SpringerNature rebuts impact factors criticism, partners with TNW, launches Polar Platform
SpringerNature has responded to criticisms of its attitude towards the San Francisco Declaration on Research, and specifically its use of journal impact factors, following last month’s aborted flotation on the Frankfurt stock market. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Chief Publishing Officer Stephen Inchcoombe rejected claims that the company exploited impact factors to market their journals, pointing out that the prospectus on which such claims were based was not a piece of marketing aimed at librarians or authors but a legal document intended for potential investors, and highlighting Springer’s use of other journal-level and article-level metrics; he also dismissed suggestions that the publisher sought higher impact factors in order to raise article processing charges, noting that more selective journals inevitably have higher charges due to the greater number of articles evaluated compared to those that are accepted and therefore charged for.
Springer has also partnered with the global technology forum The Next Web (TNW) Conference to explore how technology can help improve the sharing, discoverability and use of research data. At its third Launchpad Meetup, hosted by TNW in Amsterdam, innovators from across Europe pitched their ideas for how more value can be extracted from experimental research data; successful pitchers will have the opportunity to collaborate with Springer Nature on pilot projects and the co-creation of new products. The company also recently launched a new platform dedicated to research in polar sciences: the Polar Platform will provide a comprehensive collection of books, open access publications, journal articles, and reference works published as part of Springer’s polar sciences programme.
Strong shortlist for ALPSP innovation awards
The shortlist has been announced for the 2018 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing. The six-strong list includes cloud-based computational reproducibility platform Code Ocean; next-generation linked research information system Dimensions from Digital Science; PSI’s IP Intrusion Database, which defends sites from IP misuse and subscription abuse; Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS), the new framework for assessing publishing practices and standards from AJOL and INASP; Kopernio, Clarivate Analytics’ provider of one-click access to millions of research papers, and Annotation for Transparent Inquiry from Cambridge University Press in collaboration with Hypothesis and the Qualitative Data Repository, which allows scholars to annotate passages in an article and add links to data sources. Winners will be announced at this years’ awards dinner, held during the annual ALPSP conference on Thursday September 13.
Several participants in the awards have other news to share. Clarivate has also partnered with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), the Egyptian government’s digital library and online knowledge hub, to launch the Arabic Citation Index (ARCI). Launching in 2020 and powered by the Web of Science, the ARCI will be the first ever mapping of Arabic scholarly literature in a citation index. Clarivate company Publons, meanwhile, has announced an extension to its partnership with SAGE Publishing that will see the Publons Reviewer Recognition Service provide automated recognition to peer reviewers on up to a thousand SAGE journals. And Cambridge University Press has announced a partnership with the Canadian Mathematical Society that will see Cambridge publish the society’s journals the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.
Wiley shares 2018 figures
Wiley has reported its revenues for its financial year 2018. Adjusting for currency fluctuations, research revenues were up by 4%: journals subscription revenues have remained constant, but open access revenues have increased by a third, and publishing technology services (in the form of Atypon, bought by Wiley in 2016) are up by three quarters. STM and Professional Publishing revenues are, however, down 3% after currency adjustments.
New initiative attempts to solve manuscript exchange problems
The American National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has launched a new project to facilitate manuscript exchange across publisher and pre-print server systems. A working group of manuscript-management suppliers will work with NISO as part of the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) to find ways to transfer manuscripts between platforms using different submission-tracking systems; those working in manuscript-processing areas are invited to engage in the development of recommended practices aimed at improving the experience for researchers and service providers.
OpenAthens affiliates with ALPSP and PA
OpenAthens has become formally affiliated with both the ALPSP and the Publishers Association, aiming to work with members of each organisation on issues including piracy and improving user experiences. The identity and access management service has also chosen Google Cloud Platform as its public cloud partner as it streamlines the process of deploying, updating, and managing its applications and services.
Highwire goes off-campus, announces new partnership
Publishing technology provider Highwire has implemented the new Universal Campus Activated Subscriber Access service (Universal CASA) in cooperation with Google Scholar, ensuring that all content published on its Intelligent Publishing Platform can be accessed by researchers remotely and on mobile devices, and not only on campus. The company has also partnered with PubGrade GmbH to give its customers the option of using PubGrade’s integrated advertising platform: PubGrade for Publishers.
In brief
Kudos has renewed partnerships with the Royal Society of Chemistry and Wiley. Wiley authors will be able to generate shareable PDFs of their publications as part of Kudos’s S-PDF service, which now has a userbase of more then 225,000 and fifteen publisher partners; launched six months ago, it has already become the most popular mechanism for sharing via Kudos.
Editage has launched a new Automated Document Assessment solution to assess scientific content in research papers. Acronymically named Ada, after Ada Lovelace, it judges the quality of a submitted manuscript in terms of its readability and adherence to ethical requirements.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University