De Gruyter acquires Ubiquity

Publishing houses plan to cooperate to help accelerate the transformation towards open access and research

Jisc and HESA confirm merger

The two tertiary education sector bodies officially join forces from 4 October 2022.

Gale Business: Insights enhances user experience with new all-in-one platform to support global business research

The new interface for Gale Business: Insights provides increases access to tools and databases on one platform, improving research outcomes for students, researhers and faculty.

A new publishing model from eLife: It’s all about peer review

eLife decided to end accept/reject decisions following peer review, opting to emphasise the public peer review of preprints, restoring author autonomy and promoting the assessment of scientists based on what rather than where they publish.

The GDELT Project expanded open TV News Visual Explorer in collaboration with the Internet Archive

This massive open dataset now brings the entirety of the Archive's international television news holdings to selections from 98 channels across 50 countries and territories, in 35 languages and dialects, spanning 20 years of content.

Wiley withdraws 1,380 ebooks from ProQuest Academic Complete, causing consternation in academia

The ebooks, many of which were already incorporated into course syllabi worldwide, disappeared from ProQuest at the end of August, which marked the beginning of the school year for many institutions of higher learning.

I seek, you seek, they all seek for information in context

At the 2022 ISIC (Information Seeking in Context) biennial conference, held in Berlin, information researchers from around the world gathered to share their research about information seeking behaviours. If that all sounds very academic and scholarly, it mainly was. But that doesn't mean practicing librarians couldn't come away with a few nuggets they could use.

Preserving websites to ensure perpetual access

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine lets you see what websites used to look like but it can only do that if volunteers actively save those sites and pages. Gary Price explains how to do that.

Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp in one week

Virtual Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp takes place on Wednesday 12 October 2022.

Bibliometrics, higher education, and information professionals

Writing about university research rankings may not be everyone's cup of tea, but during the pandemic, it fit international librarian Ruth Pagell to a T. Rankings are relevant to librarians because almost all of them include at least one indicator based on bibliometrics from Clarivate or Elsevier. What a great opportunity for librarians to show off their expertise with different metrics!

University of Washington Students Unlock New Historical Connections on King Tut’s Tomb Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Royal Society of Chemistry commits to 100% Open Access

Coherent Digital reaches agreement with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) 

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) have issued a statement on the metadata rights of libraries

Metadata and the metadata services that describe library collections are critical in supporting content discovery, knowledge creation, and libraries' public missions. Metadata describing library collections is not typically copyrightable, and should be considered freely shareable and reusable under most circumstances. However, some industry players restrict libraries' rights to use such metadata through contractual terms and market influence. Such restrictive activity is out of alignment with libraries' needs and public, not-for-profit/educational missions.

A tribute to librarians in pictures

The tribute is in 3 languages, authored by marie lebert and illustrated by Denis Renard

Info Pros React to OCLC's Lawsuit Against Clarivate

Brandi Scardilli, writing in Information Today's NewsBreaks, analyzed some of the tweets that have surfaced regarding the legal action OCLC has taken against Clarivate, including comments from European librarians. Is this a feud between monopolies and is this an opportunity to advocate for open cataloging metadata?