STM Publishing – August 2022
ALPSP among organisations raising concerns about planned data mining exceptions
A group of industry organisations has written to Kwasi Kwarteng, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to raise concerns about the government’s decision to introduce a new copyright exception allowing the mining of copyrighted text and data by any entity anywhere for free, for any commercial use.
In the letter (PDF), the group – including the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and the Independent Publishers Guild – reminds the minister that the former IP minister, George Freeman MP, promised that the government would look again at the decision, which it suggests ‘will seriously undermine the UK’s intellectual property framework, conflict with international law, and … unintentionally provide international rights holders and non-UK based research organisations with a competitive advantage.’
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IOP Publishing strengthens its commitment to open access
IOP Publishing has announced that the journal Nuclear Fusion, published in partnership with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will become fully open access at the start of next year. The publisher has also issued details of a new policy to be implemented across all its journals, which will see researchers from countries with lower-middle income economies – according to the World Bank categorisation – charged a flat APC fee of £500; IOP Publishing already allows researchers from countries with low-income economies to publish without charge in its fully or hybrid open access journals.
Springer Nature offers artificial intelligence solutions
Springer Nature has announced two new initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence. Nature Research Intelligence is a new AI-led service that aims to assist academic, government, and corporate decision-makers to make decisions on strategy and funding informed by real-time information and data.
It will launch with three products: Nature Strategy Report (a customised report giving insights for setting research direction); Nature Index (metrics to help organisations understand their research output); and Nature Navigator (using real-time data and artificial intelligence to guide research decisions and identify opportunities for collaboration).
Meanwhile, a new pilot in partnership with American Journal Experts (AJE) will make the latter’s AI-driven editing services made available to book authors and editors, correcting grammatical errors and improving phrasing and word choice. The pilot will be available cost-free to book authors and editors in certain disciplines, including Applied Sciences and Medicine and Life Sciences, until the end of the year.
A second pilot, this time in partnership with Brooklyn-based start-up scite and lasting for six months, will offer researchers using the Springer Nature Research Solutions hub individual licenses for the latter’s Smart Citations tool, enabling them to discover how and why research has been cited by displaying the key context around a citation.
New Bioethics platform from F1000
F1000 is launching a new bioethics publishing platform, Bioethics Open Research, the first platform to comply with the FAIR Principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets – that will be required by the sector’s largest funder, the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), from next year. The first partner to launch a dedicated publishing space on the new platform will be The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB).
Transformative agreements
IOP Publishing has signed its first three transformative agreements in the United States. Deals with Princeton University, the University of Central Florida, and Connecticut College, all starting on 1 January 2023 and lasting three years, will provide researchers with unlimited barrier-free publication in all the publisher’s hybrid and gold open access titles, plus reading access to all its journals. IOPP now has agreements with 290 institutions in 15 countries.
Springer Nature has extended its transformative agreement with the University of California, adding Nature titles to the list of journals covered by the existing deal, signed back in 2020. The extension runs from the start of August this year to the end of 2024 and will see researchers receive $1,000 from University of California libraries towards the costs of open access publication in Nature, the Nature research journals, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports. The agreement is the first in the Americas to cover Nature titles.
Staying in the United States, Taylor & Francis has signed a transformative agreement with Montana State University granting researchers fee-free publication in the publisher’s open access journals and unrestricted access to content published in any of its journals through to the end of 2024.
Crossing the Atlantic, UK not-for-profit Jisc has signed an open access agreement with the American Psychological Association offering affiliated researchers capped open access publishing in the association’s journals.
UKRI updates information on open access policy
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has published updated information on its open access policy for research that has received funding from the organisation, originally announced in August 2021. All monographs, book chapters, and edited collections funded by UKRI and published after 1 January 2024 must be made open access within twelve months of publication. Journal articles submitted for publication since 1 April this year require immediate open access publication.
Partnerships
SAGE has partnered with the Wikipedia Library in a move that will giving the online encyclopaedia’s editors full-text access to almost two million articles published in SAGE’s thousand-plus peer-reviewed journals. The move aims to improve the quality of information available on Wikipedia while simultaneously extending the visibility and impact of research published in the publisher’s journals.
Swiss-based publisher Karger has announced a twelve-month pilot partnership with scholarly social network ResearchGate which will see more than five thousand articles from fifteen of its hybrid and fully open access journals made seamlessly available to users of the network.
In brief
The theme for this year’s Peer Review Week, due to take place from 19-23 September, has been announced: Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research. Publishers are invited to join scholarly societies, researchers, editors, libraries, universities, funding bodies, and other scholarly communication stakeholders in participating in activities including live and online events, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics.
Peter Vicary-Smith, formerly Chief Executive at Which?, has been appointed as the new Chair of the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal); he will also serve as a non-executive director of parent company the BMA.
Clarivate has announced the retirement of CEO Jerre Stead, effective from 1 September 2022; he will be replaced by Jonathan Gear, previously Chief Financial Officer of IHS Markit.
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.
Alastair writes our STM Publishing and our Academic Publishing Newsletters.