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Member News & Announcements, July IO 2021

Member News & Announcements, July IO 2021

June 2021

Product Innovation

Equipping time-strapped clinicians with evidence-based orthopaedic research summaries from OrthoEvidence
Wolters Kluwer, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 17, 2021

To help clinicians stay current on orthopaedic and musculoskeletal research, Wolters Kluwer, Health announced today that Ovid® users will now have access to OrthoEvidence, a first of its kind evidence-based summary provider for orthopaedic specialists, surgeons, nurses, medical residents and students.

“Due to the pace of medical research that we are seeing today and the abundance of new information, it’s nearly impossible for clinicians to keep up with the latest evidence in their specialty,” said Vikram Savkar, Vice President and General Manager, Medicine Segment of Health Learning, Research & Practice at Wolters Kluwer. “Ovid has long helped clinicians sift through the high volume of information as a single source for expert medical research and guidance. Now, the digestible summaries in OrthoEvidence will help clinicians interested in orthopaedics even more rapidly implement the latest evidence in their patient care.”

Medical Research from Karolinska Institutet Now Available in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global Collection
ProQuest, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 2, 2021

The Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden has joined the ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses publishing program and will now contribute its PhD theses to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global® (PQDT), the leading global source of emerging research from universities around the world.

Stockholm-based KI is globally known for selecting the winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the past 120 years. Full-text works spanning the whole field of medicine are now accessible by PQDT users globally and will be broadly discoverable via citations in major subject indexes and Google Scholar, giving KI’s authors more visibility and recognition for their research output. KI can also track, monitor and see trends in the usage of their theses by other institutions around the world with the new ETD Dashboard.

Dissertations and theses often provide the most up-to-date, comprehensive and sometimes unique research on a particular subject. Now, researchers at more than 3,100 universities from around the world will have access to medical theses and dissertations authored by KI graduates.

Partnerships & Collaborations

Taylor & Francis strengthens its partnership with the Research Data Alliance (RDA)
Taylor & Francis Group, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 28, 2021

Taylor & Francis has joined the Research Data Alliance (RDA) as an organizational member, strengthening ties with a leading data organization that is focused on facilitating data reuse and open data sharing.

RDA is a multi-stakeholder community who work collaboratively and creatively together to overcome barriers to data sharing. The key players in the RDA community are researchers, librarians, data professionals, repositories, infrastructure groups and publishers. Taylor & Francis colleagues have been involved in RDA working groups for many years, chairing or participating working groups on data sharing policies, repository guidance and handling specific subject-based data. This enhanced partnership highlights our shared goal of supporting researchers to openly share data in order to improve discoverability, reproducibility and quality of research.

IOP Publishing collaborates with OpenAthens and SeamlessAccess to improve user experience
IOP Publishing, and OpenAthens, Voting Members, News Announcement, June 9, 2021

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has enhanced access to scientific research by streamlining its online authentication process for researchers. IOPP achieved this by working with world-leading identity and access management specialist, OpenAthens, and the global cross-stakeholder SeamlessAccess organisation.

The trio collaborated to enhance the user login journey to access research published by IOPP.

Integration of the two services will enable users of IOPScience, IOPP’s online content platform, to move seamlessly between publisher websites. This supports researchers accessing information remotely. Wayfinder, OpenAthens’ organisational discovery service, is already being used by IOPP. This project sought to integrate it with the SeamlessAccess service to give users an industry leading, simplified sign-on process.

Open Access, Open Science, Open Source

JSTOR releases design system as open source
ITHAKA/JStor/Portico, Voting Member, New Announcement, June 24, 2021

JSTOR’s platform team has publicly released Pharos, JSTOR’s new design system, as open source. The system serves as a guide for ITHAKA’s product teams to create cohesive, supportive, and beautiful experiences for JSTOR’s users.

We wrote a detailed account of the team’s journey in creating a design system from the ground up. Our hope is that by sharing Pharos, it will help others in the design and product development community learn from our experience. We also hope they will help us strengthen Pharos with their feedback and contributions.

