Member News & Announcements, February IO 2020
News from NISO Members
Product Innovation
Proquest’s TDM studio Service Transforms Text and Data Mining with Efficiency, Flexibility and Power
Proquest, Voting Member, News Announcement, January 24, 2020
Researchers will now be able to uncover new connections and make new discoveries using ProQuest’s TDM Studio service, a pioneering end-to-end solution for text and data mining. TDM Studio puts the power of text and data mining directly into the researcher’s hands, from their initial idea to their final output.
With this new solution, creating a content set has been reduced to hours, rather than the months required with traditional approaches. TDM Studio gives researchers the freedom to use the content, methods and tools they prefer – and to collaborate on projects both within and outside their university.
Ex Libris to Expand Its Offering with the Cloud-Based User-Centric Rapido Resource Sharing Solution
Ex Libris, Inc., Voting Member, Press Release, January 24, 2020
Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that it has begun the development of its new Rapido™ solution for resource sharing and has established the Rapido development partner program. Rapido is built on the Ex Libris higher‑ed cloud platform and will be live by the end of 2020.
Nine U.S. schools—California State University (CSU) Dominguez Hills, CSU Fullerton, CSU LA, CSU San Marcos, Humboldt State University, Bethel University, St. Olaf College, the University of St. Thomas, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison—are participating in the program, along with four Australian institutions—Macquarie University, Monash University, the University of Adelaide, and Australia’s national science agency the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Taylor & Francis Online Support Clinical Trial Data Linking
Taylor & Francis Group, Voting Member, Press Release, January 15, 2020
Taylor & Francis Online (tandfonline.com) now links clinical trial data to published articles and automatically deposits this data to Crossref and PubMed, when authors supply the clinical trial numbers within a manuscript.
This new development will enrich the PubMed metadata record and establish a permanent link between the published article and any clinical trials related to it using functionality provided by Crossref.
Wiley Launches Mastery-Based Adaptive Courseware for Calculus
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Voting Member, Press Release, January 15, 2020
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb), a global leader in research and education, today announced the launch of Knewton Alta Calculus, a fully-digital, mastery-based adaptive learning product. Built on Knewton Alta – an affordable, integrated, personalized learning platform – the new courseware is designed to deliver a tailored learning experience to improve students’ comprehension and performance. This is the first new course offering since Wiley acquired Knewton in May 2019.
CAS Rolls Out New Predictive Retrosynthetic Capabilities in SciFinder
American Chemical Society (ACS), Voting Member, Press Release, January 13, 2020
As part of their continued commitment to helping R&D leaders accelerate scientific discovery, today CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, announced the launch of a breakthrough retrosynthetic capability in SciFindern. This computer-aided synthetic design (CASD) solution utilizes AI technology, powered by CAS’s unmatched collection of scientist-curated reaction content and leverages John Wiley and Sons, Inc.’s award-winning ChemPlanner technology to now identify predicted retrosynthetic routes for both known and novel compounds.
“Synthetic planning is a critical step in the R&D pipeline and is often a significant bottleneck impeding speed to market” says Tim Wahlberg, Vice President, Product Management at CAS. “Customers have responded enthusiastically to the new retrosynthetic capabilities we launched in SciFindern last year, and we are excited to extend this technology with predictive enhancements that allow chemists to be significantly more innovative, more confident, and more efficient.”
Libraries and Archives
$1.2 Million Digitization Project Expands Access to Newspapers in Florida and the Caribbean
University of Florida Libraries, Voting Member, News Announcement, January 17, 2020
The Florida & Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project (FPRDNP) has officially come to an end. A collaborative $923,000 project between the University of Florida (UF) George A. Smathers Libraries and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP) library system, the FPRDNP has provided access to hundreds of digitized pages of historic newspapers from Florida and Puerto Rico that were previously found only on microfilm.
Though the FPRNDP has ended, newspaper digitization efforts for the state and its Caribbean partners continue. In August 2019, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the UF Libraries $309,000 (bringing the project total to over $1.2million) to continue its digitization efforts alongside UPR-RP under the US Caribbean & Ethnic Florida Newspaper Project (USCFNP). This new collaborative project builds on the efforts of the FPRDNP to continue digitizing historic newspapers from the territory and state, with a focus on digitizing ethnic newspapers from Florida. The USCFNP also expands the scope of the FPRDNP to include digitization of historic newspapers published in the Virgin Islands with the help from a new partner, the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI).
OCLC awarded Mellon Foundation grant to develop infrastructure to support linked data management initiatives
OCLC, Voting Member, Press Release, January 9, 2020
OCLC has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a shared "Entity Management Infrastructure" that will support linked data management initiatives underway in the library and scholarly communications community. When complete, this infrastructure will be jointly curated by the community and OCLC, and will ultimately make scholarly materials more connected and discoverable on the web.
The two-year grant, for $2.436 million, will support work on the project that will run from January 2020 to December 2021. The Mellon grant funding represents approximately half of the total cost of the Entity Management Infrastructure project. OCLC is contributing the remaining half of the required investment.
