COLUMNS & NEWS
NewsBytes
Nstein Technologies Acquires Valsar
Nstein Technologies, Inc. announced that it has acquired
Valsar Consulting Group, a firm specializing in the
integration of IT solutions for large corporations
and organizations. According to the announcement, Valsar
is known for its business intelligence, program and
project management, and business process engineering.
The firm has reported nearly 20 percent annual growth
in recent years and is forecasting $4 million in revenues
and 10 percent profitability for the current year.
According to the announcement, this acquisition will
allow Nstein to benefit from Valsar's business information
and program and project management expertise, expand
its potential clientele, offer its information management
solutions to Valsar's customers, and bring in European
business. Also, Valsar's team of experts will play
the role of intermediary, facilitating exchanges between
Nstein's research and development team and the major
integrators, who will be in a position to offer their
customers substantial value with Nstein's technology
platform.
Source: Nstein Technologies, Inc., Montreal, 514/908-5406; http://www.nstein.com.
SpringerLink Adds More than 650 Titles
MetaPress announced that it has extended its agreement
with Springer, part of Springer Science+Business Media,
to add more than 650 STM journals from Kluwer Academic
Publishing (KAP) to SpringerLink (http://www.springerlink.com).
This agreement was extended as a result of the merger
between Springer-Verlag, MetaPress' largest customer,
and KAP, under the new name Springer. The addition
of this content makes MetaPress the largest primary
host of STM content in the world.
SpringerLink is the content delivery Web site for
Springer. Since May 2003, MetaPress has been upgrading
SpringerLink as a branded site for Springer Science+Business
Media's electronic publishing, marketing, hosting,
and commercial sales activity.
Of their partnership with MetaPress, Derk Haank,
CEO of Springer Science+Business Media, said: "This
agreement marks a milestone in combining the electronic
content of the two newly merged publishing companies.
Technical know-how from MetaPress and 1,250 journals
that are now on offer via joint platform will guarantee
us a leading position in electronic publishing worldwide."
Source: MetaPress, Birmingham, AL, 205/981-4007; http://www.metapress.com.
Hummingbird Announces Integration with LexisNexis
Total Search
Hummingbird, Ltd., a provider of integrated enterprise
content management solutions, and LexisNexis have announced
the integration of Hummingbird Enterprise and LexisNexis
Total Search V.2. The combined technologies will provide
increased flexibility and improve knowledge-sharing
capabilities for legal professionals.
LexisNexis Total Search, a Web browser-based application,
allows legal professionals to search the lexis.com
service while simultaneously searching the law firm's
internal work product stored in the Hummingbird DM
repositories. According to the announcement, legal
teams can fully utilize the intellectual property and
collective expertise already residing within the firm
and deliver the highest quality work product to colleagues
and clients more efficiently.
Hummingbird Enterprise provides an integrated suite
of practice management solutions for legal teams to
securely access, manage, and share work product within
the firm and with clients. Firm know-how and work product
is protected and preserved in a secure, centralized
workspace. Legal professionals gain a competitive advantage
by ensuring best practices, precedent, and expertise
are retained and organized.
Source: Hummingbird, Ltd., Toronto, 416/496-2200; http://www.hummingbird.com.
Blue Ribbon Panel Takes on Future of NISO
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
announced that 11 experts from industry, academia,
and the library community have accepted seats on NISO's
Blue Ribbon Panel, which will evaluate the progress,
challenges, and opportunities of NISO. The panel will
play a central role in the yearlong strategic planning
exercise, which NISO's board of directors launched
in May. The Mellon Foundation has provided funding
in support of the panel. The panel's formal report
will be open for public review and comment later this
year.
Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition
for Networked Information, has accepted the role of
panel chair. He said: "The landscape for making and
using standards has changed drastically in the last
few years, raising new issues and choices for NISO.
A key goal of this panel is to take a dispassionate,
external, and multidimensional look at this landscape
to offer guidance and frame possible futures for the
NISO board. And I am sure I speak for everyone on the
panel in saying that we are glad to be of help to NISO
at this important juncture in its organizational evolution."
Source: NISO, Bethesda, MD, 301/654-2512; http://www.niso.org.
Elsevier Signs Agreement to Aid New Zealand Researchers
Elsevier announced that a new agreement has been
signed with members of the New Zealand Vice Chancellors'
Committee (NZVCC) and the Association of Crown Research
Institutes (ACRI) that will provide New Zealand researchers
with access to vital scientific and medical information.
Funding to support access to core electronic information
came about as a result of a joint project application
from NZVCC and ACRI to the Tertiary Education Commission's (http://www.tec.govt.nz) Innovation
and Development Fund (IDF). The IDF is a contestable
fund whose purpose is to foster innovation in New Zealand's
tertiary education organizations.
