News Google and KB team up on book digitisation


The National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), has begun a partnership with Google Book Search. In addition to the library’s own digitisation efforts, Google will be scanning more than 160,000 of KB’s public domain books, and making this collection available globally via Google Books.


The library will receive copies of the scans so that they can also be viewed via the library’s website. It also plans to make the digitised works available via Europeana, Europe’s cultural portal.


The books being scanned constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of- copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country’s constitution and its parliamentary democracy. This move will help KB’s own scanning programme, which aims to make available online all of its Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 onwards.


This is the third agreement Google has announced in Europe this year, following news of projects with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the Austrian National Library. ‘It’s exciting to note just how many libraries and cultural ministries are now looking to preserve and improve access to their collections by bringing them online. Much of humanity’s cultural, historical, scientific and religious knowledge, collected and curated over centuries, sits in Europe’s libraries, and


Queen honours IOP Publishing’s MD


Jerry Cowhig, managing director of IOP Publishing, has been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) for services to science in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Cowhig, who is due to retire this year, has worked as managing director at IOP Publishing since 1995. He has also represented IOP on many


international bodies including the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. He said: ‘I feel highly


honoured by the award, and at the same time embarrassed to take credit for the success of IOP Publishing because it is down to a team effort.’


OA uptake still small, says OUP study


Uptake of the open-access (OA) option on Oxford Journals’ papers is still small five years after the publishers’ Oxford Open initiative first launched. In 2009 the average uptake of the OA option for participating journals fell to 5.9 per cent, compared with 6.7 per cent in 2008.


However, Oxford University Press attributes this reduction to a lower OA uptake for the 11 new titles that joined Oxford Open in 2009. The average uptake in 2009 for journals that entered the scheme prior to 2008 was stable (6.7 per cent, compared with 6.8 per cent in 2008).


www.researchinformation.info


‘These results indicate that, when given the option, most authors are not yet choosing to publish their research articles under an OA model,’ commented Martin Richardson, managing director of OUP’s academic and journals divisions. The Oxford Open initiative launched in July 2005 and now over 90 Oxford Journals titles are hybrid OA and six are fully OA. The figures over the past five years also reveal differences between subject areas. For the titles included in Oxford Open prior to 2008, the highest uptake continues to be in the life sciences (11.4 per cent


compared with 11.2 per cent in 2008). However, there was substantial variation between individual titles. For example, Bioinformatics (31 per cent) and HMG (20 per cent) have seen continued growth, whilst some other life science titles have seen a reduction of 5 to 10 per cent. OA uptake on medical titles


has declined from 5.0 per cent to 4.6 per cent, whilst humanities, social science, and law continue to have a much lower uptake (2.5 per cent). At 8.2 per cent, mathematics saw the second largest uptake, an increase compared with 6.5 per cent in 2008.


it’s great to see that we are all striving towards the same goal of improving access to knowledge for all,’ commented Philippe Colombet, strategic partnership development manager at Google Book Search. ‘Google and other technology companies have an important role to play in achieving this goal, and we hope that by partnering with major European cultural institutions such as the Dutch national library, we will be able to accelerate the rapid growth of Europe’s digital library,’ he added.


Elsevier buys Collexis


Elsevier has bought Collexis Holdings, which develops semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, including professional networking sites.


The combination of Elsevier’s content with Collexis’ semantic technology will provide institutions and researchers with new ways to collaborate, showcase accomplishments and improve grant-related workflow efficiencies, believe the companies. ‘By combining Collexis’ solutions that address several pain points across our customer’s collaboration, funding and strategic planning initiatives with SciVal, we’ve created a unique set of solutions,’ said Jay Katzen, managing director of Elsevier Science and Technology.


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