Wiley issues financial report, acquires Zyante, signs new open access pilot
Wiley has announced its results for the financial year ending April 2019. Revenues have remained steady at around $1.8bn, with a 30% rise in income from solutions offsetting a small decline in publishing revenues; operating income, however, fell by 3% year-on-year. The company has also announced another major acquisition, only a couple of months after its purchase of courseware and adaptive learning technology provider Knewton in May. Computer science and STEM education courseware provider Zyante, whose zyBooks platform serves more than 500,000 students across 500 institutions, has been bought for $56m. Wiley has also announced a transformative open access pilot programme with the OhioLINK library consortium, which will give academics from its 118 libraries and 89 colleges and universities access to a central fund for article processing charges (APCs).
Springer signs transformative deals in Sweden and Norway
Springer Nature, which last month issued a white paper on the future of open access books, has signed two new transformative deals in Scandinavia. A read-and-publish open access deal with Sweden’s Bibsam consortium – representing institutional libraries, and four of Sweden’s funding bodies – will enable researchers affiliated with those institutions to publish in over 570 of Springer Nature’s OA journals. A similar deal with Norway’s Unit consortium will also allow affiliated researchers to read journals on SpringerLink and to publish open access in more than 2,000 journals.
Digital Science extends Dimensions
Digital Science has announced a collaboration with the Research4Life initiative, which aims to provide free or low-cost access to scientific and professional information to researchers in the developing world. Research4Life participants will now have access to Dimensions Plus, the research insights platform that brings together more than 100 million publications, $1.3tn of grants, 455,000 clinical trials, 38 million patents, 420,000 policy documents, and their associated metrics. Dimensions has also partnered with the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) to integrate the latter’s European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS) as a journal list filter within Dimensions, and to launch a new database, ERIH PLUS by Dimensions.
New initiative, new social media channel from the Company of Biologists
The Company of Biologists has announced the launch of preLists, a new initiative complementing its existing preLights preprint highlighting service launched in February 2018; where preLights allows researchers to review, highlight, and comment on preprints, preLists will curate preprints into lists around particular topics and meetings. The Company has also launched its own channel on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, sharing publishing advice, research, and best practices with a Chinese audience.
Clarivate issues new Journal Citation Report
Clarivate’s Web of Science Group has released its latest annual Journal Citation Report, covering 2.3 million articles published in almost 12,000 journals from 81 countries. 283 journals have been added, while seventeen have been suppressed after displaying ‘anomalous citation behaviour’.
Announcements in brief
SAGE is partnering with the Leading Routes initiative, which aims to encourage black students to undertake academic careers, to support three events outside London celebrating black achievement in higher education and furthering the conversation around the representation and experiences of black students and staff in UK universities.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is extending its partnership with ORCID to enable its reviewers to gain credit for their work alongside their existing author profiles through their ORCID ID.
Future Science Group has extended its partnership with ScienceOpen in a move that will see the FSG journals BioTechniques and Future Drug Discovery integrated into two new featured collections on the latter’s interactive discovery platform.
Publishing technology provider Atypon has acquired RedLink, whose products include dashboards for libraries and publishers, sales prospecting engines for publishers, and editorial engagement tools for editors, authors, and readers.
Journals in brief
Cambridge University Press has launched a new open access journal to explore how data science shapes government policy; Data & Policy will be published in collaboration with the annual Data for Policy conference.
MIT Press has announced the launch of a new multimedia platform in the growing data science field. The Harvard Data Science Review, published in collaboration with the Harvard Data Science Initiative, combines elements of research journal, educational publication, and popular magazine; the first issue is already available online.
Emerald has acquired the Journal of Mental Illness from PAGEPress Scientific Publishing and will publish it on an open access CC-BY model. Emerald’s new Insight digital research platform has also gone live after being reimagined and rebuilt in collaboration with several international universities.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.