Apress, a publisher of technology books, announced the launch of ApressOpen, a program that offers technology companies and professionals the opportunity to publish technical and business content under an open access model. With ApressOpen, content will be freely available through online distribution channels and electronic formats with the goal of disseminating professionally edited and technically reviewed content to the worldwide community.

Elsevier, a provider of STM information products and services, and Ex Libris Group, a provider of library automation solutions, announced a collaborative initiative that will enable joint customers to search the Scopus abstracting and indexing database via the Ex Libris Primo Central Index.

Scientific publisher, Springer Science + Business Media, announced the company has acquired UK-based Canopus Academic Publishing. Canopus is a publisher that specializes in the subjects of physics and astronomy. With this acquisition, Springer will absorb more than 50 published or planned works.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc, announced the launch of a new interdisciplinary review publication called WIREs Energy and Environment. This publication will serve as an interdisciplinary review work which the company says will highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in research and education.

In an effort to help scientists go global with their research, Edanz has launched Journal Selector as a part of its Journal Advisor platform. By using Journal Selector, researchers will be able to match an author's non-English research to journals that publish articles on similar topics and can convert the research conducted into English. By converting research into English, Edanz feels researchers will have a much greater chance of getting published.

What happens if the lights go out? It's a question that strikes fear into the hearts of content providers everywhere--especially those that have transitioned from preserving hard copies to digital storage. Decisions about how to protect content-in this case, digital content--should be based both on an assessment of the purpose and value of that content and the development of a policy that outlines what is stored and how it is stored.

The digital age has given way to an open access renaissance - allowing for the free flow of information traditionally bound up in scholarly journals and academic publications. But when an influential analyst said that a European push toward open access could significantly hurt academic publisher Reed Elsevier's bottom line, many STM publishers took a second look at this model.

It's happened to you plenty of times. You're standing in the checkout line at the grocery story, half-heartedly gazing at all the vacuous gossip magazine covers that proclaim the latest reality show stars' divorces or the most recent travails of that Hollywood celebutante who seems to be in constant transit between rehab and jail, when you think longingly to yourself, "If only I had access to the latest issue of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter right now."

These days, getting lots of information is easy; it's using that information productively that's the tricky part. The task is even more difficult when that information comes not from a single information resource, but from several. But for users of Elsevier's various scientific resources, that task just got a little easier thanks to the August 30 release of a unified research platform called SciVerse.

You know online social networking has reached critical mass when physicists get their very own social network. While AIP UniPHY isn't exactly Facebook, it is a networking site devoted to connecting physical scientists to one another. On Tuesday, September 8, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) unveiled the launch edition of its new site, AIP UniPHY- a scientific networking platform for communicating with colleagues, identifying potential collaborators, and keeping up with competitors.

Electronic health records are not new. The concept has been around since the first PC hit the stores. Yet despite the much improved systems and greater reasons to use them, fewer than 20% of physicians' practices use electronic medical records.

Healthcare in America is changing. At the heart of the transformation is the electronic medical record (EMR). By pulling together all of a patient's information, from lab test results to billing history, into a single electronic record, healthcare organizations can dramatically improve quality of care while at the same time lowering their costs.

Perhaps no group of workers needs quicker access to accurate, current information than medical professionals. So it comes as little surprise that the medical community has been among the early adopters of mobile content.

The web: It's everywhere. It's a modern miracle. An amazing technological advancement that, when combined with mobile devices and wireless broadband, provides humanity with the promise of a more equitable dispersement of information and wealth...err, hypothetically. Despite the ubiquity of technology and the widespread availability of the mobile web, there are many places in the world where information critical to survival isn't available in a way that's relevant to those who need it. But it doesn't have to be that way. All that's needed is an understanding of the actual problems in need of solving.

New technologies are being pioneered to exponentially increase doctors' access to medical knowledge and, in turn, the chance of finding new cures. These technologies are being developed by the same people who originally created the World Wide Web. They are called semantic technologies, and are currently being explored, improved, and applied to healthcare in a movement known as Health 3.0.

If you work with STM publishing, sooner or later you’ll need to produce mathematical expressions, which seems simple until you try to bridge the gap between authors and production.