News from NISO Members
Global Impacts
Wolters Kluwer Collaborates with American Diabetes Association to Develop Virtual Alternative for the ADA’s 80th Scientific Sessions
Wolters Kluwer, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 18, 2020
The ADA’s annual, in-person meeting has been transformed into a fully digital experience leveraging components of the Wolters Kluwer virtual conference solution offering.
To create a fully immersive experience that delivers the same comprehensive, cutting-edge research and expertise to attendees, Wolters Kluwer delivered a solution that combines streamed presentations as well as prerecorded sessions that attendees can access on any device, at any time throughout the five day event and up to 90 days after the meeting. In total, Wolters Kluwer and the ADA worked together to turn more than 900 presentations into over 325 hours of digital content.
Attendees will also have access to eAbstracts of the latest research studies and can visit a virtual poster hall, eBookstore and virtual exhibit hall, where attendees will be able to see information and interact with pharmaceutical, medical device and other various companies in the digital environment. Additionally, CME credits can be earned after the conclusion of the event.
NIH Launches Analytics Platform to Harness Nationwide COVID-19 Patient Data to Speed Treatments
National Library of Medicine, Voting Member, Press Release, June 15, 2020
The National Institutes of Health has launched a centralized, secure enclave to store and study vast amounts of medical record data from people diagnosed with coronavirus disease across the country. It is part of an effort, called the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), to help scientists analyze these data to understand the disease and develop treatments. This effort aims to transform clinical information into knowledge urgently needed to study COVID-19, including health risk factors that indicate better or worse outcomes of the disease, and identify potentially effective treatments.
The N3C is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of NIH. The initiative will create an analytics platform to systematically collect clinical, laboratory and diagnostic data from health care provider organizations nationwide. It will then harmonize the aggregated information into a standard format and make it available rapidly for researchers and health care providers to accelerate COVID-19 research and provide information that may improve clinical care. A demonstration of the platform can be viewed at ncats.nih.gov/n3c.
Open Access, Open Science
ProQuest Streamlines Discoverability of Subscription and Open Access Content
ProQuest, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 16, 2020
ANN ARBOR, MI, June 16, 2020 – ProQuest is improving the accessibility of subscription and open access content on its award-winning platform with a series of enhancements designed to boost research, teaching and learning outcomes.
These enhancements include:
- A new starting point for research: Now, users can begin their search from the open web by visiting search.proquest.com. Through their search results, they’ll be delivered straight to the resources their library subscribes to.
- New preview feature: Users can search, find and preview the content of nearly a billion ProQuest documents directly from the open web for better discoverability.
- Broader discovery of open access content: Researchers can access an ever-expanding universe of scholarly full-text open access sources directly – all indexed and delivered with the same level of quality and precision as ProQuest’s subscription content.
These enhancements are a major step toward improving discoverability, simplifying access for distance learning, and driving more users to their library’s subscribed content.
Infrastructure and Platforms
Simmons University Library Goes Live with FOLIO
Index Data, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 18, 2020
FOLIO (an acronym for the Future Of Libraries Is Open) is an open source project that is reimagining library software through a unique collaboration of libraries, developers and vendors. It moves beyond the traditional library management system to a new paradigm, where apps are built on an open platform, providing libraries more choice and delivering new services to users. The FOLIO platform includes core functionality found in current library management systems and is extensible, allowing libraries to meet ever-changing needs over time.
Jay Campbell, Head of Collections and Systems at the Simmons University Library, states that “we are very excited to be running FOLIO and VuFind. Our staff has been extremely pleased with the functionality and flexibility of the systems. It’s been a real improvement over our previous ILS.” Jay added “working with the FLO staff and Index Data has been a great experience. They were exceptionally responsive and provided outstanding guidance and support throughout the migration and testing process, which has been remarkably painless.”
HighWire Implements Industry-leading Disaster Recovery Scheme to Restore Data Within Minutes
HighWire Press, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 11, 2020
The new recovery service will be deployed to all HighWire customers commencing in July. HighWire’s new managed hosting facility partner, Faction, is a leading enterprise multi-cloud platform-as-a-service provider, VMware partner and strategic Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner. Faction has multiple geographic locations both throughout the U.S. and globally.
