Dates of scheduled meetings: Product Update: Web of Knowledge, publications database and bibliometric services

Further to the recent notification that Thomson Reuters (Scientific) will be holding a series of meetings to announce updates in relation to Web of Knowledge, publications database and bibliometric services, the following meetings have been arranged:

Monday, 27 October: Institute of Education, London, 10 am - 1 pm Tuesday, 4 November: University of Glasgow, 10 am - 1 pm Thursday, 6 November: King's College London, 10 am - 1 pm

The main points covered will be:

- Provision of core bibliometric services from Thomson Reuters to support increasing reliance upon metrics

- Review of the JISC Licence to support the creation / maintenance of a Publications Database

- Development / individualisation of core services to ensure institutional requirements are met

- Inclusion of ISI Proceedings, Social Sciences within Web of Knowledge, to ensure full citation coverage of an institution / academic

The meeting format will be a presentation with some online examples, with the last hour set aside for questions.

If you wish to attend any of these meetings, please contact the Mimas helpdesk at wok@mimas.ac.uk

Alternatively, if you are willing for your institution to host one of these meetings, please get in touch with us at the Mimas helpdesk at wok@mimas.ac.uk

Date of next meeting with OVID

JIBS User Group Committee has an enhancement group which meets with Ovid (Wolters Kluwer Health) from time to time. Our next meeting with Ovid will be towards the end of November. If there are topics you wish the Group to raise with Ovid please contact me, a.smith at leeds.ac.uk

British Standards Online

The JIBS BSOL enhancement group met with BSI in June. At that meeting BSI indicated that it was working with a new software company to develop and enhance BSOL and that it hoped that from September it would be able to start a series of releases to enhance the service, especially in the usability area. It was hoped that the enhancements suggested by the JIBS group and others would gradually be rolled out in an iterative manner, with users seeing frequent smaller releases rather than fewer larger releases.
Unfortunately a review of the fundamental architecture of the current database suggests that it may be more difficult than was envisaged to make frequent changes to the system without risking service interruptions. BSI is now reviewing technical options for the delivery of a series of regular releases and in particular is looking at ways that the enhancements to usability can be made.

BSI has promised to keep the group informed of development and consult with us. We are planning to have another formal meeting in January 2009, when we hope there will have been some progress, and we will have a clearer idea of the way that the database interface can be improved.

JISC Collections agreements for four free journal archives

Supporting teaching and research with free access to online journal archives:

Over 800,000 journal articles made freely available to universities, research councils and colleges in the UK

Following an open procurement process JISC Collections is making four journal archives freely available, to all colleges, universities and research councils in the UK. These archives from the American Chemical Society, Brill Academic Publishers, ProQuest, and Taylor & Francis include 230 peer reviewed journals with some of the most important articles in the arts, built environment, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and the social sciences.

JISC Collections’ purchase of these archives means that researchers, teaching staff and students can now have free access to more than 150 years of content and over 800,000 fully searchable articles.

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