Blackboard users gain access to ResearchNow
Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) and Blackboard have struck a deal allowing Blackboard users to search the bepress portal ResearchNow and incorporate the results into their Blackboard projects. From today’s announcement:
Blackboard Inc. and The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) today announced the launch of the ResearchNow Blackboard Building Block, a new tool that integrates with the Blackboard Learning System, enabling online access to tens of thousands of scholarly materials. The ResearchNow Content Building Block makes it possible for educators to search directly in Blackboard for access to more than 85,000 journal articles, working papers, institutional repository materials, theses and dissertations hosted within ResearchNow, The Berkeley Electronic Press’s innovative database of scholarly information. Relevant resources may be easily selected and incorporated into the Blackboard Academic Suite. ResearchNow is a collection of academic materials drawing from several primary sources: the roster of peer-reviewed, Berkeley Electronic Press journals (27 and counting), bepress-hosted subject matter repositories such as the bepress Legal Repository and COBRA: The Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive, and all working papers, preprints and other “grey literature” content from institutional repositories hosted by bepress that have opted for inclusion. More than 50 schools — including the University of California system, Boston College, Cornell, and the University of Nebraska, as well as major universities in Europe and Australia — use the bepress platform for their institutional repositories. The bepress repository platform has been co-marketed with ProQuest Information & Learning since 2004 as Digital Commons. Collectively, ResearchNow materials have been downloaded more than 3 million times in the past year.
Comment. Bepress offers three degrees of access to ResearchNow, two forms of paid access and its famous quasi-open access. Today’s announcement doesn’t say what level of access Blackboard users will get.
Update (3/2/06). I just heard from Greg Tanenbaum, President of Bepress. In answer to my question about the level of access that Blackboard users will get, he writes, “It mirrors the existing ResearchNow setup. All content that is freely available to the world (e.g., IR working papers, reports, etc.) will be free to Blackboard instructors and students. Our own journal content will be free under the quasi-open access policy.” (Thanks, Greg.)
