ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2008

Joe Buzzanga, Product Manager, Elsevier Engineering & Technology

Don’t let the hip-hop product name fool you.  The second example that Elsevier showed me yesterday to illustrate their efforts to build value-added services on top of the journal literature is not trivial, but it is definitely next-generational.

Taking advantage of semantic technololgies and natural language processing, illumin8, said product manager Joe Buzzanga, is targeted at the corporate R&D market.  And, unlike it’s cousin 2collab (See post, below.), it does carry a price tag.

Joe described illumin8 as an "advanced semantic engine to enable intelligent discovery by trying to expose content in new ways."

Backed up by 3 million full texts, 36 million abstracts, 22 million patent records, and 7 billion web pages, illumin8 is, he said, not just a federated search engine that will unearth a lot of citations, but a method for discovering meaning via natural language processing.

Using a trade-secret algorithm (Joe calls it "the secret sauce"), Elsevier crawls billions of web sites and uses "thousands of rules," in search of "meaningful statements" for R&D purposes . . . statements relating to problems and solutions.   When the system finds a query match, it extracts the pertinent facts and displays the answers in table format for the user to evaluate. 

In what may be a contestant for understatement of the year, Joe described it as "not your normal search engine."

I couldn’t get Joe to tell me how many companies currently use the service, but he did say that uptake has been fast and pretty much concentrated in North America in Fortune 500 companies.  Elsevier is now ramping up to roll the service out in Europe.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2008

Fabian Kersten, Solutions Marketing Manager, Science & Technology, Elsevier

It’s Facebook, Linked-In, and del.icio.us all rolled into one.  Or, as Fabian Kersten described it in the title of his talk at Online Information 2008, it’s about scientists harnessing social media to get their research done.

Fabian is the product manager for 2Collab, one of the new Elsevier initiatives I promised to write about in a prior post. 

You will recall, during my briefing on Tuesday, Elesvier representatives told me the company is interested in getting outside the box and developing added-value services on top of their journal offerings.  In the case of 2collab, the service is absolutely free and you, yourself, can take it for a test drive right now.

Sign up.  Develop a profile.  Link your profile to the Scopus database of journal literature and automatically import your publishing history (not restricted to Elsevier journals).  Opt to show your citation history.   Bookmark articles you think are interesting, tag stuff, and share it all with everyone else, or just with your trusted friends and research associates. Generate a tag cloud for the resources you have marked.  See what literature your friends have discovered.  Form a public or a private group and start 2 collaborate.  Find experts . . . and who knows what else might happen in this social space.

Man, I said, it looks to me–to steal a term from the Dark Ages–like you’re empowering the "invisible college," (a network of researchers talking to each other, but not necessarily through the journal literature).

Since the launch a little over a year ago, Fabian reported that users have bookmarked 100,000-plus items.  But I could not get him to tell me what the average number per user was, let alone how many users there are.

He did give that "it’s rather a generational thing, that may not appeal to everyone," but said that by building services around the "recommendation culture," Elsevier hopes to create growth in its overall business.  Recall that 2collab is free to the user, as most social networking platforms in the consumer world are.  Fabian said that, of course, the system promotes use of the literature, where Elsevier still makes its bread and butter.  (Sometimes you gotta have a loss leader, right?) 

2collab, IMHE, blends a full range of Web 2.0 tools into a platform that should make sense to, and is totally appropriate for, the research community, at least the digital native end of it.  Wave of the future?  Quite possibly. Added value on top of the literature?  You bet.  The type of innovation I would expect from the market leader?  Ab.sol.ute.ly.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2008

Ed Pentz, Executive Director, International DOI Foundation

Most readers of this blog will be familiar with library consortia, centralized entities who act as buying collectives for their state or regional member libraries.  Publishers have a consortium, too.  It’s the DOI Foundation, founded and funded in 1998 by a few leading publishers to develop a system for uniquely identifying electronic journal articles and other digital objects produced by the publishers.  Publishers participating in the consortium submit metadata for the abstracts, articles and other electronic content objects they publish, and the DOI assigns each of these unique content assets with a persistent DOI name.  The core DOI Foundation service is known as CrossRef.

