Busy month for Springer Nature

Springer Nature has signed a four-year transformative deal with IRel, a consortium of publicly funded Irish higher educational institutions. The deal will give researchers from IRel member institutions full read-access to all subscription journal content from Springer, Palgrave, the academic journals on nature.com and Adis, and enable them to publish open access in more than 2,300 titles.

The company has also launched two new initiatives in partnership with the University of California. The first, a pilot forming part of the transformative agreement concluded last summer between the two parties, aims to increase understanding of researcher attitudes to and motivations towards open research practices. Participating authors, who will be interviewed on these topics, will have the option to trial Guided Open Access (GOA) for some flagship Nature titles and will be encouraged to involve themselves in further open access initiatives. The second initiative will provide funding for open access books by authors affiliated with the University of California’s Berkley Library. The resulting titles will be published under a CC-BY licence through the Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints and will be made available globally via Springer Nature’s content platform SpringerLink.

Springer Nature has also launched a new publication portal for dissertations and post-doctoral theses. BookSubMarine – apparently a contraction of ‘Submitted book Manuscripts are in evaluation’ – allows authors in both STM and HSS fields to submit their manuscript alongside a review, before choosing a publication model; editors will then assess the submission before making a decision.

Finally, the company has signed up to the Climate Pledge, making a commitment to be net zero carbon a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s goal of 2050; earlier this month, it announced that it is already net carbon neutral for emissions associated with its offices, fleets, and flights.

Wiley extends ResearchGate partnership

Wiley has announced an extension to its existing partnership with ResearchGate, with articles published since 2019 in 17 gold open access journals – including AGU Advances, Advanced Science, and Brain and Behavior – now available via the platform. This forms the first stage of a new pilot programme; the second, expected to begin later this year, will extend the pilot to cover a further 85 subscription and hybrid open access journals, enabling users who already have institutional access to access that content via ResearchGate. Wiley has also agreed to distribute open access full-text articles to UK institutional repositories via Jisc’s Publications Router.

IOP adopts new name-change policy

IOP Publishing has implemented a new policy enabling authors to change their names on previously published research. The policy is effective immediately and covers changes to names, pronouns, author photographs, and contact details, with no requirement to disclose the reason for the request or to provide name change proof.

In brief

The American Chemical Society’s publications division has concluded a transformative agreement with Syracuse University that will provide institutional financial support to researchers publishing open access in all 75+ ACS journals, plus read access to all those journals.

PeerJ has announced a new partnership with researcher-led non-profit organisation Peer Community In (PCI), which provides free peer review of pre-prints. PeerJ’s seven journals will now accept articles that have been reviewed by Peer Community in Registered Reports, a community focusing on registered reports, which conduct peer review before data collection, thereby shifting attention to hypothesis and study design rather than results.

Jisc has announced that it will be adopting the Unsub analytics dashboard – used by more than 400 research libraries across the globe – to help evaluate the costs and benefits of the subscription agreements between UK universities and publishers.

Digital Science has acquired US-based start-up Ripeta, which aims to help improve scientific reproducibility by highlighting elements of manuscripts that appear difficult to reproduce. Ripeta was previously the winner of a Digital Science Catalyst grant.

Taylor & Francis open research division F1000 has concluded a deal with China’s Beihang University to develop an open access platform devoted to ‘digital twin’ technologies, complex virtual models that constitute the exact counterparts of physical things.

---