CLIR Announces 2019 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives Awards
Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Voting Member, News Announcement, January 9, 2020
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) today announced the award of more than $4.1 million to fund 18 projects for 2019 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards. Fifty-eight institutions located in seventeen U.S. states and Canada will be involved in the projects, which cover subjects ranging from natural history and biodiversity to indigenous history, public media, and modern art. This is the first year in which an awarded project includes Canadian partner institutions.
Infrastructure and Platforms
Crossref Turns 20
Crossref, Voting Member, Blog Posting, January 14, 2020
On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organization was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”.
Our history document notes that Crossref grew more quickly than expected, “By the end of 2003, CrossRef had 300 members with 12 million DOIs assigned, compared to the initial projection of 60 participating publishers and 3 million DOIs assigned.” Looking at the 2010 annual report at the ten year mark, Crossref had 43 million content items, 943 members and 15 staff. Since then, Crossref has continued to grow faster than expected and, in fact, at the start of of 20th year, growth is increasing. Our latest annual report “Crossref Annual Report & Fact File 2018-19” highlights that there we have 111 million content items - an average annual increase of 15%; over 11,500 members with over 180 joining per month - an average annual increase of 112%; and 37 staff - an average annual increase of 7%. Crossref is also financially stable, having generated surpluses every year since 2003 and with no fee increases in 15 years - an effective 30%+ decrease for members.
Portico Access Alert: Effective Clinical Practice
ITHAKA/JSTOR/Portico, Voting Member, News Announcement, January 7, 2020
The Portico archive now hosts the content from Effective Clinical Practice, a journal published by the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine and the Alliance of Community Health Plans from 1998 to 2002.
The content for this title will no longer be available through the platform of the American College of Physicians; therefore, it has “triggered” and is available to the community via the Portico archive. This journal is freely available through Portico.
Partnerships
EBSCO and Code Ocean Partnership
EBSCO Information Services and Code Ocean, NISO Voting Members, Press Release, January 21, 2020
A new strategic partnership between EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and Code Ocean will provide to the global research community a platform to facilitate the sharing and reuse of computational code and data. It guarantees the reproducibility of reported research, and it makes research open, organized, accessible and interoperable.
EBSCO’s investment and reseller agreement highlights the critical importance that it assigns to promoting and supporting those requirements. Building upon Code Ocean’s current success with publishers, EBSCO will act as a partner, extending the potential reach and impact of Code Ocean to institutions around the world.
Open Access, Open Science
Carnegie Mellon University Joins Universities in Open Access Deal with ACM
Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, January 22, 2020
Carnegie Mellon University has joined three leading universities in entering into transformative open access agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society.
Carnegie Mellon reached the agreement with some of ACM’s largest institutional customers, including the University of California (UC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Iowa State University (ISU). CMU is the single biggest contributor to ACM.
The agreements, which run for three-year terms beginning January 1, 2020, cover both access to and open access publication in ACM’s journals, proceedings and magazines for these universities, and represent the first transformative open access agreements for ACM.
The Impact of Open Access Latin American Scholarship
ITHAKA/JSTOR/Portico, Voting Member, News Announcement, December 20, 2019
In 2018, JSTOR received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the digitization of 680 out-of-print titles from El Colegio de México Press and the dissemination of those titles on an openly accessible basis.
In a new white paper, we document the significance of this work, the process used to select and digitize titles, and what we’ve learned about the usage of this collection. We hope this will benefit other initiatives interested in increasing access to out-of-print materials.
The usage of the ebooks has been significant. Every single title has been used, with more than 500,000 total uses. The data show that there is a broad audience for this scholarship; the titles have been used in 173 countries and territories. On average, the Colmex ebooks are used 57% as much as Open Access titles in English on our platform—an impressive amount of usage of Spanish-language titles on a primarily English-language scholarly content site.
Financials, Mergers and Acquisitions
Springer Nature revives IPO plans
Springer Nature, Voting Member, Featured Article, January 16, 2020
Spring Nature, the publisher of science magazines Nature and Scientific American, is reviving plans for a stock market listing, two years after a first attempt fell through, people close to the matter said.
Its owners, buyout group BC Partners and publisher Holtzbrinck, are working with a new bank consortium led by Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N) on the deal, which may value the company at 7-8 billion euros ($7.8-8.9 billion), including debt, they added.
BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA) and Citi (C.N) are among those helping as so-called bookrunners with the initial public offering which could take place as early as May or June, they added.
F1000 Research Joins Taylor & Francis Group
Taylor & Francis Group, Voting Member, Press Release, January 10, 2020
Leading specialist academic publisher Taylor & Francis Group, part of Informa plc, has today announced the addition of cutting-edge open research publisher F1000 Research Ltd.
United by their shared goals of amplifying and democratizing research, the addition is an important further step in strengthening Taylor & Francis’ capabilities in open access and open research and extending its range of innovative publishing services.
Government Initiatives
ARL Comments on Draft NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing
Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Voting Member, News Announcement, January 9, 2020
On November 6, 2019, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a request for public comments on a DRAFT NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing and supplemental DRAFT guidance. NIH has a long history of promoting public access to the research it funds, including policies for sharing scientific data generated from large awards, genomic data, and data from clinical trials.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) welcomes the opportunity to comment on these new draft policies, expanding the guidance on data sharing to all extramural awards, contracts, intramural research projects, and other funding agreements.