Sutton to lead STM

STM – the International Association for Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers – has appointed Dr Caroline Sutton as its new CEO. Sutton, who is currently Director of Open Research at Taylor & Francis, will take up her new role in February next year.

New UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science adopted

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science – which aims to make science more transparent and more accessible by defining shared values and principles for Open Science, and identifying concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data – has been adopted unanimously at the UNESCO General Conference. Member states are encouraged to prioritise seven areas in implementing the recommendation, including investing in infrastructure and services which contribute to open science. The recommendation has already been welcomed by several organisations, including STM and Frontiers.

RSC Joint Commitment welcomes new members, issues new standards

The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing, launched last year, has welcomed three new signatories, taking its total to 47. Springer Nature, De Gruyter, and Taylor & Francis have signed up as six minimum standards have been announced with the aim of cultivating an inclusive environment for all. These include working to understand the demographic diversity of authors, editorial decision makers and reviewers, and publicly reporting on progress on inclusion and diversity at least annually.

PLOS delivers usage data first

PLOS has announced that it has become the first wholly open access publisher to deliver Release 5 COUNTER-compliant usage reporting to the library community. This has been achieved through the publisher’s partnership with identity and access solutions provider LibLynx, which began last year, and will enable PLOS institutional partners to understand better their usage of PLOS content.

Transformative deals

Wiley has agreed two new transformative deals. Building on a previous pilot deal, a three-year agreement with VIVA, a consortium of more than seventy libraries and academic institutions in the American state of Virginia, will enable researchers at participating institutions to publish in all of Wiley’s fully gold and hybrid open access journals; it will also provide access to all the publisher’s subscription content. A second three-year deal with CAUL (the Council of Australian University Librarians) will come into effect next year and will grant researchers at the 52 participating institutions the ability to publish open access in all 1,400 hybrid Wiley journals, along with read access to all of Wiley’s hybrid and subscription journals.

AIP Publishing, the American Institute of Physics’s publishing subsidiary, has concluded a three-year Read and Publish deal with Jisc that will provide access to almost all its peer-reviewed hybrid journals to more than thirty of Jisc’s consortium partners.

PLOS has announced three-year agreements with NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) which will enable researchers from the two organisations to publish in PLOS journals without incurring fees.

Frontiers has agreed a deal with the University of Southern Denmark that will provide eligible authors with a 10% discount on article processing charges.

In brief

The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) has become the latest organisation to sign up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Publishers Compact.

IntechOpen has extended its partnership with Research4Life, making its entire catalogue of more than 5,000 open access titles available via the Research4Life platform.

The publications division of the American Chemical Society is piloting a new transparent peer review process on two of its journals, ACS Central Science and the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Participating authors and reviewers will have their comments and responses made visible to readers of published articles.

Taylor & Francis has joined Emerald as the second publisher to achieve a 100% rating on Textbox’s ASPIRElist for its accessibility statement.

Figshare, Digital Science, and Springer Nature have issued their 2021 State of Open Data report, finding growing concern amongst researchers about data misuse and a lack of acknowledgement for those who do share their data.

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