STM Publishing – December 2020

STM Publishing – December 2020

Springer opens up

Springer Nature has announced that from January 2021, publication in Nature and the 32 Nature primary research journals will be available via a gold open access model involving an Article Processing Charge (APC) of €9500. The company will also be rolling out a complementary open access pilot through which authors can pay an Editorial Assessment Charge in return for being considered across six Nature journals and receiving feedback in the form of an Editorial Assessment Report. These initiatives come as Springer Nature has released a new white paper demonstrating the effects of open access publication on the impact of research. Open for All, Exploring the Reach of Open Access Content to Non-Academic Audiences involved a bibliometric analysis of nearly 360,000 documents and a survey of nearly 6,000 readers. Nature Research is also supporting a new international award, the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research, which will honour measures and projects across scientific disciplines that help advance the quality and robustness of research findings.

Busy month for IOP Publishing

It’s been a busy month for IOP Publishing, which has just announced its fourteenth transformative read-and-publish deal, with the Polish Academic Consortium. The company has also launched two new open access journals. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability (ERIS) is the first in a new series of open access environmental journals, while Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering is a multidisciplinary journal devoted to the design, development and application of artificial neural networks and brain-inspired systems towards advancing scientific discovery and realising emerging new computing technologies. IOP Publishing has also integrated its ‘track my article’ feature into WeChat using Charlesworth’s WeChat Gateway product.

Developments at Jisc and Wiley

Jisc has announced two new partnerships. A deal with EDP Sciences will offer subscribing institutions a discounted price on online read access to a package of four out of the six EDP maths journals, under a subscribe-to-open model. A green-compliant option will be offered if the subscribe-to-open threshold is not reached, to ensure that authors can satisfy funder mandates. Meanwhile, a partnership with Wiley and several UK universities, plus the British Science Association, will create a new digital collection, British Association for the Advancement of Science – Collections on the History of Science (1830s-1970s), hosted on Wiley’s Digital Archives platform and free to access for Jisc members and affiliates.

Wiley has also announced the launch of two new programs. Wiley Beyond is a new employee benefits platform through which employers can support their staff to earn degrees or advanced certification through tuition reimbursement. Wiley itself expects to be one of the first companies to adopt the platform next year. And Wiley’s new Open Science Ambassador Program will recognise and support Chinese thought leaders around the world who embrace open science principles.

New compliance tool for cOAlition S

cOAlition S has launched a beta version of its Journal Checker Tool, intended to enable researchers to identify journals and platforms that are compliant with Plan S. In its current iteration, the tool checks whether a particular journal offers a CC-BY (or equivalent) licence and no embargo, plus the ability to retain sufficient copyright to allow open access.

In brief

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced the launch of a suite of nine gold open access journals, collectively known as ACS Au.

Figshare has this month launched its fifth annual report into the State of Open Data, in collaboration with Springer Nature, Digital Science, and several other representatives from industry and academia.

Emerald Publishing has become the latest publisher to join the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA).

A partnership will see BenchSci use its biomedical artificial intelligence to analyse research published in Taylor & Francis journals.


Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.

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Alastair Horne is Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where his research interests include digital and academic publishing. He worked in publishing for thirteen years, firstly at ProQuest and then with Cambridge University Press, where he served as Innovation Manager and led work on the BETT-award-winning Race to Learn software in partnership with the Williams Formula One team. After leaving Cambridge in 2016, he began work on a PhD exploring how smartphones are changing storytelling.

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