Plan S continues to make waves

Plan S, the open access initiative launched in September by a coalition of eleven European organisations funding research, has been buoyed by the announcement that two of the world’s largest private research funders – the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – have joined the coalition. According to its new open access policy, which will come into effect in January 2020, Wellcome will refuse to fund publication in hybrid journals and require grant-holders to make their articles freely available through PubMed Central under CC-BY licenses by the date of publication.

Five journals and an acquisition for Wiley

It’s been a busy month for Wiley, which has extended two existing partnerships and made an acquisition in the university services market. An expansion of the company’s collaboration with Hindawi sees a further four journals – Advances in Polymer Technology, Journal of Interventional Cardiology, Cardiovascular Therapeutics, and Heteroatom Chemistry – join the nine titles already under the joint Wiley-Hindawi brand, all published on the Gold Open Access APC-supported model. Meanwhile, an extension to Wiley’s existing publishing partnership with the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers sees Near Surface Geophysics join Basin Research and Geophysical Prospecting on Wiley Online Library, becoming available for subscription in January. Wiley has also acquired the American academic programme manager Learning House from Weld North, offering a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional training and credentialing services, for integration into its own Wiley Education Services product.

Figshare’s State of Open Data report brings mixed news for advocates

Figshare has launched its third annual report into open data, in partnership with Springer Nature. The State of Open Data 2018 combines survey results with a collection of articles from industry experts, and its key findings include both good and bad news for the open data movement. Though increasing numbers of respondents – now almost two thirds – are making their data available, three in five had not heard of the FAIR principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability – that offer guidelines for enhancing the reusability of academic data, while the percentage of respondents who have reused open data in their research continues to fall, now under 50%.

In brief

Code Ocean’s cloud-based computational reproducibility platform, winner of this year’s ALPSP Innovation Award, has been added to the Silverchair scholarly and professional content platform as a widget enabling readers to run the code used in scholarly articles alongside the articles themselves.

SAGE has acquired two new journals: a partnership with the British Medical Acupuncture Society will see Acupuncture in Medicine published by SAGE from January 2019; the Ear, Nose & Throat Journal moves from Vendome to SAGE at the same time.

Cambridge University Press has announced, during Open Access Week, that four more of its journals will become open access. Epidemiology & Infection, Genetics Research, Primary Health Care Research and Development, and the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences will flip from their existing subscription model to Gold Open Access from 1 January 2019; there are plans for further journals to switch during 2020.

Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.