STM Publishing – October 2022
ALPSP announces award winners at annual conference
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) announced the winners of its annual awards at this year’s conference in Manchester.
Lorraine Estelle, director of COUNTER, received the Contribution to Scholarly Publishing award for her work over two decades, first at Jisc, where she founded the Collections Team in 2002 and became CEO in 2006 when it became a standalone organisation, and then at COUNTER, which she joined in 2015. Her work as a leader and mentor was particularly praised.
The Award for Innovation in Publishing was shared between Charlesworth Gateway – which provides a quick and effective means for publishers to communicate with authors in China using Chinese social platform WeChat – and Gigabyte, whose XML-based publishing system allows readers to interact with the data and software underlying scientific articles. David Sommer of Kudos, chair of the judging panel, highlighted the fact that the two winners focused on the needs of authors and researchers while making the scholarly record more widely accessible.
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Springer Nature releases annual progress report for 2021
Springer Nature has released its first annual progress report, covering performance metrics for 2021 from across its wide portfolio. The figures show that article and book chapter downloads rose 10% year-on-year, totalling 2.6 billion: more than 7 million daily; that downloads per article rose to 900, doubling over three years; and that citations per article were just shy of 6, an increase of 60 % in the same period. The company invested €120 million in technology last year and waived €18 million waived in APC fees for researchers in financial need.
Springer Nature Chief Operating Officer Martin Mos is to retire after almost two decades with the company; his replacement Marc Spenlé joins from Barco NV, where he was Chief Digital and Information Officer. The company has also announced that Dan Benjamin has joined Scientific American as VP, Product and Technology.
Emerald launches Global Inclusivity Report
Emerald Publishing has launched its 2022 Global Inclusivity Report, exploring academic perceptions and experiences of inclusion. Almost three quarters of respondents said that publishers could play their part in creating a more inclusive society by removing paywalls, making research more discoverable, and offering more routes to open access. The report, which forms part of the publisher’s Power of Diverse Voices campaign alongside its Impact Manifesto, also found that almost a third of academics experience discrimination in the workplace, as well as other anti-inclusive behaviours, with almost half of women having experienced gender discrimination.
Emerald’s own efforts towards inclusivity in recent months have included becoming accredited as a flexible employer by Flexa, coming second in the media category in that organisation’s 2022 Flexible Working Industry Awards, and signing up to the Menopause Workplace Pledge – to help create a supportive and understanding environment for employees experiencing the menopause.
New partnerships for IOPP, Springer, and Wiley
IOP Publishing has launched a new collaboration with open access workflow streamlining platform ChronosHub. The first fruit of the partnership, the free-to-use IOPP Journal Finder, will enable users to check whether their chosen IOPP journal complies with the requirements of their institution or funder.
Scientific product search engine CiteAB has announced partnerships with scholarly publishers Springer Nature and Wiley. Previously, the engine, which provides researchers with citations, supplier details, and experimental information for nearly six million antibodies, had relied upon open access data, but will now incorporate selected journal and book citation data from the two publishers’ content also.
Springer Nature has also partnered with the Center of Health Equity and Patient Affairs (HEPA) at global biopharmaceutical company Takeda to raise awareness of health inequality through an outreach programme including conference activity, the development of resources across publication including Nature and Scientific American, and the launch of a new global Nature Award programme.
Taylor & Francis is undertaking a six-month pilot of Proofig’s image integrity software, which uses artificial intelligence, computer vision, and image processing to find possible examples of duplication, manipulation, or fabrication of images in scholarly papers. Any instances found will be reviewed by publishing staff before any action is taken.
PLOS to analyse Open Science practices in partnership with DataSeer
PLOS has extended its partnership with DataSeer, following a successful pilot programme, to develop a suite of three Open Science Indicators. The indicators are intended to help increase the adoption of best practices in data sharing by analysing how open science is practiced across the 66,000 articles PLOS has published since 2019. Later this year, the publisher will begin sharing the rates of data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting for its published articles, and comparing this to a randomised sample of non-PLOS content for benchmarking. The results will be updated as new content is published, and further Open Science Indicators developed in future.
Transformative agreements
IOP Publishing has agreed several more transformative agreements across the Americas. Deals with the University of Florida, North Carolina State University, Rowan University, Mount Holyoke College, Olin College of Engineering, and the 51 non-profit academic libraries comprising Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium (VIVA) all start from 1 January 2023; they will offer APC-free publication in all journals published by IOPP and most of its partners, along with read access to the same publications. A similar three-year agreement with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) will launch on the same date.
Springer Nature has concluded a three-year open access deal with the Finnish FinELIB consortium enabling researchers at 30 institutions to publish their work open access across the Nature portfolio of journals. Subscription access to the Nature Review, Nature protocols, and Research portfolio is also included. Springer’s transformative agreement with Projekt DEAL, originally signed in 2019, has also been extended for a fourth year.
IEEE has agreed a three-year read and publish open access agreement with the Italian university consortium CRUI (the Conferenza dei Rettori delle Università Italiane). Researchers from the 54 participating institutions will be able to read subscription content comprising more than five million articles and publish open access in around 200 IEEE journals and magazines.
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.
Alastair writes our STM Publishing and our Academic Publishing Newsletters.