As a result of the project application's success,
researchers from eight universities and nine Crown
Research Institutes have complete access to 1,900 full-text
journals on ScienceDirect under the Freedom Collection
package. Three polytechnics were also involved in the
project, and they will have access to journals in their
required fields through ScienceDirect Subject Collections.
According to the announcement, New Zealand has a
history of producing top-quality research in science
and technology, and the recent investment in Elsevier's
ScienceDirect Freedom Collection is a clear indication
of the country's commitment to science.
Source: Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 011-31-20-4853507; http://www.elsevier.com.
Swets Joins Ingenta's Subscription-Activation
Initiative
Ingenta, Inc. announced that Swets Information Services
has joined its initiative to simplify the online access
of e-journals for the 17,000 libraries that currently
use ingenta.com.
Building on an existing process of exchanging subscription
data from some publishers with Ingenta, Swets joins
a number of other key subscription agents in providing
Ingenta with their data in order that a library's access
can be reconciled automatically using Ingenta's unique
authentication system. Now that 98 percent of the 260
publishers represented by Ingenta have agreed to follow
this process and trust the data supplied by their agents,
Swets and Ingenta confirmed that they will work together
this way.
Using this process, libraries have seamless, pre-configured
access via Ingenta to their journals purchased through
subscription agents. With other Web services, libraries
have to manually communicate each of the titles they
subscribe to in order to activate online access. Now
they can simply instruct their agents to send Ingenta
their subscriptions lists for immediate online access.
Source: Ingenta, Providence, RI, 401/331-2014; http://www.ingenta.com.
ASERL Supports Launch of Alliance for Taxpayer
Access
The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
(ASERL) has joined 3 dozen national organizations in
launching the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), an
informal coalition of libraries, patient and health
advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms
that will make publicly funded biomedical research
affordably accessible to the public. The ATA proposal,
if enacted by the NIH and Congress, would bring sweeping
changes to the way Americans access the results of
federally funded medical research.
"ASERL is proud to be part of the Alliance for Taxpayer
access," said ASERL board president Barbara Dewey of
the University of Tennessee. "American taxpayers have
supported NIH-funded research for decades, but economic
constraints are increasingly impeding access to the
results of that research. Today, we are asking for
the results of these investments to be made freely
available to taxpayers through an open access archive.
Our faculty, students, and the general public would
all benefit from this access."
"The proposal presented for consideration by NIH and
on Capitol Hill does not change the traditional peer-review
and scholarly publishing process," said John Burger,
ASERL executive director. "It simply ensures free public
access to the archives of previously reported information
that was funded by the American public. It's clearly
the right thing to do."
Source: Association of Southeastern Research Libraries,
Atlanta, 404/892-0943; http://www.aserl.org.
CAS Science Spotlight Tallies Real-Time Document
Requests
CAS announced that recording how often a journal's
contents are cited in scientific literature has long
been the conventional way of measuring the importance
of specific publications and even of the authors themselves.
However, the widespread availability of electronic
journals on the Web has enabled CAS to provide a new
measurement: a tally of researchers' actual requests
(real-time document requests or RDRs) for full-text
articles transmitted via CAS search services. The latest
rankings are now available on the Web, free of charge,
through CAS Science Spotlight.
According to the announcement, CAS Science Spotlight
taps into the aggregated research activity of thousands
of scientists who use CAS information products, then
highlights the most requested articles in chemistry
and related sciences. CAS is projecting 11 million
RDRs in 2004. Visitors to the free Science Spotlight
Web site (http://www.cas.org/spotlight/index.html) can
compare the "Most Cited" articles of 2003 versus the "Most
Requested" articles of 2003. Typically, there is little
if any correlation between the two lists. This possibly
indicates that authors sometimes cite articles mainly
because they have been cited by other researchers.
Source: CAS, Columbus, OH, 614/447-3731; http://www.cas.org.
BCR Partners with Collaborative Digitization
Program
The Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR), a
nonprofit, multistate library cooperative serving more
than 3,000 libraries throughout the western U.S., has
announced a new partnership with the Collaborative
Digitization Program (CDP).
The CDP (formerly known as the Colorado Digitization
Project) is a collaborative initiative involving libraries,
archives, historical societies, and museums also in
the western U.S. The CDP has gained a national reputation
for its training, articulation of digitization "best
practices," and metadata tools. Under the new partnership,
BCR will offer CDP digitization workshops as part of
its regular BCR training program.
