New content puts Ovid in rude health

Health content and research tools provider Ovid has announced a raft of partnerships aimed at expanding its academic offerings. It has forged strategic partnerships with Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier Bibliographic Databases, McGraw-Hill, Nature Publishing and the OUP.

It has also agreed to distribute 3D anatomy images from London based Primal Pictures on the Ovid platform. Steven Hall, journal sales and marketing director at Blackwell Publishing, told IWR: “We have renewed our agreement with Ovid and extended it to additional titles because we recognise that medical libraries, particularly ones in North America, like the single interface to medical and allied health content that the Ovid platform provides and wish to see Blackwell journals made available through it.”

He added: “We wouldn’t expect our academic customers, who have access to both medical and non medical Blackwell journals on our Synergy platform, to switch to Ovid’s platform for their medical titles.”

On pricing differentials,Hall said: “I can’t comment on the cost of accessing Blackwell journals via Ovid as they are free to set their own prices, but I wouldn’t expect them to be much different to our own.”

More than 20 dictionaries and encyclopedias in technology, science, and engineering from McGraw-Hill will be available on Books@Ovid, Ovid’s e-book product. Rossella Proscia, Ovid executive director, said the deal will help Ovid broaden its reach beyond the clinical to target academics who are focussed on fulltext.

Ovid will make more e-books available to meet user demand. Tracy Korman, EVP of strategic marketing and business development at Ovid, added: “Users don’t want to leave the electronic environment of journals to get access to books.”Ovid plans to develop access to its products from handheld devices in 2006. Ovid is part of the Wolters Kluwer scientific and academic publishers ( read more here ).