Change at the top for Springer
Springer Nature CEO Derk Haank will be retiring at the end of 2017, after a career in academic publishing spanning thirty years, half of which were spent with Springer. Haank led the integration of Springer Science and Business Media with most of Macmillan Science and Education in 2015, when he became CEO of the new entity. His replacement, Daniel Ropers, is currently CEO of bol.com, the online retailer he co-founded in 1999 and has led since 2000; he will join Springer Nature at the start of October to smooth the transition.
ALPSP announces Innovation Shortlist
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has released the shortlist for its annual Innovation in Publishing awards. The six-strong list covers a wide range of services and industry initiatives. AuthorAID, the global support, mentoring, resource and training network for researchers in developing countries, coordinated by international development charity INASP, is joined by Delta Think’s Open Access Data and Analytics Service, and Escalex, the food regulation database from IFIS, the not-for-profit academic publisher formerly known as the International Food Information Service.
Also on the shortlist are Publons, the peer review initiative recently acquired by Clarivate Analytics, Springer Nature’s content sharing initiative SharedIt, which enables authors and selected media outlets to share read-only versions of articles on social media and the web, and EMBO’s Source Data, a new platform that allows researchers and publishers to make their papers discoverable based on their data content. Chair of the judging panel, Kudos co-founder David Sommer, noted that this year’s shortlist had been drawn from more than forty submissions; the awards are sponsored by digital platform provider MPS, and the winner will be announced at this year’s ALPSP tenth anniversary conference in Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
New conference
While the ALPSP conference is celebrating its tenth anniversary, a new one-day conference will be making its debut in December this year in London. Run by Research Information and London Info International, Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle will form a pre-conference day to the annual LII event, and will address key industry issues from the perspectives of three key stakeholders: publishers, information professionals, and academics. Potential speakers are invited to submit abstracts to RI editor Tim Gillett for consideration.
Dutch go for Gold
More large-scale consortium deals are in the pipeline. Cambridge University Press has concluded a three-year deal with universities in the Netherlands that will allow researchers at those universities to publish via the Gold Open Access route in more than 350 CUP journals – both fully open access and hybrid titles – at no extra cost. It is said to be the first time that a publisher has chosen this route. Meanwhile, JISC is running a group-purchasing pilot giving subscribing institutions access to twenty collections from publishers Adam Matthew Digital, Brill, and ProQuest; institutions have until the middle of this month to sign up.
Figshare: brimful of ASHA
It’s been another busy month of activity from the Digital Science portfolio companies. Figshare has announced partnerships with the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) and the University of Sheffield. The ASHA deal sees research outputs from its journals showcased in a new customised portal whose functionality includes DOIs, usage tracking and in-browser viewing for 650 file types; the agreement with Sheffield has involved the university using the Figshare API to build its own hub for sharing and managing research data on top of the Figshare portal. Altmetric, meanwhile, has announced deals with Cabells, Researchfish, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The EPFL has adopted the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions platform, and Researchfish has integrated Altmetric badges, while Altmetric data will be integrated into Cabells’ journals whitelist database.
Alastair Horne writes our Academic Newsletter.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student
at the British Library and Bath Spa University.
He writes our Academic Newsletter.