Science Intelligence and InfoPros

An interesting white paper, sponsored by Springer, where 5 consultants give their conclusions after first years of experimentation.

“eBooks have evolved considerably over the last fi ve years, beyond the more mature, but less dynamic eJournals space. Th ey are now poised at an intersection of library, technology and research trends that afford great opportunities and challenges, for both the library and publisher communities.

Similar to the formative years of STM eJournals adoption, eBook uptake shows both promise and challenges:promise as an efficient source for research, and challenges as stakeholders grasp how best to manage this relatively new content format.

In their sixth year, eBooks are entering an Age of Experimentation… (…)

Content:

• In Their Infancy: eBooks Helped Librarians and Researchers Work Smarter, But…
• eBooks Today: As Many Questions as There Are Answers
• eBooks Tomorrow: A Bright, If Uncertain, Future

Read the white paper at:

http://www.springer.com/ebooks

At last, Springer has joined the group of Big STM publishers who have already plunged in the mobility.

“Springer has launched the SpringerLink mobile app for iPhone and iPod Touch. It is free to download from the iTunes App Store providing access to the science platform www.springerlink.com. The SpringerLink mobile app includes a number of features like personalized notifications, save and share abilities, advanced search, document details with abstracts and full-text views available to institutional subscribers. In addition, the app provides users with a multi-functional home screen, allowing for keyword and advanced searches. Included in the advanced search is a save search feature that allows the user to save any advanced search so that it may be quickly executed from the home screen. The user can be notified from the app’s home screen when any new chapters or articles are published that meet the criteria of his or her saved search, allowing a user to specify his or her areas of interest and quickly check for new, relevant publications“.
Press release: http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-6-1325121-0

At the time writing, almost all of STM publishers offer smartphone and tablet applications to access their content. NLM’s PubMed was the first early adopter in January 2010, followed by Nature in February 2010, and Elsevier’s Sciverse Scopus in May 2010. In 2011, many others have joined the ride, such as Wiley, SciFinder, etc.

Nature was on the first to offer apps to read the famous journal on an iPad. Elsevier has massively invested in applications development, mainly by the way of developers contests. Then, the Sciverse platform proposes an app market (the Application Gallery) to customize the interface.

Press release:

The company, which pioneered the open access model and now publishes over 220 open access journals, has introduced a streamlined design and new look which makes the high-traffic website site much more straightforward to navigate. The redesigned site also introduces a range of new and enhanced features.

Emphasizing the company’s commitment to meeting the evolving needs of authors and readers, the new site includes:

• a greatly improved “My BioMed Central” section offering users convenient access to the latest research in their subject areas together with status updates on manuscripts which they are submitting or reviewing
• enhanced navigation for archives, supplements and special article collections
•  additional RSS feeds and embedded social linking technologies and, improved subject gateways, providing a central starting point to find research on particular scientific topics.

BioMed Central’s new website: http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Good marketing by Springer, announcing the Frankfurt Book Fair:

http://www.springer.com/bookfair2011/Invitation.html

See also:

Putting the book back into the Library,

by Thomson-Reuters about the new Book Citation Index in the WoS

http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/webofscience/

… suggests some journal titles, based on how your keywords fetch with key content already indexed in a list of existing journals…

At the moment, it works only with Springer journals (they won a recent contest organised by the STM publisher), but the concept is not bad…

http://journalsuggest.appspot.com/

Ebooks survey, Indiana University, departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, 81 respondents, 2011.

Some findings:

• E-books and print will coexist for a long time in the foreseeable future
• The first reason to use ebook is availability 24/7
• The first concern, the difficulty to read
• Preferred format is PDF
• Critical features: ability to print, full-text search
• Preferred vendors: Wiley, Springer, Elsevier

Zhang, Y. & Beckman, R. E-book usage among Chemist, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a survey and Interviews. ISTL, Spring 2011. Online:
http://www.istl.org/11-spring/article2.html

SpringerLink will be soon enriched by semantic technologies, thanks to a collaboration betwwen Springer and TEMIS.

