New funding to develop Springer Nature
Investment firm BC Partners, part-owners of Springer Nature alongside the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, have announced the creation of a new fund worth more than €1bn intended to extend the firm’s investment in the company and to support its continuing growth. Springer Nature is also launching a new US Research Advisory Council (USRAC) whose members will be drawn from institutions, funders, policymakers, and research-driven organisations. The council will meet annually to advise on research culture and how research contributes to a more equitable society. The publisher has also announced a new partnership with LYRASIS, the US-based non-profit association of libraries, archives, and museums, to publish a series of open access books on climate change, equity, peace, and justice, in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Three new initiatives from the Microbiology Society
The Microbiology Society has announced three new initiatives, launching in June, to provide article-level metrics to stakeholders for all open access articles published in its journals. The first, the OA Switchboard, an independent intermediary and aggregator built on community-based infrastructure, sends structured article data to libraries. The second, a collaboration between Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager and CCC’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications, will integrate fee-free and APC-funded routes to OA publication into the manuscript workflow for authors while also offering insights for institutions tracking OA output and expenditure. The third tool, a publishing history tracker hosted on the society’s own platform, will enable institutions to look up their researchers’ publishing history in the society’s journals.
ALPSP Innovation Award shortlist announced
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has announced the shortlist for this year’s Innovation in Publishing Awards. The six-strong list includes the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication’s Antiracism Toolkit for Allies, SAGE’s Lean Library Futures, Mindscape Commons from Coherent Digital, Opening the Future from CEU Press and COPIM, PLOS Community Action Publishing (CAP), and the Future Science Group’s Standalone Plain Language Summary of Publication Articles (PLSP). The winners will be announced on the final day of this year’s ALPSP conference, on Friday 17 September.
Journals news
SAGE has partnered with Clarivate to offer open review reports for four of its journals, Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Clinical Medicine Insights: Pediatrics, and Neuroscience Insights. Using Web of Science’s transparent peer review service and SAGE’s own online submission and review system SAGE Track, the process will enable transparent publication of an article’s complete peer review process, with reviewers who choose to be identified gaining recognition on their Clarivate author profile.
Emerald Publishing has partnered with King Saud University and the Saudi Computer Society to publish the latest issues of Applied Computing and Informatics (ACI) and the Arab Journal of Mathematical Sciences (AJMS) under a platinum open access licence.
Cambridge University Press has launched a new open access journal Flow: Applications of Fluid Mechanics; the journal will act as a companion journal to the 65-year-old Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM).
IOP Publishing is launching a new open access journal in partnership with the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB) and the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science. Materials Futures will cover all areas of basic and applied materials science and technology.
All six of the subscription maths titles published by EDP Sciences have flipped to open access under the subscribe-to-open model, supported by Knowledge Unlatched.
Transformative agreements
Emerald Publishing has signed two new transformative deals; both make use of the publishing vouchers that have become a characteristic feature of their agreements. A three-year deal with Finland’s FinELib Consortium will give researchers at 33 participating institutions access to more than 200,000 articles from 310 journals and vouchers for publication in all Emerald hybrid journals, Gold OA journals and Emerald Open Research. A two-year deal with CzechELib – the National Centre for Electronic Information Resources of the Czech Republic – will provide seven institutions with access to Emerald’s Premier collection and Management portfolio and their own bespoke eJournal library; vouchers will allow publication in hybrid publications included within that bespoke collection.
Taylor & Francis has also signed a transformative deal with CzechELib, providing 18 participating institutions with access to subscription content from more than 2,000 journals and the ability to publish open access in the same number of journals. Additionally, the publisher has committed to make 50% of the consortium’s previous output open access this year, and 100% by 2022.
Karger has concluded a transformative deal with the MALMAD (Israel Center for Digital Information Services) Consortium, providing read access to all Karger journals and open access publication for affiliated authors at no additional cost.
IOP Publishing has signed a four-year read-and-publish agreement with Ireland’s IReL consortium, providing authors affiliated with eight member institutions with read access to more than eighty journals and no-cost publication access to the publisher’s hybrid journals.
Frontiers has concluded a three-year publishing deal with Luxembourg’s national library, the Bibliothèque Nationale du Luxembourg. Eligible authors will be able to publish work in any of the publisher’s 116 open access journals at no cost to themselves.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has signed a transformative agreement with 49 institutions from the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The deal will enable open access publication in 75 of ACS’s hybrid and open access journals at no additional cost, while providing researchers with read access to subscription content from the society’s titles.
In brief
Information Power has released a new report commissioned by ALPSP and cOAlition S, which recently appointed Robert Kiley as Head of Strategy for six months, on secondment from Wellcome. The report, How to enable smaller independent publishers to participate in OA agreements, notes a reverse in the recent decline in open access articles published in hybrid journals, and notes the challenges faced by smaller independent publishers in transitioning to open access.
IOP Publishing, which recently became the latest publisher to sign up to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Publishers Compact, has partnered with OpenAthens and SeamlessAccess to streamline its online authentication process for researchers, enabling users to sign in once to access content across multiple publisher websites.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.