Transformative agreements
The past month has seen a flurry of transformative agreements from STM publishers. Wiley has concluded five deals across three continents. A three-year agreement with the Slovenian Academic Consortium (CTK consortium) will provide its ten member institutions with read access to all Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals along with the ability to publish accepted articles in all the company’s 1,400 hybrid journals. A memorandum of understanding signed with Tohoku University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, and Tokyo University of Science will provide the same access for these four Japanese institutions from April, as will a pilot agreement with the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) in Texas. A four-year deal with the Royal Danish Library (RDL) will enable researchers from 34 member institutions to publish more than 1100 open access articles each year while also providing access to Wiley’s complete journal portfolio. Wiley has also announced the extension into a fourth year of its existing transformative agreement with Projekt Deal, a consortium representing more than 900 institutions across Germany.
Springer Nature has concluded two new transformative agreements in the Americas, providing open access publication in more than 2,000 of its hybrid journals: a deal with Consorcio Colombia will start in July, while a deal with the Federal Science Libraries Network (FSLN) in Canada began in January.
The Microbiology Society has likewise confirmed a Canadian agreement: a four-year deal with four Canadian consortia will provide fifteen participating institutions with the opportunity to publish an unlimited number of Open Access articles in hybrid and fully OA titles, along with full read access. The society has also announced that its founding journal Microbiology, this year celebrating its 75th anniversary, will be the first in its portfolio to transition from a hybrid model to fully Open Access, starting in 2023.
IOP Publishing has concluded a consortium agreement with the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology which will enable researchers at 70 participating German institutions to publish unlimited open access articles across 71 hybrid and fully open access journals, while also providing read access to most of IOPP’s journal portfolio.
PeerJ launches new peer review reward scheme
PeerJ has launched a new programme to reward peer reviewers, who can now earn tokens for peer reviewing and editing submissions; these can be exchanged for discounts of up to 100% on the publisher’s article processing charges. Tokens have no expiry data and can be combined or transferred to another user.
New partnerships for IOP Publishing
IOP Publishing, which last month instituted transparent peer review across its entire open access journal portfolio, has announced two new partnerships. A collaboration agreement with the scholarly social networking site ResearchGate will see 36,000 full-text articles from IOPP open access and hybrid journals uploaded to the site and will run initially for twelve months. A deal with The Lens, a not-for-profit data aggregation and analysis platform for scholarly articles and patents, will provide the platform with metadata from the publisher’s research outputs and the publisher with insights into their performance.
In brief
Taylor & Francis has announced the renewal of its partnership with The Conversation Africa, the South African voluntary organisation and news site; the company will act as a Funding Partner and will offer the publisher’s authors, journal editors, and publishing partners closer links with the site.
Springer Nature, which recently appointed Harsh Jegadeesan to a newly created role of Chief Solutions Officer, has fulfilled its commitment to create a content hub for each of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. The final hub, for Quality Education, was launched on the International Day of Education, January 24th.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.