PLOS announces 2017 financial overview
PLOS has released its financial overview for 2017, with figures showing a fall in income from $38.2m to $36.8m, due to a decline in publishing revenues. A reduction of $12.8m in net assets resulted largely from the halting of development on the Aperta submission system following the comprehensive organisation review instituted by new CEO Alison Mudditt. The overview describes ‘a pivotal moment in the life of PLOS and Open Access publishing’, and proposes a future centred on ‘partnership and coalition’.
Springer partners with Publons, sells InfoChem
Springer Nature has announced what it describes as a ‘wide-ranging partnership’ with Publons to address the growing burden on the peer review community. The first stage of the partnership will see Publons’ Reviewer Recognition Service rolled out across more than 2,000 Springer journals, following a successful pilot programme involving 60,000 reviewers and 275,000 reviews. The publisher’s own in-house reviewer finding system will also link up with Publons Reviewer Connect, offering access to the editorial and reviewing history of Publons’ community of more than half a million reviewers, and integration with its reviewer availability feature.
Springer has also sold its Munich-based cheminformatics business InfoChem to DeepMatter, the Scottish specialists in digitising chemistry, for around £1.8 million in cash and shares.
SAGE announces upgraded plug-in and new journal partnership
SAGE has announced that Library Alternatives, the browser extension produced by its recently-acquired technology start-up Lean Library, which offers researchers alternative routes to full-text resources, will now support ebooks. The publisher has also announced a partnership with the British Orthodontics Society that will see the society’s flagship journal, the Journal of Orthodontics, published by SAGE from March 2019.
New publishing deals for Oxford and De Gruyter
Oxford University Press has signed a two-year deal with the Max Planck Society which will provide access to OUP journals for society members while also allowing them to convert subscription fees into payments for open access publication. The deal began on January 1st and will run until the end of 2020.
De Gruyter has signed a ‘read and publish’ deal with Iowa State University which will give researchers at the university access to the publisher’s Research Now package, plus deep discounts on open access processing charges, enabling all articles written by university researchers to be made available through open access immediately upon publication. The agreement will run for the next three years.
Altmetric announces annual top 100 articles
Altmetric has announced the most-discussed research of 2018, with articles on Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, the circulation of fake news online, and alcohol abuse topping the charts. 41% of the top 100 articles were published under open access licences, with a further 13% free to read. Research in Medical and Health Sciences accounted for almost half the top 100 articles, with 45 different journals appearing, and the journal Science coming out on top, with 12 articles included in the list.
Publishers Association launches institutional archiving agreement template
The Publishers Association has launched a new template for agreements between publishers and universities for the deposit of journal articles in institutional repositories. It aims to help address common workflow issues involved in the deposit of academic research by providing a framework for discussions between publishers and staff in the university and library sectors. The template is available for download by anyone involved in academic publishing, whether a member of the PA or not.
In brief
ProQuest and its company Ex Libris are opening three new offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico, to strengthen their existing presence in Latin America.
JISC, the UK’s technology solutions organisation for higher and further education, has merged with Eduserv, which specialises in digital transformation in several fields including higher education.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.