This state-of-the-art approach to disaster recovery utilizes an always-on or ‘pilot light’ method whereby critical core elements of HighWire’s data infrastructure are configured and constantly running, but at a diminished, standby capacity. Should the need arise, the architecture can become a fully functioning production environment within a matter of hours – if not minutes.
North Carolina Institute of Medicine Chooses HighWire to Host its Flagship Journal for Another 7 Years
HighWire Press, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 4, 2020
NCMJ is NCIOM’s flagship journal and is co-published in conjunction with The Duke Endowment, for healthcare professionals and lay persons who share an interest in health and healthcare policy affecting the lives of North Carolinians. The site, which is open access, has been hosted by HighWire since 2015.
The latest renewal also encompasses an upgrade for NCMJ, providing a more modern, intuitive hosting site with configurable design and theming options, streamlined user experience and easy-to-use self service tools.
“This upgrade will give us the extra functionality we need to ensure that this important medical resource is easy to use, discoverable and up to date,” said Kaitlin Phillips, Managing Editor at NCMJ.
Product Innovation
CABI Launches New agriRxiv, The Dedicated Agricultural Preprint Service for Agricultural Research
CABI, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 3, 2020
agriRxiv – pronounced agri-archive, and previously known as AgriXiv – is to be relaunched with a new website offering researchers and students access to preprints across agriculture and allied sciences.
Preprints are drafts of research articles that authors typically share with the wider community for feedback before submitting their final version to a journal and formal peer-review. They bring many advantages: preprints allow researchers to share their results rapidly, in just a few days; they reach a global audience and there’s no charge for authors or readers; they provide an early forum for discussion and allow authors to get informal feedback on their article prior to submitting an improved version to a journal for peer review.
The new and enhanced platform, which is hosted and managed by CABI, aims to benefit from the organisation’s greater global reach and sustainability. It draws on CABI’s extensive expertise in agricultural data, information and knowledge dissemination. agriRxiv will benefit from the technical and content management infrastructure used to deliver CABI’s subscription products, like CAB Abstracts – the leading English-language bibliographic information service providing access to the world’s applied life sciences literature, which has almost 10 million records.
Partnerships
The Institution of Engineering and Technology and Wiley Announce Open Access Publishing Partnership
The Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET), and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Voting Members, Press Release, June 17, 2020
Under the terms of the publishing agreement, the IET will transition its entire hybrid subscription journals portfolio to a gold OA model, joining its existing gold open access journals, to create a leading collection of engineering and technology open access journals. This development will be enabled through a new publishing partnership with Wiley, who have a strong track record in society partnerships, and are leading the way in the transition to open access. The IET is working with its existing stakeholders to make this transition.
The move to the open access publishing model allows researchers and practitioners around the world immediate and free access to the IET Engineering and Technology hub through the Wiley Online Library. As well as publishing current research open access, all articles published from 2013 will be made freely available, making a vast body of published research widely accessible.
eLife and PREreview Partner on Open Discussion and Review of Preprints
eLife Sciences Publications Ltd, Voting Member, Press Release, June 15, 2020
eLife is pleased to partner with PREreview, a platform for the crowdsourcing of preprint reviews, to bring together scientists globally for a series of virtual discussions around research posted as preprints.
These live-streamed discussions, known as preprint journal clubs, will take place once a month for five months, starting in June. The aim is to help engage diverse groups of researchers in the review of preprints, and to provide their feedback openly so that the preprint authors and other readers can benefit from it.
Each month, the journal club will discuss a preprint and provide constructive feedback for improving the manuscript. After each call, the PREreview team will work with participants who are interested in helping to collate the main discussion points into a full report, which will then be shared openly on PREreview.
Online Literacy and Learning
IOP Publishing Joins Researcher to Keep Academics On Top of Leading Physics Research
IOP Publishing, Voting Member, News Announcement, June 4, 2020
Readers of IOP Publishing (IOPP) journals can now easily keep up to date with the latest papers in their fields, thanks to Researcher.
Researcher is a free mobile and web app that gives users a social media-style feed of the latest papers, which they can filter with keywords according to their areas of interest.
As well as filters, Researcher allows users to share papers and data they discover with their peers and colleagues.
Claire Webber, associate director of content and engagement marketing at IOPP, said: “Researcher is a brilliant way to condense all the latest research in a precise area of focus into one simple feed. Keeping up to date with new studies is clearly essential for academics, but they are often short on time.