SUBSCRIBE NOW! Vol. 27 No. 6 — Nov/Dec 2003 Industry News Compiled by Suzanne Sabroski

A new German portal for scientific information, named Vascoda, debuted in August 2003 at the IFLA conference in Berlin. Established by 37 German libraries, research institutes, and other organizations and funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Society, the portal will act as a central source of large amounts of scientific literature that have been developed by public funding. Vascoda will allow for interdisciplinary searches and, in a later version, complex navigation and browsing. When possible, the information will be free. However, pay-per-view pricing for publisher-owned materials and commercial databases will also be available. Vascoda is the basis for the German Digital Library, consisting of 23 virtual specialized libraries (ViFas) covering social sciences, business, education, and psychology, as well as the hard sciences [www.vascoda.de].

Dialog Enhances Company Profiles; LexisNexis Enhances Company Dossier

Dialog Company Profiles (DCP), a stand-alone company and industry research tool accessible by a password separate from a standard Dialog account, offers profiles for nearly 500,000 publicly traded and privately owned companies from 188 countries. Newly added is information from Encyclopedia of American Industries, Encyclopedia of Emerging Industries, Encyclopedia of Global Industries, Market Share Reporter, and World Market Share Reporter, all Gale Group publications. The search interface now includes four search forms: Company, Industry, Articles, and Advanced Search. Industry search supports both SIC and NAICS codes. Topical links to recent articles have been added, as has the ability to limit by type of content, specific publications, and date. DCP has a flat-fee subscription [www.profiles.dialog.com].

LexisNexis has increased the number of companies covered in its Company Dossier to 10 million U.S. companies and 3 million non-U.S. companies, both private and public. Sources added include Courtlink, Martindale-Hubbell, and Mealey's litigation reports. These join D&B, Standard & Poor's, Directory of Corporate Affiliations, Canadian Business Profiles, Asian Company Profiles, and numerous worldwide news sources. Improved tabbing should make search choices more transparent. LexisNexis Industry Dossier provides in-depth information of over 1,000 U.S. industries, allowing for searches by industry name and SIC codes. Subscriptions to Company Dossier are at two levels—snapshot or complete—and will be available as an add-on subscription to Academic Universe [www.lexisnexis.com].

Legal

LexisNexis announced the availability of the official version of California's new plain-English civil jury instructions. The state adopted plain-English jury instructions in July 2003 to replace phrases like "preponderance of evidence" with language more easily understood by jurors. According to the California Rules of Court and Standards of Judicial Administration, the new plain-English instructions are the "official instructions for use in the state of California" and use of the instructions is "strongly encouraged." As official publisher, LexisNexis produces the jury instructions in print, CD, and online at lexis.com [937/865-8852; www.lexisnexis.com].

Thomson Delphion now offers searching of full-text patent specifications from the German national collection. With main claims back to 1968, this is the most comprehensive set of German patent data available. The collection includes applications, granted patents, and utility models. The integration of German data from INPADOC with the German national collection data and the presentation of both on the unique Delphion Integrated View allow users to see legal status and family data in the same view as they see the text, claims, and other bibliographic information [215/386-0100; 800/336-4474; www.isinet.com; www.delphion.com].

Business & Finance

Thomson Financial announced that new issues and syndicated loan data are available on Thomson ONE Banker-Deals, a Web-based interface that provides an extensive and flexible resource for intelligence on worldwide M&A, project finance, equity, bond, and syndicated loan transactions. Users receive instant access to industry standard league tables, volume analysis, and transaction lists, as well as the ability to drill down to transaction detail and create customized reports, league tables, and analysis [646/822-2000; www.thomson.com].

Mergent, Inc. announced the introduction of a product unique in the world of financial information providers: an accredited, indicated annual dividend service that projects a stock's dividend payments over the next 12 months. Though standard dividend projections are available in packages from other sources, Mergent's Indicated Annual Dividend (IAD) is the only stand-alone product available. In addition, only Mergent's IAD is derived from a proprietary formula that takes into account the company's quality per share dividend data [704/527-2700; www.mergent.com].

Alliances & Deals

IBM and Factiva announced an agreement in September to co-develop text analytics solutions built on the IBM WebFountain platform. Factiva is the first company to license IBM's WebFountain e-business on demand service and its text analytics technology. IBM's WebFountain is a Web-scale mining and discovery platform that extracts trends, patterns, and relationships from massive amounts of unstructured and semi-structured text. Factiva's first application on the WebFountain platform will track corporate reputation, offering an external view of a company's reputation by analyzing information from a comprehensive collection of Factiva sources, Internet pages, and newsgroups [IBM: 408/927-1285; www.us.ibm.com; Factiva: 609/627-2312; www.ibm.com].

