Light on your wallet, HighBeam – the subscription news site – relaunches

HighBeam Research has been around for some years now.  It stood as the simple-to-use and cheap alternative to the heavy-weight news aggregators such as Factiva and Nexis, useful for those who have very little budget but wanted access to some premium news sources.  It’s never  pretended to have all the functionality, or source breadth of the big boys, but is a useful add-on to free news searching.

Earlier this month it relaunched and has addressed some of the functionality that was lacking.  As a subscriber, you can set up alerts, access an advanced search interface, email, print, and cite full-text articles. You can also move, copy, delete, and save articles and searches into your own custom folders.  A blog covers search tips and changes to the product.  As a free perk HighBeam is also currently offering some of its lengthier articles for free.

Highbeam is still very cost-effective, coming in at under $300 a year ($200 for a first, introductory year), and offers a 7-day free trial.  It’s worth considering if you’re looking for a user-friendly and cost-effective news database that will give you access to some of those premium titles.  The bigger players would do well to take notice of this relaunch and keep an eye on HighBeam.  They might get some useful ideas!

HighBeam’s put on weight – enough to justify comparison with the news offerings from Factiva and Nexis, but will it prove disruptive to them and steal custom?

Everyone likes a mystery at Christmas time and here’s a rare one

Someone unknown, but extremely talented, has been leaving paper sculptures around Edinburgh libraries since March this year.  The depositing of these exquisite works of art has now come to an end, as the creator said that she was only producing 10, but it took a while to track down the last two!

This has to be one of the most unusual and original – not to say beautiful – ways of showing support for “libraries, books, words, ideas”.

Lovely!

From retro-search to future-search

The founder of the search site, Recorded Future (which I’ve mentioned before) has recently been talking about The Future of Search in a 6 minute video.  Apart from booking travel, or looking at the weather forecast, most of what we look for has already happened (albeit sometimes only just) – what research is out there?  What’s the latest news on a company?

Searching may be quite effective now, but in the future, searching may be better able to include what hasn’t yet happened, and what’s happening right now.   This is Recorded Future’s interest – they focus on the temporal aspects of search and would love to be able to tell you more about what’s going to happen tomorrow.  They think that this will be a growing trend in search-to-come.

Sentiment, event, temporal, or prediction engines – these are the sort of themes that may be on the horizon.  Could be disruptive!

So will “oh, that’s so yesterday” become “oh, that’s so, um, earlier today”?

Keep that pressure on! Scientists want more open access

Following on from highlighting Nature Communications in my last post, there was a more-than-somewhat critical article in the Guardian recently, criticising the vast fees that publishers charge the public to access research that we’ve already paid for.  The article pointed out that when scientists publish papers based on publicly funded academic research, it becomes inaccessible to all unless we’re willing to pay a hefty fee.  You can either buy papers individually at around $30 per paper (in many cases more) or pay a huge up-front licence fee of many thousands of pounds.  The choice is yours, but universities who traditionally provide full-text online access to their students have been struggling to afford the licences in recent years, with some pulling out completely.

Now Science Business has reported that scientists are beginning to bypass these publishers by taking steps to publish their papers elsewhere.  They are becoming increasingly content to publish in open access journals (Nature Communications, being a half-and-half example).  Furthermore, they say that all publicly-funded research results should be available for free. Yippee, that’s the spirit!

You can find the full report here: “An Open Access Future – Report from the eurocancercoms Project”

Hmmm – she sniffs the air – is there a sea-change coming?  It could be quite disruptive!

Nature Comms scientific papers – 50% free!

Oh dear, this just goes to show that a person who’s never successfully kept a diary in her life shouldn’t really start a blog.  It’s not that there’s a shortage of posts to write – not at all, I have a bunch of interesting sites in the wings.

How about a quick advert for Nature Communications for starters?  This site, launched in 2010 now offers over 400 papers, half of which – I’m pleased to see – are “open access” which means free to read.

Nature Comms is truly multidisciplinary in scope – covering research from across the life, physical, chemical and earth sciences – and nicely searchable.

