News update from BIDS
News update from BIDS
Keywords Academic libraries, Electronic publishing, Serials, United Kingdom
The University of Bath and ingenta Ltd have announced the move of the BIDS service into a new public/private sector partnership.
Under these arrangements,BIDS services will be hosted by "ingenta", a newly-formed company, which will be part-owned by the University of Bath. The operation will remain located on the University of Bath campus and will continue to provide the JISC-funded services to the UK HE community on behalf of the University of Bath on a not-for-profit basis. Users and supporters of these services will see very little change, and access arrangements will be unaffected. In time, though, they should be able to see benefits from service improvements made possible by the access to private investment capital.
As well as providing services for the UK's academic community, BIDS has developed a range of services for the scholarly publishing market, enabling publishers to incorporate electronic editions of their scholarly journals into the BIDS services and linking them to the bibliographic database services. The full text services,previously called JournalsOnline, will in future be marketed under the name ingentaJournals. The service has already made agreements with 11publishers who between them offer over 600 journal titles. The service is growing rapidly with the number of available full text articles now approaching 100,000 and users accessing over 11,500 articles a month.
Commenting on the move,the Vice Chancellor of Bath University, David VandeLinde, said "I am delighted that a future for BIDS has been secured which retains its independence and connections with the academic sector and JISC support while also providing capital and resources to develop new activities which will provide further benefits to academia".
Mark Rowse, chief executive of ingenta, added: "This unique public/private partnership will safeguard the interests of the UK's library and end-user community, maintaining free access for users to a flagship national service. At the same time it will allow ingenta to develop its position as an aggregator and distributor for the scholarly publishing market".
BIDS is delighted to offer full text electronic journals from two more publishers through the JournalsOnline service.
Professional Engineering Publishing are the publishers to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers(IMechE). Currently available online are 11 journals, including all parts of the proceedings of the IMechE, together with the Journal of Strain Analysis. Free electronic access to full-text articles from 1997 and 1998 is available to current, full-rate print subscribers. Non-subscribers may purchase individual articles by account or credit card.
White Horse Press is a small independent publishing house, specialising in environmental issues. Current institutional print subscribers have free access to full-text material from the following journals: Environmental ValuesandSociety andAnimals.
To access full-text material, users need to have a BIDS user name to login to JournalsOnline as a registered user.
If you have a print subscription to any of the available titles from Professional Engineering Publishing or White Horse Press, but do not have a BIDS username, please contact the BIDS Help Desk bidshelp@bids.ac.uk quoting the relevant subscription number(s).
BIDS will be making changes to the login procedure for all BIDS services (bibliographic databases and JournalsOnline). Instead of a separate login page for each service, users will be presented with a single login screen for all BIDS services. After login,a selection menu of services available to that particular username will be presented. It will be possible to switch between services without repeating the authentication process.
Source: press release
