Open data
Springer Nature has become the largest publisher so far to open up its reference lists for data discovery and reuse, making the metadata available across all its own journals and academic books, and giving its society partners the option to do the same. The references are available through Crossref’s Metadata APIs and Metadata Search. The company has also launched a new linked open data platform in collaboration with Digital Science. SciGraph collates information on funders, publications, conferences, projects and grants from Springer Nature and its partners to produce facts, or ‘triples’, about the scholarly ecosystem. The platform currently includes 155 million triples, but this is expected to grow to more than 1 billion by the end of this year as additional data, including citations, patents, and usage numbers, are added.
Busy times for Digital Science
It’s been a busy few months for Digital Science, which back in February announced a refreshed senior leadership structure, promoting Daniel Hook to Chief Executive Officer, Jon Treadway to Chief Operating Officer, and Steve Scott to Director of Portfolio, and appointing Lisa Hulme as Director of Global Communications and Tracy Flashman as Global HR Lead. The company has revealed the latest winners of its Catalyst Grant awards, supporting innovation in software tools and technologies for research. Two of the winners are from London colleges: HackScience, from Imperial College, is a platform for creating and sharing open lab automation tools, while HipDynamics, from King’s College, is a data set interrogation tool for cell and molecular biology. The third, Figures is a workflow solution for managing figure data.
Digital Science’s portfolio companies have made several announcements. Altmetric has released an enhanced version of its Explorer for Publishers platform, and integrated citation data from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science into its Explorer for Institutions. ÜberResearch has joined Leidos’s Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR), contributing global funding data and natural language processing functionality from its Dimensions platform to OnPAR’s global research knowledge management platform. ReadCube has partnered with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to deep-index the society’s six Science-branded journals and add additional interactive functionality for readers. BioRAFT will be acquiring the ChemTracker brand and intellectual property from Stanford University, integrating the latter’s chemical safety and regulatory information database into its enterprise safety, compliance, and training solutions.
Wellcome investment
News has emerged, somewhat belatedly, that the scholarly social network ResearchGate, often criticised by publishers for failing to police the sharing of copyright materials, received more than $52 million in investment back in 2015 from a range of organisations including the Wellcome Trust. Wellcome, which has previously warned publishers that it could refuse to fund the publication of research in hybrid journals if the service provided does not improve, last year partnered with F1000Research to launch its own publishing platform, Wellcome Open Research.
Consortia deals
IOP Publishing has reached a new agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), which covers 31 universities across Australia and New Zealand, to provide access to all 76 journals published by IOP and its partners. The deal, which lasts until 2019, charges universities according to the number of full-time equivalent students, with weightings for levels of study and research, and replaces a previous system based on historical spend on print journals. And ProQuest has joined JISC’s Digital Archival Collections Group Purchasing Pilot, making seven of its collections available to institutions free for up to ninety days until the pilot ends in July; the price to institutions afterwards will depend on how many subscriptions result.
New partnerships
Kudos has announced four new partnerships, with nursing, social sciences and medical publisher the Springer Publishing Company, the Acoustical Society of America, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Association for Food Protection. And AIP Publishing has moved its entire suite of journals, including those it publishes for its partners and member societies, and its magazine Physics Today, to a new site, Scitation, built on Atypon’s Literatum platform.
Conferences
The fortieth annual UKSG conference takes place in Harrogate on April 10-12th; with plenary sessions on ‘Access. Ethics, and Piracy’ and ‘Post-Truth: the role of publishers and librarians’, the hashtag to follow on Twitter is #UKSG17. Registration has also opened for the ninth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP), which will take place on September 20-21st in Lisbon; sessions will cover open peer review, open infrastructure, and research evaluation and assessment.
The Academic Newsletter is sponsored by The Copyright Clearance Center.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), with its subsidiaries RightsDirect and Ixxus, is a global leader in content workflow, document delivery, text and data mining and rights licensing technology for thousands of publishers, businesses and academic institutions. CCC’s solutions provide anytime, anywhere content access, usage rights and information management while promoting and protecting the interests of copyright holders. CCC serves more than 35,000 customers and over 12,000 copyright holders worldwide and manages more than 950 million rights from the world’s most sought-after journals, books, blogs, movies and more. The company has locations in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania and Japan.