The DOI name is the magic formula that lies behind link resolution capabilities.  During my visit with the foundation’s executive director, Ed Pentz, I learned the DOI can now even be used as a Google search term for targeting in on articles of interest.  [Get the Google toolbar.]  Other tools available for information users.

Since the system went live in 2000, 33 million DOI’s have been assigned, said Pentz, 90% relating to journal articles.  Though many, many publishers now use this universal back-office content-management system to tag their assets, there are still new publishers joining the collective, with recent growth coming from Asia.  In addition to being used as tags for articles and article elements, DOI’s can be used for uniquely and persistently identifying many digital items and have even been applied to protein sequences.

New developments?  Ed told me The DOI Foundation is expanding its back office services to publishers in a couple of ways. 

To help publishers assess impact and develop other performance metrics, some 130 publishers are depositing the references included at the end of journal articles.  Once a number of them do this, other publishers will be able to see where their journal articles are being subsequently referenced. 

The Foundation is also working on a CrossCheck feature that will help publishers detect plagiarised manuscripts.  For this activity the foundation is cooperating with iParadigms and Authenticate.  The service, Pentz said, will check both against the published mansucripts submitted by publishers and open web content.  But only 4 million articles have been indexed so far.  Publishers participating include Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley.

Next year, the foundation, will be piloting a service to be called CrossMark, a certification system that will permit publishers to officially "brand" the authorized published version (not be confused with the author’s original manuscript or another pre-press version) with a seal to notify readers, that, yes, indeed, they are looking at the official published version.  Such "sealed" documents will also be linked to corrections and possibly comments that appeared after official publication.

While the DOI Foundation was so successful from the start that it was able to pay back its initial investors after only two years, Pentz closed the interview by noting that, of course, it’s difficult to promise perpetual persistence. He said the Foundation was evaluating ways to assure that the promise of persistence can be met for generations to come.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 4th, 2008

Bryan Vickery, Deputy Publisher, and Marianne Haska, Head of Sales, BioMedCentral, now a division of Springer

If there is a poster child for Open Access publishing, it would appear to be BioMedCentral (BMC), the company founded in 2000 by VitekTracz, chairman of the London-Based Science Navigation Group.  The service was recently sold to Springer.

In making the acquisition announcement in mid-October of this year, Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media said:  “This acquisition reinforces the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade."

When I met with Bryan Vickery and Marianne Haska in their stand yesterday, they told me there were now nearly 200 journals in the BMC collection (expected to grow 10% this coming year), all being provided under a model which involves "Article Processing Charges," i.e., someone–most likely the funding institution or the researcher’s employer–pays up-front to have the article published, thus supporting widespread free and "Open Acess" to the contents.

While noting that in addition to "biomed" central, BMC also has launched PhysMath Central (now with 3 titles) and Chemistry Central (with 1 title), Vickery observed that the acceptance of Open Access publishing by authors varies by discipline and is not evenly accepted yet in all fields.

Springer is no stranger to Open Access, having been one of the first big journal publishers to offer an Open Access option (Springer Open Choice), under which authors may choose to make their articles open, in exchange for paying an upfront Article Processing Charge.

"All staff at BMC," said Vickery, "view the acquisition as a proof of concept, that Open Access is a viable, stable publishing model."

Since its launch BMC has published 35,000 research articles, the number which is expected to grow to 50,000 by the end of 2009, according to Vicery.

Though I made a couple of attempts, I was unable to find a spokesperson available in the Springer stand for comment.

Dick Kaser

ITI, VP, Content

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

The networking support crew at Online Information (Ed Mitchell, facilitator; David Wilcox, social reporter; and Emma Wallace, facilitator) is experimenting this year with a new way to get everyone networking. It’s designed to let people meet people who wouldn’t ordinarily run into each other.

A range of delegates’ topical interests was gathered in advance using Crowdvine and then printed out and posted on the boards near the tea bar in the conference area. Attendees were encouraged to add their names to the post-it notes (and it looked like the response was pretty  good) and add their names to any topics that matched their interests.

Tables were subsequently labeled with specific topics for discussion to let the networking begin.

