Busy month for Taylor & Francis
It’s been a busy month for Taylor & Francis. The publisher has partnered with Knowledge E to make almost 2,500 of its journals available through the latter’s Zendy platform, giving affordable access to readers in 39 countries across North Africa and the Middle East. It has also launched a new publication option that will allow customers across 32 of its leading journals to publish their medical academic conference materials digitally in the form of an Open Access supplement on tandfonline, in addition to flipping its Annals of Medicine journal to open access, and announcing Kinokuniya as the exclusive agent for its F1000Research platform in Japan.
Transformative Deals
Springer Nature has agreed a framework towards a four-year transformative agreement with the Max Planck Digital Library. Building on the company’s agreement with Projekt DEAL signed in January this year, the deal would see researchers affiliated with participating institutions gain read access to the complete Nature portfolio and APC-free open access publication in Nature and Nature-branded research journals. The framework will now be offered to German institutions, with a view to a January 2021 start.
JISC has announced two new transformative deals with publishers. An agreement with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (CSHL Press) will provide read-and-publish access to the complete selection of CSHL Press journals for researchers at participating institutions. Meanwhile, a deal with the American Physiological Society extends the conventional read-and-publish model through the addition of one-year membership of the society for authors publishing with APS. A further pair of deals with the fully open access Public Library of Science (PLOS) offer participating institutions a choice between paying an annual fixed price covering uncapped publishing in five PLOS journals or uncapped publishing in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology via a collective action model.
OAPSA launches new platform to boost open access
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association has launched a new not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers, aiming to provide the infrastructure, standards, and back office services required to support the transformation of the publishing market so that open access becomes the pre-eminent mode of publication. The OA Switchboard initiative, founded on 16 October, is a central hub for exchanging information, connecting parties and systems, and streamlining communication and the exchange of OA-related publication-level information, so that financial settlements can be agreed for the implementation of multi-lateral Open Access publication-level arrangements.
Cambridge seeks transformative journal status from cOAlition S for most of its titles
Cambridge University Press has announced that it will request that the majority of its journals be given ‘transformative journal’ status by cOAlition S, committing them to increasing the share of research articles they publish Open Access each year and flipping to full OA once that share reaches 75%.
Leadership reorganisation at SAGE
SAGE will be reorganising its leadership team following the departures of Stephen Barr, President of SAGE International, retiring at the end of this year, and Katharine Jackson, Chief Operating Officer and CFO of SAGE International. Ziyad Marar, President of Global Publishing, will add responsibility for sales to his existing portfolio of editorial, production, and marketing, while Karen Phillips, Senior Vice President, Global Learning Resources, will become Executive Lead for SAGE’s London office.
New commitments from ALPSP and IOP Publishing
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has made two new commitments on diversity and sustainable development. The organisation has joined the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), set up to address issues of diversity and inclusion within the industry; it has also signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact, which aims to encourage and inspire action across the publishing industry towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
And IOP Publishing has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), committing the organisation to displaying a wider range of metrics; improving diversity and inclusivity; recognising author contributions; providing unrestricted access to citation metadata, and reviewing reference list constraints.
Partnerships
Open access publisher Hindawi has extended its partnership with the Charlesworth Group to provide digital author marketing services in China, alongside its existing editing services.
AI diversity monitoring and analytics provider Umbrella has announced a partnership with Maverick Publishing Specialists to provide diversity and inclusion analysis, monitoring, and advice across the publishing industry.
PLOS and Digital Science have signed an agreement giving the publisher access to the comprehensive Dimensions research information database on Google Cloud’s multi-cloud data warehouse BigQuery.
Oxford University Press has partnered with the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology to publish the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (JIMB) from January 2021.
OpenAthens, which last month welcomed HathiTrust to its OpenAthens Federation, has launched a new publisher consultancy offering, providing a range of packages supporting the implementation of single sign-on.
Alastair Horne is a PhD student at the British Library and Bath Spa University.