Taylor & Francis buys F1000 Research
In an unanticipated development, Innovative open access publisher F1000 Research has been acquired by the Taylor & Francis group for an undisclosed amount. Having launched the world’s first open research publishing platform in 2013, F1000 Research has become increasingly popular as a provider of managed open research publishing services to institutions and funders including Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Taylor & Francis Global Publishing Director Deborah Kahn stated that the takeover would provide F1000 Research with additional investment and support to ensure its growth is sustainable, whilst creating additional publishing choices for T&F researchers and new opportunities for its partners.
Line-up for Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum announced
The programme for the London Book Fair’s Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum, taking place on 12 March this year, has been confirmed. Conference chairs Alicia Wise and Richard Charkin have put together a line-up featuring speakers from across the sector, including a keynote from independent consultant Claudio Aspesi and a session on Learned Society and University Presses involving Roheena Anand of PLoS, Matthew Day of Cambridge University Press, and Tasha Mellins-Cohen of the Microbiology Society. Other speakers include Euan Adie of Overton.io, Vanessa Proudman of SPARC Europe, and Kathy Christian from Digital Science. The full programme can be found here.
Three transformative deals for Spain’s CSIC
Three publishers have announced new deals with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the largest public research institution in Spain and the third largest in Europe. Cambridge University Press has concluded a three-year read-and-publish deal through which researchers from the 120 institutions affiliated to CISC will be able to publish in Cambridge’s open access and hybrid journals and also gain access to the full collection of more than 400 journals published by the Press. Oxford University Press, which – in partnership with China Science Press – has just converted National Science Review (NSR) to a fully open access publication, has also confirmed a its own five-year deal with the CSIC which will provide reading access to over 350 of its journals alongside similar opportunities to publish research. And IntechOpen has concluded a deal which will cut OA book publishing fees for affiliated authors by 25%, with 50% of the remaining fee being covered centrally by CSIC.
Transformative deals in brief
IOP Publishing, which this month appointed Professor Qi-Kun Xue to a newly created role as chief scientific advisor for China, has signed read-and-publish deals with four universities in the Netherlands. Researchers at these institutions – the University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the University of Groningen, and the University of Twente – will be able to publish in 42 IOP journals without paying APCs; further deals are expected to be announced shortly.
Open access publisher Frontiers has signed a deal with the Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Joint Services in Higher Education & Research, giving researchers a national discount on APCs for Frontiers journals, centralised, flexible invoicing and payment options, plus dedicated support for library staff dealing with APCs.
The American Physiological Society (APS) has taken the read-and-publish model one stage further with the announcement that it is piloting what it describes as the first ‘Read, Publish, and Join’ deal in conjunction with Iowa State University Library. Alongside the now conventional bundling of access and publishing charges, APS is offering faculty who serve as corresponding authors a one-year APS membership.
PISA leans toward Oxford
Oxford University Press has won a tender by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to develop the Science Framework for the 2024 iteration of its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), widely acknowledged as the benchmark for evaluating education systems across the world, examining 15-year-old students’ knowledge of mathematics, reading and science.
New deals for Springer
Springer Nature, which last month confirmed the signing of what it describes as ‘the world’s largest transformative open access agreement’ with Germany’s Projekt Deal, has concluded two further alliances in recent weeks. An agreement with OpenAIRE will grant the EU organisation, which facilitates openness in scholarly communication, access to full-text articles and chapters from the publisher, regardless of their access status. OpenAIRE will then use text and data mining techniques to extract links, data, and other scholarly outputs from these publications, which both parties will use to provide searches and statistics, thereby increasing the discoverability of datasets linked to publications. Springer has also signed a new strategic publishing agreement with the Material Research Society, starting next year, that will see the two parties work together to publish the society’s five journals and its books, and Springer host the archives of the MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) and the MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research (MIJ-NSR).
New data sharing initiative from the STM Association
The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers has launched ‘STM 2020 Research Data Year’, a dedicated action plan aiming to achieve increases in several key areas: journals with data policies; articles with data availability statements; journals depositing data links to the SCHOLIX framework; and citations to datasets along the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. Publishers already signed up as ‘active participants’ include Springer Nature, Elsevier, Emerald, IOP, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Karger, De Gruyter, and the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge. A new website contains further information on the initiative.
New platform from Kudos for ongoing research
Kudos has launched a new platform to drive discovery of ‘research in progress’. Research Showcase will enable researchers to share news about their work throughout the entire lifecycle of the research process, creating additional opportunities for impact and engagement and providing stakeholders – including funders, taxpayers, donors, research participants, and beneficiaries – with earlier insights into developing research.
News in brief
The University of Huddersfield Press has made more than 130 of its publications available via Science Open, including books, the Journal of Creative Music Systems, and the British Journal of Pharmacy.
Annette Thomas, previously MD of the Nature Publishing Group, Chief Scientific Officer of Springer Nature and, most recently, chief executive of the Web of Science group, has been appointed as Chief Executive of the Guardian Media Group.
Information Power has issued a new report, funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of cOAlition S, aims to increase transparency in open access pricing and services.
A year after its relaunch, Sciendo – formerly De Gruyter Open – has published its 600th journal.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.