Snapshots International and Content Directions, Inc. (CDI), the first commercial DOI Registration Agency, announced an agreement to register DOIs for Snapshots' entire collection of market research reports. Snapshots Reports currently cover 35 industries in 23 countries, and each report provides an instant overview of a market, with data supplied in both graphical and tabular formats. The DOI is an Internet-based system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property of all kinds; wherever the DOI is encountered—on Web sites, on Search Engines, within product reviews, within e-mails, and within downloaded content—it brings the user back to whatever information or services the publisher wishes to offer [Snapshots: +44 20 7829 8410; www.snapdata.com; Content Directions, Inc.: 718/965-8490; www.contentdirections.com].

Nstein Technologies Inc. has been engaged by Wiley InterScience to construct a working prototype using Nstein software to enhance the search and retrieval experience of Wiley InterScience's customer base [Nstein: 514/908-5406; www.nstein.com; Wiley InterScience: www3.interscience.wiley.com].

Serials Solutions, Inc. and NewsBank, Inc. announced an agreement to improve the accessibility and accuracy of electronic content for mutual subscribers. As part of this agreement, NewsBank electronically transfers metadata for its electronic content and titles to Serials Solutions. Serials Solutions uses the metadata, including journal specific links, to increase data accuracy and track more NewsBank databases through its suite of e-journal access products, including A-to-Z title lists, full MARC records and Article Linker—an OpenURL link resolver [Serials Solutions: 866/737-4257; www.serialssolutions.com; NewsBank: 800/762-8182; www.newsbank.com].

Sci-Tech

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) launched an on-demand search service, Science IP, designed to meet the needs of information professionals, attorneys, and others in the patenting and R&D communities who do not have the time, staff, or expertise to meet their scientific information retrieval needs. Science IP reports will support decisions such as prior art/patentability for the prosecution of new patents, freedom-to-practice/operate for new and existing technologies, and patent validity for infringement litigation.In addition to employing industry experts in patents and scientific searching and retrieval as researchers, Science IP will draw upon a team of CAS scientists with in-depth knowledge of specialized areas [800/753-4227; 614/447-3731; www.cas.org].

Wiley InterScience announced the launch of a new interface, the result of a comprehensive redesign of the site's underlying information architecture and its graphical interface. At its commercial launch in 1999, Wiley InterScience was primarily an online journals service, but has since developed an extensive range of content that goes beyond journals, including multi-volume Reference Works and libraries of OnlineBooks, to Current Protocols and a suite of chemistry databases that incorporates sophisticated structure-search technology [201/748-6484; +44 20-8326-3865; www.interscience.wiley.com].

An RSS Primer for Publishers and Content Providers has been published by EEVL, the Internet guide for engineering, mathematics, and computing of Heriot-Watt University. RSS provides a way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any Web site that publishes content such as news, jobs, products, or events on a regular basis. An RSS file enables other sites to syndicate the content and thereby reach new audiences [+44(0) 131 451 3576; www.eevl.ac.uk].

The Thomson Corporation has acquired Techstreet, Inc., a digital content delivery company that provides full-text industry standards and specifications to engineers, researchers, and technical and information professionals from the world's leading Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), including the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the British Standards Institution (BSI), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Most documents can be obtained in both print and electronic format, via subscription or single document delivery. Searchable online, the content covers research, design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection in industries such as electrical and electronics, petrochemical, architecture and construction, food safety and public health, wastewater engineering, information technology, and aerospace/aviation [215/386-0100; www.isinet.com].

Peopleware

Sirsi Corporation announced that Marty Keeley, a veteran of technology and book distribution companies serving the library community, has joined the company as vice president of strategic initiatives.

Inmagic, Inc. announced the appointment of David M. Darsch, a strategic business advisor with 24 years of entrepreneurial and technology management experience, as chairman of the board of directors. Mr. Darsch, who has served on the Inmagic board since 1999, replaces Karen Brothers, an Inmagic co-founder, who has served as chair since 1998 and will remain on the board. Inmagic, Inc. also announced the appointment of Lourdes Engel as vice president of engineering. Ms. Engel will be responsible for guiding the development team as it expands the company's new content management product, Inmagic Content Server, as well as the rest of Inmagic's family of information management products.

MuseGlobal, Inc. announced that Emily Fayen, formerly with Information Quest, RoweCom/divine's online database of scientific, technical, and medical journal literature, has joined the company as vice president for digital content and access.

Portals & Intranets

Advanced Technology Libraries (AT/L) has selected information distribution and retrieval service ebrary to provide librarians with freely viewable, online access to its digital archives.ebrary provides a platform for securely distributing newsletters, magazines, and other publications online in an environment that maintains the exact appearance of the printed editions. Advanced Technology Libraries offers a concise monthly review of information technology relevant to libraries [www.advancedtechnologylibraries.com; ebrary: 770/725-0585; www.ebrary.com].

