This message was sent to ##Email##
|
|
|
 Marcie Granahan, NFAIS Executive Director
| January marks the one-year anniversary for NFAIS Advances, when we launched our inaugural issue as part of our ongoing effort to provide greater avenues for NFAIS members to discover and share relevant, timely information about the information services industry. Hopefully we are achieving our goal, and NFAIS Advances has helped drive meaningful discussions and networking opportunities among you and your colleagues.
Since our launch, we’ve watched carefully the evolving changes in the way scholarly content is being discovered and delivered, and on the horizon is a changing role for academic journals.
The societal contribution of academic journals has evolved in recent years from disseminator of ideas to certifier of quality. While this might seem a radical statement to some, check out Academic publishing is all about status, Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum, PhD Project Plan published to invite community feedback early on, as well as this week’s NFAIS Community Forum, where I discuss this in more detail.
As we embark on our second year of publication, we very much welcome your feedback on ways we can make NFAIS Advances more useful and helpful to you. Feel free to drop me an email at mgranahan@nfais.org.

Marcie Granahan
Executive Director
NFAIS
BloombergView
As a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s and 1950s, Paul Samuelson made a habit of visiting the offices of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, then based at MIT, to look through the other economics journals that arrived in the mail. “I’d read every journal, every article,” he told me a decade ago.
READ MORE
Nature News
An astrophysicist has launched a low-cost community peer-review platform that circumvents traditional scientific publishing — and by making its software open-source, he is encouraging scientists in other fields to do the same.
READ MORE
PhysOrg
Development and implementation of novel methods for publication, visualisation and dissemination of the constantly growing biodiversity and genomic bioinformatic data are the main objective of the first PhD Project Plan available from the open-access Research Ideas and Outcomes journal, a journal created to publish the outputs of the whole research cycle. Founded on the principles of open science, the project addresses digitally born scholarly papers and digitised data, aiming to make them more accessible and citable, and the results more reproducible.
READ MORE
The Scholarly Kitchen
While predicting the future is fraught with peril, there seems a fairly clear consensus about where the research community would like to see things go. Our efforts these days are focused on broadening access to the research literature and research results, and toward improving their quality, through better transparency and reproducibility. Academia is a notoriously conservative community though, and has been slower to move in these directions than some would prefer. Rather than waiting decades for consensus, many research funders, governments, publishers and institutions have chosen instead to push things forward through policies that impose requirements on researchers.
READ MORE
American Libraries
Contemporary research in the humanities has expanded beyond anything that could be considered traditional. Historians are building interactive digital maps, literary scholars are using computers to look for patterns across millions of books, and scholars in all disciplines are taking advantage of the internet to make their work more dynamic and visually engaging.
READ MORE
Research Information
As researchers are presented with many more ways to find scholarly papers online, so content databases are being developed and evolved to ensure researchers have the best experience of sourcing research materials. Wouter Haak, Elsevier’s vice president of research data management solutions, observes: ‘Those in the front lines of science – researchers, research managers and librarians – are acutely aware that they find themselves in an ever more demanding and fiercely competitive environment.
READ MORE
United States Department of Commerce
With the launch of the Commerce Data Service (CDS), the U.S. Department of Commerce is taking big steps toward building a data-driven government. We are excited to announce another major milestone in this effort – the Commerce Department hires its first-ever Chief Data Scientist, Jeffrey Chen.
READ MORE
Nature News
The Netherlands is leading what it hopes will be a pan-European effort in 2016 to push scholarly publishers towards open-access (OA) business models: making more papers free for all users as soon as they are published. In 2014, publishers worldwide made 17 percent of new papers OA immediately on publication, up from 12 percent in 2011 (see 'Growth of open access'). But most papers are still locked behind paywalls when they are first published. The Dutch government, which took over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union council of ministers this month, has declared furthering OA to be one of its top priorities.
READ MORE
Digital Science
Recently, The Geological Society of London (GSL) announces a strategic partnership with our portfolio company Figshare. The Geological Society of London, founded 1807, is a learned and professional body of nearly 12,000 Earth scientists with a remit to investigate, interpret, discuss, inform and advise on the nature and processes of the Earth, their practical importance to humanity, and, in the interests of the public, to promote professional excellence.
READ MORE
The Scientist
Name ambiguity may soon be a thing of the past, at least among members of the scientific community. Several major journal publishers and scientific societies have pledged to require submitting authors to sign up for an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID iD) number and use that number as a unique identifier. A variety of publishers—including PLOS, AAAS, IEEE, EMBO Press, eLife, The Royal Society, and the American Geophysical Union—promised to start requiring authors to provide an ORCID iD over the next year, in an open letter released recently (Jan. 7).
READ MORE
The Atlantic
Richard Price always had an entrepreneurial bent. He started a cake business in his mum's kitchen during a summer break from his doctoral program at Oxford, eventually converting it into a sandwich-delivery service after realizing people only ate cake once a week. Then, when one of his philosophy papers took three years to get published, Price channeled his business interests into a new venture aimed at streamlining that academic process.
READ MORE
NFAIS
Access Innovations, under subsidiary Access Integrity, and Find-A-Code are pleased to announce that they are ready to launch eMDoc™, an all-new evaluation and management (E&M) medical coding tool through IntegraCoder, their combined medical record analysis system.
READ MORE
Seeking Alpha
Apple has bought Emotient, a startup that relies on a form of A.I. known as deep learning to decipher human emotions via facial expressions. Emotient has mostly worked with advertisers to help them gauge consumer reactions to their ads, but many other use cases for its technology are also possible.
READ MORE
Times Higher Education
Lars Fischer writes, "As a historian, I know my way around journals covering academia’s poor relations, the arts and humanities. Far from generating meaningful income, most have always depended on massive self-exploitation by those who run them. But, at least as far as their reviews sections are concerned, we are fast approaching a point at which concerted action is required to avoid the whole enterprise becoming untenable."
READ MORE
Open and Shut?
Since the birth of the open access movement in 2002, demands for greater openness and transparency in the research process have both grown and broadened. Today there are calls not just for OA to research papers, but (amongst other things) to the underlying data, to peer review reports, and to lab notebooks. We have also seen a new term emerge to encompass these different trends: open science.
READ MORE
NFAIS
Lunch & Learn: Customer Insight - The Right Tool for the Right Job
Date: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016
Time: 12 - 12:45 p.m. EST
NFAIS 2016 Annual Conference
Sunday, Feb. 21, 2016 1 p.m. - Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016 2 p.m. EST
The NFAIS Career Center is the premier one-stop place for employers and job-seekers in the information services field to make the right connections. Click here to view all job opportunities or to post an open position.
|
|
|
 7701 Las Colinas Ridge, Ste. 800, Irving, TX 75063
|