Some people do diaries, some don’t.  I fall into the latter group.  However, I like a challenge.  Let’s see if I can get a personal best for number of (useful and informative, of course) posts in 1 month!

Six weeks of free access to Cambridge journals online

From July 15th to August 30th, Cambridge University Press is offering free access to all of its journals as a promotion for their increased digitisation of archived and new content.

To access simply visit journals.cambridge.org.  You’ll need to register, but that’s all.

There’s a wide range of content available which you can browse or search:

Browse Cambridge Journals by title

Browse Cambridge Journals by subject

A great offer, well worth a look!

Academic literature searching: fee versus free

Like many of my colleagues in the library-world, I’m often asked how good the likes of Google Scholar, Scirus and Science Research really are.  Some people claim that they are serious competition for Web of Science, others that they can’t hold a candle to the subscription scientific literature databases. 

Here’s an interesting and concise comparison between the two heavy-weights which may help: Google Scholar Vs Web of Science: McDonalds Vs a Gourmet restaurant?!  Note that Scholar is often used in tandem with searching Web of Science.  Personally, I find Scholar as a useful starting point – a place to try out and refine my search strategy. 

Of course many can’t afford to access subscription databases, and so “get by” on the free sources.   I don’t think the free sources should be dismissed with disdain.  The main concern is usually the breadth of their coverage.   While my main gripe is usually with the search interfaces of the free sites, they are too simplistic and, certainly in the case of Scirus, don’t always parse your commands in the way that you intended!  But they will be developed and improved.

That other venture site

I had intended to follow up my last blog entry quite quickly, but that clearly didn’t happen!  To make up I’ll suggest 3 more sites instead of just one

Here’s the other venture site I found quite useful.  It’s called CB Insights, and although not free, does allow some trial searches and an even more useful email alert trial.  Of course, if you’ve the budget it’s probably a very useful source to subscribe to.

The other two are Tornado Insider  which covers European companies, has a free email alert and allows you to search its start-ups database for free and Real Deals which is a private equity journal, and also offers a free email news alert, and quite a few free articles with it.

There we are, guilt in long delay since posting somewhat assuaged.

On the move, plus a good source for VC and equity info.

It’s been too long since I last posted here, but I’ve been having a slight job move, back into my parent company!

Now I’m installed, the blog should be back and let’s kick off with a really useful source if you’re looking for venture capital or private equity firms, funding and people.

The source is called PSEPS – Venture Capital and Private Equity Directory.  There, a name that says just what it is, for once!

However, it also claims to be “the world’s largest open venture capital and private equity directory” which makes it even more interesting.  You can register to use it or just use it straight off without registering.

Using it without registering, you find that the results are neatly presented, and there is some functionality, but you have to know where to look.  For example, if you have a company record and see that the company’s location, eg. London, is highlighted, clicking on this will bring up a revised list of companies in London.

Registering probably offers more, but I haven’t had time yet!  I will do so and get back with more details on this site in another post.  Plus, just to be annoying, I’ll also have another venture-themed site to share with you.

Until next time.  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” as they say.

The British Library’s Management & Business Portal

The British Library has recently been promoting their MBS portal from where you can delve into, and search, their business and management collections.

Registration is quick, and a fair proportion of the “high quality management research publications” are freely available to download.

A useful one-stop-shop, the portal contains a wide variety of formats, including video clips and interviews, working papers, articles, websites, books and reports as well as a blog providing additional comment from management gurus such as Mintzberg.

You can also submit your own publications so you can “preserve and disseminate your work for free”!

Key Features

• Download research reports, summaries, briefings, working papers, conference papers and articles from key publishers. You must register to see most of the content.
• Discover the British Library’s vast print and digital collections – in one powerful search
• Receive alerts about new content that matches your subject interest(s)
• Watch author interviews and other videos
• Disseminate and preserve your work

The portal itself is helpfully designed, with features such as a list of key subject areas and “our picks” highlighting  notable content additions.

As well as running a search, you can also look at the Most Popular entries, Most Recent or A-Z by publisher.