Another busy month for Wiley
Wiley has had another busy month, launching one new product and announcing an international partnership. Wiley Digital Archives, a new collection comprising millions of pages of digitised primary sources in the sciences in medicine, bringing together archival material from societies such as the New York Academy of Sciences and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, will launch in 2018. A partnership with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank and digital textbook and personal study platform Kortext will also see Egyptian citizens and students gain access to Wiley’s digital textbooks.
F1000 launches two new platforms
Publishing services provider F1000 has also been busy, announcing the launch of two new publishing platforms. A new partnership with the African Academy of Sciences will see the launch in early 2018 of AAS Open Research, a platform intended to enable researchers affiliated with or funded by the AAS to publish their work immediately and without barriers. Articles published on the platform will undergo transparent post-publication peer review, with review reports appearing alongside the articles themselves. It is hoped that the initiative will help level the publication playing field for researchers from the continent. A similar initiative, HRB Open Research, was announced at the end of last month, in partnership with Ireland’s Health Research Board.
Meanwhile, F1000’s former Commercial Director Bev Acreman has been appointed as Interim Executive Director for UKSG, replacing Sarah Bull. Acreman has also previously held senior roles at Springer Nature, BioMed Central, and Taylor & Francis.
Clarivate appoints Burridge, issues report
Clarivate Analytics has appointed Samantha Burridge to the newly-created role of Director of Strategy & Transformation in its Scientific & Academic Research group. Burridge will be responsible for developing strategy, supporting innovation in data and analytics, and establishing best practice in innovation new businesses; she will report directly to division CEO Annette Thomas, her former colleague at Springer Nature. The company has also issued Research Fronts, its fourth annual report in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, identifying 100 hot and 43 emerging speciality areas in the sciences and social sciences. An English-language version of the report can be downloaded for free here.
Figshare finds progress on open data
Figshare has issued a second annual report on The State of Open Data, including articles from industry experts and the results of a survey of the area, conducted in partnership with Springer Nature and Wiley. Findings include increased awareness of open datasets amongst respondents (up from 73% to 82%), an increased willingness on the part of researchers to reuse open data sets in their own research (up from 70% to 80%), and a slight increase in the number of researchers who routinely share their data, up 3% to 60%; much higher increases were found in Asia. The report can be downloaded for free here.
Open access news in brief
Open Access publisher Ubiquity Press, founded five years ago by researchers at University College London, has announced that it will be piloting two open-source cloud-based hosted repository systems from January, and is looking for libraries interested in taking part in the pilot.
Springer Nature has contributed data covering 600,000 chemical substance records to the National Institutes of Health open chemistry database PubChem; the data comprises more than 26 million links to scientific articles, of which 1.6 million point to documents that are freely available.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student
at the British Library and Bath Spa University.
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