EBSCO Information Services Releases the EBSCO eBooks™ Open Access Monograph Collection
EBSCO Information Services, Voting Member, Press Release, June 17, 2021

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is releasing a new e-book collection containing thousands of high-quality open access (OA) e-books from the world’s most trusted university presses and scholarly publishers. The EBSCO eBooks™ Open Access Monograph Collection is DRM-free and available at no cost on the EBSCOhost® platform and easily discoverable via EBSCO Discovery Service.

The EBSCO eBooks Open Access Monograph Collection was created in collaboration with university presses and scholarly OA publishers such as University of Michigan Press, Taylor & Francis and Temple University Press to provide libraries and end users with choice and access to a large selection of discoverable content, which will continue to grow by the thousands. With the collection, libraries gain access to all current and future OA e-books with DRM-free access on the EBSCO platform, providing a consistent user experience with other e-books in the library’s collection.

Infrastructure and Platforms

Ex Libris Rapido Platform Goes Live with First Four Customers
Ex Libris, Inc., Voting Member, Press Release, June 10, 2021

Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that the first four implementations of the Rapido™ resource sharing platform have now gone live.

The development of the Rapido platform began in late 2019, when Ex Libris teamed up with a group of early adopters and development partners in the United States, Europe, and Australia. This collaboration afforded Ex Libris an opportunity to hear customers’ voices and create a solution tailored to the needs of resource-sharing institutions.

The aim of the Rapido platform is to make resource sharing an outstanding experience for library patrons and staff. To this end, the development has adhered to the principles articulated by the Big Ten Academic Alliance and other institutions.

Ex Libris Rapido workflows automate the borrowing and lending processes, simplifying the staff’s management of a high volume of requests. For library users, the Rapido platform provides a central location where they can find the materials they need and obtain those materials quickly through a frictionless experience.

Financials, Mergers, and Acquisitions

2022 Pricing Updates from Duke University Press
Duke University Press, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 17, 2021

In continued recognition of the financial changes that many libraries face as a result of COVID-19, for the second year in a row, Duke University Press will maintain existing prices for the 2022 calendar year for our journals and select electronic collection products.

Pricing will remain unchanged for the e-Duke Books and e-Duke Journals collections, DMJ 100, Euclid Prime, and direct journal subscriptions (with the exception of Prism, which will increase in frequency in 2022). Detailed information is available at dukeupress.edu/libraries. If your library has a custom deal, the library relations team will be in touch in August to confirm your renewal pricing.

Naiman receives NASA grant to digitize astrophysical literature
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, June 2, 2021

Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman has received a $506,912 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to digitize predigital scientific literature. Her project, "The Reading Time Machine: Transforming Astrophysical Literature into Actionable Data," is a collaboration with Harvard University and the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a digital library portal operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. With over 15 million records, ADS is one of the most important archives in the scientific field of astronomy.

"Newer documents are ‘born digital,’ making them machine-readable and parseable," said Naiman. "This has not only helped domain scientists find relevant research more efficiently, but through methods like natural language processing, it also has facilitated new discoveries in these fields."

Naiman's project aims to extend these capabilities to predigital documents by extracting their text, figures, and tables, allowing researchers to apply the same information mining methods that are available to "born digital" documents. This will result in more easily searchable documents and new discoveries. The work will also enhance the screen-reading capabilities of these documents to make them more accessible.

Research Efforts

Clarivate Report Demonstrates that Nations or Institutions with Diverse Research Priorities Respond More Comprehensively to Unprecedented Scientific Challenges
Clarivate Analytics, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 16, 2021

Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today released a new Global Research Report which examines the ability of nations and institutions to respond to unexpected challenges or opportunities in science, medicine, technology and social sciences based on the diversity of their research activities and expertise.

With the publication of, “Subject diversity in research portfolios”, analysts at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate consider subject diversity in a research context and show trends in national and institutional research portfolios by examining publications from across the G71 and BRICK2 nations from 1981 – 2018. The report finds that subject diversity provides benefit, notably in resilience and responsiveness to unexpected challenges and examines these nations’ ability to provide for their citizens’ needs in responding to a severe unforeseen global challenge – the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, Clarivate identifies a new and readily usable analytical approach to evaluate the capacity and competency of research organizations and nations.

