STM Conference
This year’s STM conference at Frankfurt marked the organisation’s fiftieth anniversary. The keynote speaker was new Springer Nature CEO Daniel Ropers, who expressed concerns at publishers being seen as enemies of knowledge dissemination. A panel on diversity and inclusion then saw Elsevier VP Michiel Kolman emphasise the history of strong female leadership in scholarly publishing and Melanie Dolecheck of the Society for Scholarly Publishing introduce a new cross-industry group the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (of which more later).
After lunch, David Lefer, Director of the Innovation and Technology Forum at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, encouraged attendees to focus on problem finding over problem solving, then David Nicholas of CIBER research offered some interim insights from an in-depth study into attitudes and behaviour amongst early career researchers: perhaps encouragingly, they seemed largely ambivalent towards publishers, except in France, where feelings were more hostile. The closing panel celebrated the organisation’s fiftieth birthday by considering the future of the industry: Wiley’s John Napack warned that the single biggest threat to publishing was publishers themselves, who had stretched their customers’ trust and been too slow to engage in meaningful dialogue with the market.
New move to promote inclusion and diversity
Featured at the conference, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) has just released a Joint Statement of Principles committing its members to provide leadership and commit time and resources to promote involvement, innovation, and expanded access to leadership opportunities that maximize engagement across identity groups and professional levels. Coalition members include ALPSP, the Association of University Presses, OASPA, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and UKSG.
Atypon widens usage reports, extends deal with Taylor and Francis
Atypon has announced that its Literatum platform will soon provide publishers with article-level usage reporting drawn from three of Digital Science’s literature discovery tools – ReadCube, Papers, and Dimensions – and from Mendeley, thanks to a collaboration between Elsevier, Atypon, Digital Science and COUNTER on a new standard for Distributed Usage Logging. The initiative, which will launch in early 2019, aims to provide a fuller picture of the usage of scholarly content reflecting changes in researcher workflows. Atypon has also revealed that an extension to its existing contract with Taylor and Francis will take the relationship between the two companies into a second decade.
Cambridge makes sharing pilot permanent, joins the dots on writing prize
Cambridge University Press has confirmed that its content-sharing tool Cambridge Core Share has become a permanent feature of its books and journals platform Cambridge Core, following a successful ten-month pilot, during which 6,000 links were shared, resulting in more than 150,000 views. More than 250 journals are now involved in the scheme, with articles since 1997 available for sharing. Cambridge will also be involved once more in the Nine Dots prize, which this year offers $100,000 and a publishing contract for the best answer to the question, ‘Is there still no place like home?’
UNSILO adds AI to peer review process
Artificial intelligence tools and solutions provider UNSILO has announced a partnership with Clarivate that will pilot the use of AI in manuscript evaluation procedures in Clarivate’s ScholarOne submission and review system. The pilot will focus on providing decision support features for editors, with the aim of improving paper screening to save millions of hours on peer review. The company is already working with Cambridge University Press on an unconnected project providing AI-generated links to relevant content for articles in fields poorly supported with taxonomies and ontologies.
OpenAthens launches new free service
Federated identity and access management service provider OpenAthens officially launched a free new organisational discovery service at Frankfurt last week. Developed alongside the Resource Access for the 21st Century (RA21) pilot projects, Wayfinder allows patrons to log in once to access multiple online resources subscribed to by their institution.
Open access news
Knowledge Unlatched is working with the German National Contact Point Open Access project OA2020-DE to convert up to fifty journals to open access from 2019. Titles from ten publishers, including the American Institute of Physics, Berghahn, Brill, De Gruyter, Emerald, and John Benjamins, are currently under consideration from KU’s Title Selection Committee.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology has launched three new gold open access journals: IET Collaborative Intelligent Manufacturing, IET Energy Systems Integration, and Cognitive Computation and Systems (CCS).
De Gruyter and JISC have reached an agreement offering participating institutions access to De Gruyter journals and discounts on open access APCs.
In brief
Overleaf has added enhanced collaboration and editing features to its writing and publishing tool, including real-time track changes and commenting, and private invitation, link sharing and chat functionality.
HighWire has launched a new, simplified version of its submissions management tool. BenchPress Unlimited is aimed at smaller publishers with low volume and straight-forward submission processes, offering an alternative flat rate rather than submission-based pricing model.
ScienceOpen has announced two new partnerships. A deal with Carl Hanser Verlag will integrate all Hanser’s journal content into the ScienceOpen discovery environment, while an agreement with Compuscript subsidiary International Science Editing in China will see ScienceOpen develop new products specifically for the Chinese market.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.