content will continue to be accessed through the new ProQuest Dialog™ service and will ultimately be available on the all-new unified ProQuest platform, where it will be cross-searchable with all ProQuest content.

ProQuest is growing organically through a variety of groundbreaking technology and content initiatives and is also expanding through acquisitions. Earlier in 2011, ProQuest acquired ebrary, an innovative provider of e-books to libraries. In late 2010, the company acquired University Publications of American and Congressional Information Service, fueling growth for ProQuest in government information markets.