The past month has seen no let-up in the rush of announcements, partnerships and new deals in the STM publishing sector. HighWire Press, which last month acquired Semantico, has announced some changes to its management team, with Abhinay Mittal becoming chief technology officer and Maya Sommers director for professional services; Colin Caveney becomes consultancy director and Tasha Mellins-Cohen director for strategic engagement services. The new roles are intended to boost deeper strategic engagement with customers.
Science publisher and service provider F1000, which last year partnered with the Wellcome Trust on the Wellcome Open Research platform, has just announced an agreement with the research outcome reporting and impact tracking platform Researchfish. Any research outcomes reported in Researchfish that have been recommended by F1000Prime’s team of 8,000 senior scientists will now include additional information on who has made the recommendation, and why they consider the outcome significant. Further announcements about deeper integration between the two platforms are expected to follow.
One of the month’s more unexpected deals came from the United States, with the acquisition of AI-powered science search engine Meta by Chan Zuckerberg, the philanthropic organisation launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and paediatrician Priscilla Chan. The acquisition is the first to be made by the organisation, which announced in September 2016 that it planned to invest $3 billion in businesses and groups conducting medical research as a step towards its ambitious goal of eradicating all disease by the end of this century. Founded in 2010, Meta indexes repositories and analyses citations to provide researchers with the most relevant papers; once the deal is completed, the company will drop its existing freemium model in favour of entirely free access.
The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced that it will be transferring its systems for manuscript revision and peer review from ScholarOne to the ReView platform offered by UK-based River Valley Technologies; the news follows the announcement in October last year that the IET would use the same platform to manage professional registration applications from its 167,000 members.
SAGE Publishing has announced that it will now be publishing Global Advances in Health and Medicine (GAHM) in partnership with the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health. Founded in 2012, the open access journal publishes six times a year in the field of whole-person and whole-systems care and healing.
And it’s been another busy month for Digital Science, with the announcement that the group has invested in Peerwith, the Amsterdam-based marketplace for academic author services including editing, illustration and translation. Peerwith already has partnerships with publishers including Brill and the Emerald Group, and plans to use the additional investment to scale its activities and extend its business to academic institutions. Meanwhile, Digital Science portfolio company ReadCube has announced a new content-sharing pilot initiative in partnership with Wiley, enabling Wiley authors, subscribers, and more than fifty selected media organisations to share articles with non-subscribers. The pilot will apply to 180 Wiley journals for subscribers and the media, while authors will be able to share their work across all Wiley journals from the start. A third Digital Science company, Overleaf, has made three announcements of its own: new partnerships with editorial and XML solutions provider Inera and open access journal eLife, while its partnership with Purdue University, offering students and staff at the university access to customised writing templates and LaTeX authoring tools, will continue beyond its initial single-year pilot for a further five years.
