Busy month for SAGE Publishing
It’s been a busy month for SAGE, which has invested in Thusly, a technology start-up creating research tools for big data analysis of document archives, as part of its social science-focused SAGE Ocean initiative. The publisher’s investment will support the launch of Thusly’s TagWorks crowd annotation software – which enables researchers in the social sciences to analyse documents deeply by asking internet-based workers a series of detailed questions to evaluate passages of text – into the academic research market.
SAGE has also launched a new free-to-access online community space called Mentor Space, which enables students, researchers, instructors, and authors in social and behavioural research to connect, share insights, learn from their colleagues, and broaden their professional networks. It has also extended its ORCID mandate to require ORCID IDs from corresponding authors across a range of journals from this winter.
Finally, SAGE has announced that it will begin publishing both the Ear, Nose, & Throat Journal and Epilepsy Currents from 2019.
Implementation guidance released for Plan S
cOAlition S has released guidance on the implementation of its Plan S, which aims for full and immediate Open Access to publications from publicly funded research. It sets out three paths to compliance: publication in Open Access journals or platforms; deposit of Versions of Record or Author Accepted Manuscripts in Open Access repositories without embargo; or publication in ‘hybrid’ journals under transformative agreements. Feedback can be provided until 1 February 2019 via the cOAlition S website.
Meanwhile, UK coalition members UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Wellcome have partnered with the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) to explore how learned societies might adapt to life under Plan S. The potential damage caused by the loss of their publishing incomes under Plan S has been a major cause of concern to such societies.
Kudos wins funding, launches new service
Kudos, the start-up service aiming to maximise research impact, has announced that it has received £2.2 million of investment led by Mobeus Equity Partners to develop and launch a new communications management service for researchers. The first participants in this service will be the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (Wits RHI) at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and ‘Good for Kids’ program at Hunter New England Population Health, Australia.
New version of Libero to be developed
eLife has announced that it will be developing a new version of Libero, its open-source online publication platform, in partnership with open-access publisher Hindawi, the non-profit Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko), and digital consultancy Digirati, under a formal Memorandum of Understanding. The organisation is also working with participants from its first Innovation Sprint on Swipes For Science, a templating service for creating mobile-friendly games that enlist players to help with analysing large amounts of research data.
Clarivate wins REF contract
Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information has won the contract to provide citation information to the panels involved in the Research Excellence Framework assessment exercise in 2021, undertaken on behalf of the UK’s four higher education funding bodies: the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, Research England, and the Scottish Funding Council.
Report suggests balance of power in scholarly publishing changing
A new report from Research Information, launched last week at its second Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle conference, which brought together librarians, researchers, and publishers, suggests that the past year has seen a rebalancing of power within scholarly publishing, with policymakers’ scholarly publishing policies and impact both increasingly recognised factors.
In brief
Cambridge University Press has signed a read-and-publish deal – covering both subscription and APC charges – with Bibsam, a consortium of 85 higher education and research institutions led by the National Library of Sweden.
Altmetric has partnered with Meta to incorporate the former’s data on the consumption and sharing of research into the latter’s AI discovery tool for biomedical researchers.
F1000 has signed a deal with the Max Planck Digital Library which will see the library cover the costs of publishing via the F1000Research platform for authors affiliated to the Max Planck Society.
Scholarly collaboration network PaperHive has partnered with the European research consortium ROMSOC to enable researchers across the consortium’s fifteen international academic institutions and eleven industry partners to collaborate using its network.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.