ALPSP conference explores change, rewards innovation
The tenth ALPSP conference took place in Noordwijk in the Netherlands. With a keynote session on Trust, Truth and Scholarly Publishing, and plenaries focusing on change – including artificial intelligence and the drivers behind rapid evolution in scholarly publishing – the conference featured speakers from across the sector. Recordings of sessions and presenter slides are available on the association’s website.
For the second year running, there were two winners of the annual ALPSP Innovation in Scholarly Publishing Award. Publons, the peer review platform acquired earlier this year by Clarivate, was one, praised for providing both training for reviewers and tools for editors to find, contact, and motivate reviewers. The other was EMBO’s open scientific discovery platform SourceData, which enables scientists to find research data locked away in figures and scientific illustrations. The award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing was presented to Sara Miller McCune, Founder and Executive Chair of SAGE Publishing, who launched the company 52 years ago in New York and has kept the company successful and independent ever since then, while also making significant charitable contributions in the fields of education, culture, and health.
INASP, the development charity whose AuthorAID MOOC training courses were also shortlisted for the ALPSP Innovation Award, has announced the launch of a new framework for assessing publishing practises and standards, aimed at helping publishers of legitimate journals in the global South increase their awareness of internationally accepted best practices, to avoid being wrongly labelled as ‘predatory’. The Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework provides detailed assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices of such journals and is initially being used to assess the journals hosted on INASP’s JOL platforms.
Digital Science catalyses innovation, incorporates Amazon
Digital Science has announced the winners of its Catalyst Grant for ideas that could improve research. The three winners, each of whom will receive up to £25,000, are Ricochet by Ripeta, a framework to assess the reproducibility of research published in scientific journals; the Open Syllabus Project, software that collates and maps university curricula globally; and Researchably, a search tool that uses machine learning that provides recommendations for further resources based on analysis of researchers’ existing reading.
Meanwhile Digital Science portfolio company Altmetric has announced that it has extended its tracking of the online discussion about books to include Amazon, generating considerable amounts of new research data: 145,000 mentions of 3,000 books just via Twitter. The company expects to see around two million posts referencing Amazon’s book pages annually.
Partnerships and appointments
Bioscientifica has partnered with Sheridan PubFactory, which will host all the publisher’s titles from next summer. Redlink has announced the integration of ORCID into its Remarq tool, enabling the prepopulation of users’ profiles when they log in to Remarq using their ORCID credentials. Open Access publisher Hindawi has signed a publishing partnership agreement with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that will see Hindawi provide post-acceptance publishing services for the AAAS’s new Science Partner Journal publishing programme, including systems, processes, staff, and a new journal platform. And UCL Press has announced that its eight scholarly journals will now be hosted on the ScienceOpen discovery platform and integrated into its research network.
Springer Nature has appointed Frank Vrancken Peeters, formerly Regional MD of Wolters Kluwer, in the new role of Chief Commercial Officer; Peeters will report to new Springer Nature CEO Daniel Ropers from October. And Kudos has appointed Peter Shelley, formerly of ProQuest, Bowker, and Emerald Group Publishing, as Head of Business Development.
Alastair Horne writes our Academic & STM Newsletter.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student
at the British Library and Bath Spa University.
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