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Vol. 21 No. 9 — October 2004

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.