This new alliance will allow the Collaborative Digitization
Program to benefit from BCR's assistance in promoting
and providing an infrastructure for CDP's digitization
workshops, while CDP contributes the trainers and subject
expertise. The training will offer BCR member libraries
instruction in digital imaging and the range of issues
associated with digitizing primary source materials.
It will also provide information on Dublin Core metadata,
digital audio, and teaching with digitized primary
sources.
Source: Bibliographical Center for Research, Aurora,
CO, 303/751-6277; http://www.bcr.org.
Swets Information Services Adds Eight Publishers
Swets Information Services announced that it has
recently signed eight new publishers to SwetsWise Online
Content. SwetsWise is the Web-based, modular service
for the procurement, access, and management of subscriptions
and online information. SwetsWise now carries a total
of 8,485 full-text e-journals from 319 publishers,
with more than 90 percent of the top STM publishers
participating.
SwetsWise has signed the following publishers:
• Academy of Traumatology
• American School for Classical Studies
at Athens
• Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
• BC Decker
• IAHS Press
• Medknow Publications
• Palgrave Macmillan
• Pharmacotherapy Publications, Inc.
Swets Information Services is an outsourcing and
facilitating partner for the acquisition, access, and
management of scholarly, business, and professional
information.
Source: Swets Information Services, Lisse, Netherlands,
011-31-252-435-389; http://www.swets.com.
netLibrary to Distribute Penguin Titles
netLibrary, a provider of e-books to libraries worldwide,
has signed a distribution agreement with Penguin Group
(USA), an affiliate of Penguin Group, the world's second-largest
English-language trade book publisher.
"We are very excited to be working with netLibrary," said
Peter McCarthy, vice president and executive director
of Penguin Group (USA) Online. "Getting the works of
our authors to readers everywhere—regardless of
what format is used to do so—is core to Penguin's
mission. We believe netLibrary has the perfect mix
in an e-book partner: a long-standing understanding
of their customers, great relationships, solid technology,
and a fundamental understanding of, and respect for,
publishing."
Penguin Group (USA) publishes under some of the most
prominent and most respected imprints and trademarks
in American publishing, including Berkley Books, New
American Library, Penguin, G. P. Putnam's Sons, and
Viking. Penguin's roster of best-selling authors includes
Patricia Cornwell, Nick Hornby, Eric Jerome Dickey,
Stephen King, Amy Tan, Al Franken, Catherine Coulter,
and hundreds of others.
Source: netLibrary, Boulder, CO, 303/415-2548; http://www.netlibrary.com.
Ontario Consortium Makes RefWorks Available Systemwide
The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL)
and RefWorks, LLC have announced an agreement that
will make RefWorks, the Web-based bibliographic management
tool, available to all OCUL members for the next 3
years.
RefWorks allows users to create personal databases
of bibliographic records and access them from any Internet-connected
resource. Users can utilize these databases to generate
footnotes and bibliographies, collaborate on research,
or disseminate references. The OCUL RefWorks system
will be hosted at the University of Toronto, which
will provide access for all 20 OCUL members.
OCUL joins a growing list of consortia subscribing
to RefWorks. Presently, RefWorks is available through
consortia based in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Established in 1967, OCUL has a long history of collaboration
and cooperation among its member institutions. OCUL's
Ontario Scholars Portal initiative supports more than
350,000 faculty and students in the Ontario universities
by drawing together, in a unified framework, access
to electronic full-text resources, index and abstract
databases, numerical and statistical data, and geospatial
data.
Source: RefWorks, Bethesda, MD, 301/961-6700; http://www.refworks.com.
LexisNexis Completes Acquisition of Seisint,
Inc.
LexisNexis U.S. announced that it has closed on its
acquisition of Seisint, Inc., a U.S.-based provider
of information management products and services, for
$775 million. LexisNexis is a member of Reed Elsevier
Group, PLC.
Seisint will become part of the LexisNexis U.S. Risk
Management business of the Corporate and Federal Markets
division. The LexisNexis Risk Management business includes
flagship products such as RiskWise, PeopleWise, and
Banko. Risk Management products and services are used
by lawyers, financial services, insurance, telecommunications
and retail businesses, the federal government, and
law enforcement agencies. Those products and services
are used to authenticate identity, predict fraud, and
control credit and fraud losses to improve risk assessment
and communicate with customers during the customer-management
cycle. LexisNexis PeopleWise services help companies
create better, more productive workplaces through pre-employment
screening and background checking.
The technology and products developed by Seisint
will fortify the LexisNexis capabilities in identity
authentication, fraud prevention, credit, and security
risk products. The acquisition will allow LexisNexis
to offer its customers expanded data, technology, and
product offerings.
Source: LexisNexis U.S., Dayton, OH, 937/865-6800; http://www.lexisnexis.com.
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