“At the core of this partnership, TEMIS’s flagship Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform leverages a sophisticated combination of linguistic and statistical methods to calculate semantic relatedness among the millions of publications accessible on SpringerLink.

This enables the automatic recommendation for each available article or book chapter of a selection of highly-relevant, semantically-related documents, without requiring specific editorial efforts”.

Press Release, TEMIS, May 19, 2011
http://tagline.temis.com/2011/05/19/springer-and-temis-extend-their-collaboration-on-semantic-analysis-of-scientific-content/

[See my previous post]

Springer has decided to make the SpringerImages App free.

Anyone can download the SpringerImages App and access the 295.000 OA images for free. Institutional customers with a Clinical Medicine/Life Science or complete subscription to SpringerImages.com have mobile access with their Username and Password.

Individuals may purchase access to these image collections. Visit springerimages.com/mobile for more information

A manifesto, by a student of the activist coalition RightToResearch.

“These days there is continuous discussion on ways to improve the efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare.

I would argue that one of the most neglected and important ways to improve our healthcare delivery and innovation is by opening access to research. “Open Access” is the free, immediate, unrestricted availability of high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship over the Internet … (…)

6 arguments:

1. Education: The gap in access to up to date information diminishes our ability as students to educate ourselves. Furthermore, this gap in access is likely to grow. In the current era of budget cuts at public universities and hospitals, expensive journal subscriptions make an attractive target of cost savings. So where does this leave student education? With an even larger gap in access, the majority of students will be unable to fully access information crucial to our education
2. Patient care: This gap in information access is even larger in private practice where doctors often only subscribe to a handful of journals due to cost restrictions
3. Innovation: Research thrives on the sharing of ideas, and research careers are made by publishing widely read articles that inspire other people’s research or change the way we practice healthcare. For the author, the goal of publishing an article is to move patient care or medical innovation forward, not to have a list of unread articles serving as bullet points on a resume. Increasing open access to research allows for a free exchange of ideas serving both the goals of the researcher and the benefit of students and patients
4. Patient’s right: None of these (alternative) sources (wikipedia, wesites, etc.) provide reliable information to patients. In fact, I would argue these resources only increase the duress of patients and families by providing views that often contradict the information provided by the doctor without providing an evidence base
5. Global Health Equity: Open access to research would be another step towards reducing steep health disparities in developing countries
6. Public investment: The vast majority of medical research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, a federal organization funded by you, the taxpayer. Why do we invest our public dollars in research? To improve patient care and medical innovation, of course – an outcome that only happens when students, physicians, researchers, and patients have open access to research

Anderson, Tim. 6 reasons Open Access matters to the Medical community. The Right To Research Coalition blog. Online, posted on: April 2011.
http://www.righttoresearch.org/blog/6-reasons-open-access-matters-to-the-medical-commu.shtml

STM publisher Springer has announced the launch of a new free analytics tool, http://realtime.springer.com, which provides multiple visualisations of the usage that is generated worldwide by  springer’s online products, including journals, books, images and protocols.

Realtime.springer.com aggregates the raw data on downloads of Springer journal articles and book chapters in real time from all over the world, and displays them in a variety of interactive visualisations such as:

• a map showing where the downloads are coming from
• a constantly updating keyword tag cloud
• and a visualisation of total downloads.

In addition, a search feature shows a chart of the downloads and the ‘Top Five Most Downloaded’ list for every journal or book.

The results provide book authors and journal editors with information on how intensively their content is used.

They gain insight into what topics are trending at the moment, and which areas of the world are currently looking at what type of topics in Springer books and journals.
Librarians get a clear overview of where Springer content is used in the many fields.

Realtime.springer.com currently receives input from the information platform SpringerLink with nearly five million documents from about 41,000 eBooks, 1,160 book series, 2,524 journals and 173 eReference works. Additionally, the tool receives feeds from the SpringerImages database with more than 2.7 million images and from SpringerProtocols, the database of reproducible laboratory protocols in the life and biomedical sciences