STM Publishing – November 2022
Revenues up but profits slightly down for Cambridge
Cambridge University Press and Assessment has issued its annual report for its first year post-merger. Overall turnover increased from £772m to £868m, with profits falling slightly from £112m to £108m – though £30m was transferred from the press to its parent university, up £2m from last year. In the section of the report concerning the academic division, Managing Director Mandy Hill drew attention to the innovative Elements series of mini-monographs – 233 published in 2021 and 300 expected in 2022 – and a landmark centenary edition of Ulysses, alongside the press’s progress on open access: half of all new journal articles expected to be open access by the end of the year. A new chair of the press’s Academic Publishing Committee has also been appointed: Professor Amira K. Bennison, a fellow of Magdalene College, takes over the role from Professor Kenneth Armstrong.
Springer Nature extends two data-sharing pilots and agrees new partnership
Springer Nature, which recently marked the publication of its 2,000th open access book, has announced the extension of two initiatives aimed at enabling authors to share data from their published research, following successful pilot programmes. A partnership with Code Ocean will enable authors publishing in selected titles from the Nature portfolio – initially Nature Computational Science and Nature Machine Intelligence – to share their code and data at the same time. Springer’s partnership with Figshare, begun this April, will also be extended, allowing authors submitting to journals from the Nature portfolio covering the fields of life, health, chemical and physical sciences – including Nature itself – to opt into data sharing via Figshare as part of an integrated submission process.
The publisher has also agreed a partnership with The Lens which will see the online patent and scholarly literature search platform index full text and abstracts from more than 12 million research works published by Springer Nature, linking them with its existing portfolio of patent and scholarly works data, including the citation links between patents and cited scholarly works, and the full open scholarly citation graph.
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RSC to move entire journal portfolio to open access within five years
The Royal Society of Chemistry has committed to making its entire portfolio of fully owned journals open access within five years. As a first step towards this goal, all 44 fully RSC-owned journals will shortly be submitted to the cOAlition S Transformative Journal programme for approval. The Society intends to partner with institutions globally to develop open access models that do not depend on APCs, as part of its commitment to inclusion and diversity.
Emerald issues findings from new report
Emerald Publishing, recently announced as finalists at this year’s Great British Workplace Wellbeing Awards – in the Best Support for Remote Workers category – have announced the findings from their 2022 Time for Change survey into academic culture. More than 1,400 academics from around the world answered questions on subjects including openness and transparency, content forms, and the role of the publisher. On this last topic, 60% of respondents felt that publishers could help to improve academic culture by offering different options to publish; 70% thought they could offer more support to underfunded areas of research, and more than half wanted more post-publication assistance.
Wiley launches new Partner Solutions division
Wiley has created a new division in its Research business, focused on providing support for its partner organisations as they adapt to an era of open research. Wiley Partner Solutions will provide associations, scientific publishers, societies, and corporations with a range of digital platforms, publishing solutions, and services aimed at enabling them to scale and accelerate their publishing programmes from manuscript submission to publication.
Taylor & Francis in peer review trial
Taylor & Francis is trialling Research Square’s Research Quality Evaluation Service on a small number of its journals. When a journal is unable to find sufficient peer reviewers for a paper in time, the Research Square team will match it with reviewers who will be paid a small honorarium. The publisher has also renewed its partnership with the Wikipedia Library to provide qualifying Wikipedia editors with automatic access to more than 500 of its journals across a wide range of topics, enabling them to incorporate insights from the latest research into the encyclopaedia’s entries.
Transformative and Open Access Agreements
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has signed a one-year open access agreement with the Universidad Nacional Autonoma Mexico (UNAM), the country’s largest research institution. The deal, which starts on 1 January 2023, will enable affiliated researchers to publish in PLOS One and selected other PLOS journals without incurring processing charges.
SAGE has concluded a transformative agreement with the 68-strong Italian consortium of Biomedical Research Libraries, Bibliosan. The deal, backdated to the start of this year, will allow researchers at participating institutions to publish their work freely in all the publisher’s hybrid journals and give them a discount on APCS for publishing in gold open access titles; it will also provide them with read access to more than 350 journals.
IOP Publishing has announced a three-year transformative agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). Starting on 1 January next year, the deal will allow unrestricted access to all IOPP’s own and partner-published journals, plus uncapped open access publishing in 76 Gold and hybrid journals, at no cost to authors. Taylor & Francis has agreed a deal with the same consortium, also beginning in January and lasting three years; researchers will retain access to journals they already subscribe to and will be able to publish open access in a wide range of the publisher’s journals without paying APCs.
Oxford University Press has agreed a three-year transformative deal with the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE), which represents 500 of the country’s libraries. Researchers at participating institutions will receive discounts on APCS for fully open access journals while also gaining comprehensive access to OUP’s journal collection. The deal is the press’s first in Asia and its 30th overall.
Also agreeing a deal in Japan is Springer Nature, which has signed a pilot agreement with ten institutions which will see researchers from participating institutions publish nearly 900 articles open access in any of more than 2000 of the publisher’s journals. Two of the institutions – the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology – have committed to publishing 100% of their researchers’ articles openly, while the other eight will have at least 50% of papers from their authors published fully open access.
Wiley has extended its open access agreement with Projekt DEAL, the consortium which represents more than 900 German institutions, into a fifth year. The agreement will now incorporate an additional 240 open access journals and has already seen a ten-fold increase in articles being published open access by authors at participating institutions since it began in 2018.
Alastair Horne is a lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling.
Alastair writes our STM Publishing and our Academic Publishing Newsletters.