Wiley buys Hindawi
Innovative open access publisher Hindawi has been bought by Wiley at a price of just under $300m. The move will see Wiley’s gold open access portfolio doubled through the addition of more than 200 Hindawi journals, with the latter’s technological capability expected to complement the former’s existing platforms and services. Hindawi CEO Paul Peters will continue to lead the organisation within the Wiley business. Wiley has also signed a three-year transitional open access agreement with Iowa State University.
Science goes green
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced that its journal Science, along with its sister journals, is updating its terms of publication to trial a new green open access policy. The policy will allow researchers supported by funders signed up to cOAlition S’s Rights Retention Strategy to share their accepted manuscripts online for free distribution via a CC BY 4.0 license or a CC BY-ND license. The move is motivated by the association’s concern that exclusively gold open access models may exacerbate existing inequalities within research.
Taylor & Francis goes green too
Taylor & Francis, which recently joined the Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact, has announced the success of its year-long Alternative Mailing Packaging (AMP) trial, which saw 900 of its journal titles move to non-laminated print editions. The publisher has also launched a new open access journal, Functional Diamond, in partnership with the Zhengzhou Research Institute for Abrasives & Grinding.
New deals
Springer Nature has extended its transformative compact agreement with Jisc in a move which will see the Nature series of journals added to the pair’s existing deal, which will now last until December 2022. The publisher, which last month promoted Carolyn Honour to Chief Commercial Officer, has also signed up to the Valuable 500, a global movement which works to put disability inclusion on the business leadership agenda.
The Max Planck Digital Library has signed two new read-and-publish agreements with publishers. A three-year deal with the Company of Biologists will enable corresponding authors at the Max Planck Society’s 86 institutes to publish in the Company’s hybrid subscription and open access journals with no author-facing costs; researchers will also gain unlimited access to the full journal archives, dating back to 1853. A two-year deal with Rockefeller University Press in the US will enable researchers to publish open access in RUP’s three hybrid journals – the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM) and the Journal of General Physiology (JGP) – and provide unlimited read access to its journals.
Two new consortia have signed up to the Community Action Publishing (CAP) program run by the Public Library of Science (PLOS), which shifts publishing costs from authors to research institutions based on prior publishing history. The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) of American universities and nineteen participating institutions from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) will be able to publish fee-free in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology over an initial three-year period.
The international society for optics and photonics, SPIE, has announced a three-year read-and-publish agreement with the German National Library of Science and Technology.
Flipping journals
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has transitioned its entire journals portfolio to open access through a partnership with Wiley. All content from 2013 on is now available through a new IET Research hub page on Wiley Online Library.
IWA Publishing, the publishing arm of the International Water Association, has flipped its ten subscription journals, including Water Science and Technology, to open access on a subscribe-to-open basis, working in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched.
The journal Public Health Nutrition, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Nutrition Society, has switched to a gold open access model, with discounts and waivers for researchers from developing countries. Cambridge has also launched Biological Imaging, a new Open access journal for interdisciplinary research into quantitative and computational imaging in the life sciences.
In brief
The two BJS Society journals, the British Journal of Surgery and BJS Open, have moved from Wiley to Oxford University Press as of January 2021.
IOP Publishing has appointed Miriam Maus, formerly vice president and managing director in Wiley’s Journals Editorial Organisation, as its new publishing director. The company has also partnered with virtual conference and content solutions provider Morressier to enhance its conference research publishing workflow, increasing the range of content that can be published and streamlining the submission and review process.
The C19 Rapid Review Initiative, a group of organisations across the scholarly publishing industry aiming to improve the efficiency of peer review and publishing of vital Covid-19 research, has agreed to mandate data deposition across members’ journals. Data must be posted to a trusted repository; a data availability statement will not be sufficient.
Brooklyn-based discovery and evaluation platform scite has partnered with SAGE to index its articles and so create what it terms Smart Citations, which provide additional context for citations and a classification of whether a citation provides supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.