Commercial Digest, a once a week digest of messages containing informational content from commercial bodies (i.e., publishers, vendors, agents, etc.) This week's digest contains 2 messages: 1) The Max Planck Society and De Gruyter Sign Agreement for Open Access Publishing 2) New thesaurus created for the astronomy community --------------- Message #1: Subject: The Max Planck Society and De Gruyter Sign Agreement for Open Access Publishing From: <Ulrike.Lippe@degruyter.com> Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:27:18 +0100 PRESS RELEASE The Max Planck Society and De Gruyter Sign Agreement for Open Access Publishing Berlin/Munich, 24 January 2013 – The Max Planck Society and the academic publishing house De Gruyter have signed a groundbreaking agreement to cooperate in the publication of Open Access books. The agreement covers texts intended for publication by scholars at the more than 80 individual Max Planck institutes working around the world today. It encompass the full range of disciplines in which the Max Planck Society is active, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and applies to both monographs and anthologies. “Our collaboration with De Gruyter will enable us to offer our scholars a unified platform – both from a legal and an organizational perspective – for publishing books in Open Access,” explains Ralf Schimmer, Director of the Department of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library. “In this way, we’re responding to an increasing number of requests from the Max Planck institutes, and are extending the support we give for Open Access publishing from journal articles to the arena of books.” De Gruyter is providing the Max Planck Society an attractive opportunity to disseminate its content to the broadest possible audience. Alongside free, global access to content at De Gruyter Online (www.degruyter.com), print versions will also be released. “Our agreement with the Max Planck Society underscores that De Gruyter’s Open Access model is a groundbreaking form of academic publishing,” says Anke Beck, Vice President of Publishing at De Gruyter. “Publications from the internationally renowned institutes of the Max Planck Society will enrich our program with the highest quality content across all fields of research.” Already in the past several years De Gruyter has successfully published a number of Open Access books in collaboration with a variety of ongoing research projects, including with the Berlin College of Antiquities’ Cluster of Excellence project The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations (TOPOI) and with the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. Contact Ulrike Lippe Public Relations Manager Tel. +49 (0)30-260 05 153 ulrike.lippe@degruyter.com Tina Planck Max Planck Digital Library Tel. +49 (0)89-38602249 planck@mpdl.mpg.de De Gruyter: The academic publishing house De Gruyter can look back on a history spanning over 260 years. The Berlin-based group of companies releases over 850 new titles each year in the fields of medicine, the humanities, natural sciences, and law, in addition to more than 600 journals and digital media publications. www.degruyter.com The Max Planck Society: The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is an independent, non-profit research organization. It primarily funds research at its own institutions, which conduct basic research in the natural, biological, and social sciences, as well as in the humanities. http://www.mpg.de --------------- Message #2: Subject: New thesaurus created for the astronomy community From: Collins@ioppubusa.com Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:53:25 -0500 The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and IOP Publishing (IOP) have jointly announced the gift of a new astronomy thesaurus called the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) that will help improve future information discovery for researchers. The AAS will make the UAT freely available for development and use within the astronomy community, while ensuring the thesaurus remains relevant and useful. Further development of the UAT will be undertaken by the John G. Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in collaboration with the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) to enhance and extend the thesaurus to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the astronomy community. Adoption of the thesaurus within the ADS will result in better linking with the majority of astronomy research journal articles through a common vocabulary, thereby greatly improving the accuracy of information discovery. The work to combine the thesauri has been carried out by Access Innovations, Inc., a privately held company that specializes in information management and database creation products and services. For details on this endeavor, please view the press release. Sincerely, Sharice - - - Sharice P. Collins Vice President, Marketing IOP Publishing, Inc. 150 South Independence Mall West Philadelphia, PA 19106 ioppublishing.org * * * This message has been cross-posted. 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