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 Marcie Granahan, NFAIS Executive Director
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Microsoft grabbed headlines this week with its recently announced acquisition of LinkedIn. For more details, you may want to take a look at Is the LinkedIn Acquisition Microsoft’s Attempt to Build Its Own Alphabet?; I’ve slept on it – and I’m still baffled at Microsoft buying LinkedIn for $26.2B; and Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn.
Also check out the NFAIS Community Forum, where I compare Microsoft’s current business direction with Elsevier’s in creating a suite of tools and services for improving workflow and productivity.
Inside NFAIS, a call for presentations for next year’s Lunch & Learn with NFAIS series was just announced. Members of NFAIS and the information community are invited to share their expertise and insights with others in the industry. The Lunch & Learn series is free to NFAIS members and accessible to non-members for a nominal fee, creating a launch pad for debate and discussion, and helping to influence and shape the future of information services.
We hope you enjoy reading this week’s issue of NFAIS Advances! As always, feel free to share with colleagues and friends.

Marcie Granahan
Executive Director
NFAIS
Harvard Business Review
Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn is big and bold — and likely to be consequential. Precisely how consequential and in what way is still a puzzle to observers. One reason for the uncertainty is that we don’t know yet what kind of acquisition this is. I see three possibilities, each with its own rationale and trajectory.
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ArsTechnica
Recently, Microsoft announced that it was buying business-oriented social network LinkedIn for a casual $26.2 billion dollars. It didn't make a whole lot of sense then, and now, having slept on it and taken the time to think it over, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
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The New Yorker
Microsoft’s announcement, on Monday, that it would purchase LinkedIn—its biggest acquisition ever, at more than twenty-six billion dollars—brought to mind an earlier takeover attempt, almost a decade ago. Back in the mid-aughts, Microsoft’s C.E.O. at the time, Steve Ballmer, flew to Palo Alto to try to convince Mark Zuckerberg, the young C.E.O. of Facebook, to let Microsoft buy his company.
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Forbes
Last month the European Union offered a bold and striking call for all scientific literature to be made available to the world free of charge. Many questions remain regarding how such a vision can be made into reality, especially where the funding for such a mandate will come from. Such calls, happening amidst a sea change in the open access debate, offer a powerful moment of reflection into why the vast majority of scholarly research is still walled off from the public that largely pays for it.
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The Washington Post
In social science, we talk a lot about replication, transparency and open data. We're rightly concerned when researchers publish and publicize dramatic claims without sharing their raw data. Recent examples include Michael Lacour's faked study on attitudes toward same-sex marriage and a controversial paper on "air rage" in which the data not released for business reasons and then questioned by an aviation journalist.
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NFAIS
The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS™), a global nonprofit membership organization serving the information services community, announces a "Call for Presentations" for its 2016-2017 Lunch & Learn with NFAIS virtual education series. The submissions deadline for the 2016-2017 series cycle is Monday, Aug. 1, 2016.
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Publishers Weekly
A number of states throughout the country have reduced funding to public universities. In trying to cut costs, some university systems are taking a hard look at their presses. While one university is considering shutting down its press, others continue to support theirs—but expect them to rely more on their own resources and less on institutional funding.
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Scholastica
When you think of the term “brand name” you likely associate it with various consumer companies. Many of us have go-to brands we prefer for clothes, electronics, food, and so forth. “Brand-name” scholarly journals likely aren’t the first thing that comes to mind. But, if you take a moment to consider whether there are any journals that are better known in your field than their competitor titles, your thought process may change. You can likely come up with at least three “brand-name” publications off the top of your head.
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BioMed Central blog
Maria Kowalczuk writes, "How to convey information was an emerging theme of the Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting that I have recently attended. This year about 450 professionals responsible for different aspects of scholarly publishing from around the globe met in Denver to debate diverse issues ranging from managing journals, to scientific misconduct and the future of publishing."
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American Journal Experts
American Journal Experts interviewed Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare to discuss Collections, a new, free resource developed by the figshare team, and how researchers can use this tool to further their collaborative efforts.
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TheScientist
Reproducibility problems plague the scientific literature. Several recent analyses have suggested that large swaths of published work in some fields are irreproducible. Some pundits are calling for a complete overhaul of the scientific publishing process to make researchers more accountable for their methodologies and publications.
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WTTW-TV
Cancer researchers will have an easier time accessing, sharing and analyzing information with the launch of a new platform funded by the National Cancer Institute. The Genomic Data Commons (GDC) initiative “provides the cancer research community with a unified data repository that enables sharing across cancer genomic studies in support of precision medicine,” according to the GDC’s website.
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Dataconomy
Everyone in the data chain has to worry about the question of ethics and security. Individuals want to protect their data. Companies and researchers want to learn from it. Big data, like many other emerging areas of technology, suffer from very real ethical problems. Regulations, governing bodies, and even general understanding of ethics are struggling to get up-to-date. Worse still, it’s not just mega-corporations using that data, it’s researchers and the thousands of small companies and studies worldwide.
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PRNewswire
The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters announced the 2016 update of its Journal Citation Reports® (JCR), the world's most influential resource for evaluating peer-reviewed publications and the source of annual journal metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).
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Inside Higher Ed
Open access is not fully realized without open peer review, which would provide opportunities for scholarly dialogue and critique throughout the writing process and beyond, argues Alex Mueller.
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NFAIS
The Association of American University Presses recently released Best Practices in Peer Review, an AAUP Handbook. The handbook articulates a set of practices that comprise a rigorous process of peer review for scholarly monographs. Best Practices for Peer Review will serve as a core resource for the AAUP community, providing a guide for new editors in the field and new scholarly publishing programs, as well as a reference point for scholars, authors, and universities.
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NFAIS
Discovery for Scholarly Research: Evolving Needs and Services
Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - 9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. EDT
Lunch & Learn: New Technology in Manuscript Authoring, Submission, and Peer Review
Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - 12 p.m. EDT
NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable
Friday, Sept. 23, 2016 - 9 a.m. EDT
NFAIS 2017 Annual Conference
Feb. 26 – 28, 2017
Willing to share your insights and expertise with others in the information services community? The Call for Presentations for the 2016-2016 Lunch & Learn with NFAIS series is now open. The submission deadline is Aug. 1, 2016.
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.
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