MuseGlobal, Inc. and Kreutzfeldt Electronic Publishing of Hamburg, Germany, have announced Deutsches eBook-Portal, the first Web site serving as a point of access to more than 2,000 e-books in the German language. Visitors to the portal can simultaneously search the databases of six large e-book shops. To purchase an e-book, the MuseSearch software links the buyer to the corresponding page of the shop selling the title [MuseGlobal: 775/832-6698; www.museglobal.com; Kreutzfeldt: +49-40-819 514-81; www.kreutzfeldt.de; www.ebookportal.de].

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) and the University of Bielefeld (Germany) announced an agreement to further promote the development and implementation of search technology for the benefit of the online academic information landscape. With over 8,500 electronic journals available in full text versions, the Bielefeld University Library provides its users with searching catalogues, multimedia textbooks, subject portals, and a library catalog with both electronic and printed documents recorded. The collaboration will include the deployment of FAST Data Search at Bielefeld University Library and a partnership with FAST to further educate academic libraries worldwide on the benefits of online information access [FAST: 781/304-2495; www.fastsearch.com; www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/].

Online Services

Swets Blackwell announced plans to change its company name to Swets Information Services in December 2003. As part of the agreement with Blackwell concerning the purchase of shares from the Swets Blackwell joint venture, the Blackwell trade name will no longer be used for subscription activities. The use of the Blackwell name will continue to be used for the renowned chain of Blackwell bookstores [+31 252 435 111; www.swetsblackwell.com].

JSTOR joins the data sources accessible via WilsonWeb's WilsonLink. Customers who subscribe to WilsonWeb and who are JSTOR participants are able to link directly to the full-text articles in the JSTOR archive of 320 scholarly journals via WilsonWeb's SFX-powered open-URL linking technology. This SFX-powered technology is licensed from ExLibris and is available with every WilsonWeb subscription [800/367-6770; www.hwwilson.com].

In the spirit of the California recall, Factiva launched its first media visibility metric service that tracks the visibility of high-profile election candidates. The Factiva Index is a new tool to show a quantitative snapshot of the media's most widely covered people, events, or companies within a given time frame. Factiva can collect and index extensive amounts of data from thousands of local, national, and international newspapers, news wires, magazines, and journals and weed out extraneous press mentions that are not timely or are irrelevant to the searched subject. The California Recall Factiva Index became available via Business Wire in September. Other Factiva Index topics include a monthly snapshot of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Two new subscription options for individuals or small businesses in need of conducting occasional business research are now available from Factiva. Subscribers can access content direct from Factiva or via links in The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. Individual subscription users can search Factiva content using any of seven language interfaces: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, or Russian [609/627-2312; www.factiva.com].

Social Sciences & Humanities

The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) is now available through the Internet Database Service from CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts). The IBSS database provides coverage of the core social science disciplines of sociology, politics, economics, and anthropology, containing more than 2 million records published since 1951. International in scope, a quarter of the IBSS database reflects materials not originally published in English. IBSS also features extensive coverage of books and monographs [www.csa.com/csa/factsheets/ibss.shtml].

Project MUSE, an online collection of scholarly journals in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Arts, announced new journals joining the project in 2004. Among its participating publishers for 2004 are the University of Toronto Press, Singapore University Press, and the Indian Institute for Population Studies (Thailand). The new journals will expand MUSE 's coverage in diverse areas, including music, area studies, film studies, demography, literature, and legal studies. Project MUSEalso recently added a For Librarians page to its Web site, designed to help librarians find out more about MUSE and make the most out of a MUSE subscription [410/902-8712; http://muse.jhu.edu].

Biomedical

Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, has signed an agreement to secure the long-term digital archiving of all research published by BioMed Central. As well as archiving all of the publisher's research articles, the KB has committed to updating the archive as technology changes. This will preserve the articles as a usable resource and ensure open access in perpetuity. BioMed Central's rapidly growing collection, currently 100 journals and more than 2,500 articles, will be freely available in keeping with the publisher's open access policy, both to walk-in visitors to the KB and via the library's Web site [www.kb.nl; www.biomedcentral.com].

Kluwer Academic Publishers announced its participation in the second phase of the philanthropic project Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI). The initiative is a major aspect of the Health InterNetwork project introduced by United Nations' Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000. The project aims to strengthen public health services by providing public health workers, researchers, and policy-makers with access to health information through an Internet portal. Each publisher is free to determine which countries and which journals they include in HINARI. Kluwer will include 140 medical journals [+31 78 657 6542; www.kluweronline.com].

Monkeypoxis a rare viral disease usually found in the rainforests of Central and West Africa. With several confirmed cases appearing recently in the United States, EMBASE.com has highlighted its coverage of this rare disease. The first published scientific reports about the U.S. monkeypox outbreak began appearing in June 2003, with more literature accumulating every week. A substantial collection of references to the world's monkeypox literature with information about its cause, transmission, and treatment is available. With daily updating, EMBASE is the most current indexed bibliographic database in biomedicine available today. Fully indexed article citations are usually searchable online within 2 weeks after original publication [+31 20 485 3507; www.embase.com].