Springer Nature, publisher of Nature and Scientific American, to build stronger understanding of US research needs with new US Research Advisory Council
Springer Nature, Voting Member, Press Release, June 10, 2021

As part of its ongoing strategic intent to provide the best possible service to the US research ecosystem, Springer Nature is launching a US Research Advisory Council (USRAC).

The USRAC was organized by a Springer Nature steering group and task force representing its diversity of research publishing and solutions activity including books, journals, magazines and databases, which included Laura Helmuth, editor in chief of Scientific American, and Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief of Nature.  This new body will meet annually in a roundtable workshop format with members drawn from institutions, funders, policy makers and research-driven organizations and advise on research culture and how research contributes to a better and more equitable society. The broad topic of the Council’s first meeting will be how COVID-19 has affected research and the way it is communicated. 

Jennifer Griffiths, Springer Nature’s Head of Academic Affairs, North America, said: “In times of rapid change and progress in research and research communication, publishing must evolve in step with the needs of the community.  We realize that the solutions we offer are only as good as the value they provide research, researchers and the organizations that shape the research ecosystem. We are excited to launch the USRAC so we can be better informed on the key priorities of the stakeholders we serve.”

Libraries and Archives

The British Library’s Endangered Archives Program Puts Four Completed Digitization Projects Online
British Library, L.S.A. Member, Blog Post, June 7, 2021

We have another four completed digitisation projects that have recently gone online. These four projects represent both the global breadth of EAP projects and the wide variety of content types:

Library of Congress Acquires Audio Diaries from Healthcare Workers During COVID-19 
Library of Congress, Voting Member, Press Release, June 8, 2021

The Library of Congress has acquired audio diaries featuring more than 200 frontline healthcare workers in the fight against COVID-19, a collection that provides first-hand testimonies from hospitals and communities across the country as the public health crisis unfolded. The audio library was donated by The Nocturnists, a San Francisco-based independent medical storytelling community and podcast.

The majority of the recordings were originally collected for the “Stories from a Pandemic” series in the spring of 2020, of which only a small fraction was published on the podcast and accompanying online story map. The gift also includes the pandemic-related material from The Nocturnists’ “Black Voices in Healthcare” series, which was recently selected as a podcast honoree in the 2021 Webby Awards. Additionally, the group plans to donate recordings collected for the follow-up series, “Stories from a Pandemic: Part 2”, launching today on The Nocturnists podcast.

Strategic Planning

Crossref The Road Ahead: Our Strategy through 2025
Crossref, Voting Member, Blog Post, June 3, 2021

This announcement has been in the works for some time, but everything seems to take longer when there is a pandemic going on, including finding time and headspace to plan out our strategy for the next few years.

Over the last year or so we have had our heads down addressing how to scale our 20-yr-old system and operation – and adapting to new ways of working. But we’ve also spent time talking to people, forging alliances, looking ahead, and making plans. So we’re happy to now let everyone know exactly what we’ve been up to lately, what we are heading towards in 2025, and what projects and programs are prioritised on our near-term agenda.

Leadership Announcements

Library of Congress Announces New Chief of the Digital Innovation Lab
Library of Congress, Voting Member, Blog Post, June 4, 2021

The Library of Congress has appointed Nicole Saylor as the new Chief of the Digital Innovation Lab, a position established to lead the Library’s innovation with digital collections and to support its digital transformation.

The position, located in the Digital Strategy Directorate in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, is being created as the Library experiments with new ways of applying technology to collections and services.

“I’m delighted to have Nicki come aboard to manage the Digital Innovation Lab, a pioneering organization within the Library dedicated to experimentation and innovation,” said Kate Zwaard, the Library’s Director of Digital Strategy. “Nicki’s bold thinking and leadership will be critical as we explore new technologies and creative ways to share the Library’s treasures with Congress and the American people.”