Next time you’re in the conference area, leave a note to the networking support team about what you think of the idea.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

One look at the Laughing Buddha statue decorating the head table at the Thomson Reuters luncheon Tuesday was proof that it has been a very good year for Thomson Innovation. The product development team was on hand to celebrate the first anniversary of the "next generation intellectual property research and analysis tool" and introduce a host of new enhancements to Thomson Innovation 2.0.

Within its first year out of the gate, Thomson Innovation has won a collection of clients and two industry awards, according to David Brown, executive vice president for the Scientific business of Thomson Reuters. Winning the R&D100 Award (R&D Magazine) and the InfoWorld 100 Award (InfoWorld) was a "real tribute being recognized as a top solution by the technology world," he says. 

Researchers can now map the landscape of proprietary patent data from Derwent World Patents Index and scientific literature with ThemeScape, a visualization tool that translates data into a two-dimensional map with peaks that represent a concentration of documents. A Clustering tool categorizes patent documents automatically using linguistic analysis of text highlighted in user-selected fields and displays relationships in documents that would otherwise take hours/day/weeks to complete. The patent coverage has also been pumped up with data from 41 of the world’s patenting authorities, along with English translations of titles, abstracts, and all claims for Chinese utility models and applications. There’s even a tracking function that allows centralized control of managing research across an organization, and a Japanese language interface available with just one click.

Although Brown admits there were some "growing pains along the way in 2008," he says this rollout continues Thomson Innovation’s mission of "setting the standard in IP research with patents, scientific research, news, and world-class content."

Version 2.0 will be available for corporate consumption starting December 15.

At right: Thomson Innovation’s Daphne Greechie and David Brown; the ThemeScape landscape mapping is displayed on the screen.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

I spent some time on the Information Today stand this afternoon and ended up in a fascinating conversation with two librarians discussing gray (or grey, depending upon which language spelling you prefer) literature. What is the definition today? Does it involve publishing through non-established sources? What about white papers? And pamphlet materials now digitised and sent to the web? Items not showing up in bibliographic databases? Lots to think about.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

Altarama Information Systems, a first-time London Online exhibitor, is introducing its new RefChatter product at the show. Designed to be a reference librarian’s best friend, this latest offering in Altarama’s product line delivers online reference via Instant Messaging. Although there may be other similar products on the market, RefChatter gives librarians a little extra with transcripts, statistics, and multiuser capability. And since it’s fully hosted and web-based, there’s no software to load locally.

Australian-based Shirley Forster, managing director, says the company specializes in services that improve reference and management functions at libraries. The company, which was launched in April 2001, has a big following in Australia and is now gaining momentum in Europe and the U.S. Forster offered a demo on RefChatter’s ease-of-use and functionality. Those clients without Instant Messaging networks can use a supplied widget to contact the library with the same efficiency. Other Altarama tools include RefTracker (information request management system), SMSReference (text messaging for information requests and notices), and DeskStats (simple capture and reporting of reference statistics).

Above: Shirley Forster provides a brief demo of RefChatter to Tim Buckley Owen (FreePint).

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today

• Online Information 2008
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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

In a year when everyone is trying to read the runes to see what 2009 will bring, some positive signs on the exhibit hall floor. When I came past, the ProQuest  stands was mobbed – admittedly they were serving champagne but plenty of meaningful conversations seemed to be happening at the same time. Alban Smith, Head of Licensing and Development at BSI www.bsi-global.com reported enthusiastically that business was growing and the company looking to expand; while Mo Siewcharran, Head of Marketing at Nielsen Book www.nielsenbook.co.uk was optimistic for the outlook for the year ahead. While there are plenty of more pessimistic tales to be overheard in the show aisles and cafes, it’s not all doom and gloom.

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ITI Bloggers December 3rd, 2008

Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of the UK’s National Archives was named IWR Information Professional of the Year 2008 yesterday. The trophy was presented as delegates gathered over drinks to mark the end of Day 1 of the conference. Interestingly, Ms Ceeney’s official title is ‘Keeper of the Public Records’ but she prefers to be known as ‘Head of Profession for Knowledge and Information Management for Government’ – an ambitious declaration of the scope and significance of the information profession.

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