STM Publishing September 2019 | The Hub by The London Book Fair

All change at Clarivate

It’s been a busy month at Clarivate Analytics, with Annette Thomas and Samantha Burridge both leaving the company. Thomas, who will be replaced by Mukhtar Ahmed, had recently been appointed president of Clarivate’s newly merged Science Group, combining its Web of Science and Life Sciences divisions; Burridge had been VP of Strategy and Transformation for the Web of Science group. Ahmed is described as a ‘seasoned executive with deep roots in research-orientated businesses’ who has spent a quarter of a century ‘focusing on innovation and product development within the biopharmaceutical, technology and scientific research industries’.

Clarivate, which has recently announced the pricing of its secondary offering of 34.5 million ordinary shares currently held by affiliated companies, has also acquired Sequence Base, a company providing patent sequence information and search technology to the biotech, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. The company has additionally announced that nursing, behavioural and health sciences, and medical publisher Springer Publishing is moving its manuscript submission and peer review system to Web of Science’s ScholarOne platform.

ALPSP recognises Scite and Michael, shares transformative toolkit

Scite has claimed the Innovation in Publishing Award at this year’s annual conference of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). The new platform uses deep learning models to evaluate the reliability of scientific claims. Ann Michael, chief digital officer at PLOS, received the award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing.

The conference also saw the launch of an independent report and transformative agreement toolkit aiming to help learned society publishers accelerate their transitions to open access, and so comply with Plan S. Funded by two members of cOAlition S – the Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – in collaboration with ALPSP, and produced in response to the concerns of many learned societies about their ability to adapt to Plan S’s requirements, the report explores 27 business models, only three of which rely on APCs. It was written by Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle at Information Power.

Wiley announces new partnerships

Wiley, which recently reported increased revenues for the quarter ending July 2019, has announced two new publishing partnerships. A deal with the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience (ISDN), beginning in January 2020, will see the company publish the International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience (IJDN), the society’s official journal. Another agreement with the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) will result in Wiley publishing the Journal of Dental Education (JDE), also from January.

The company has also announced the development of a new multi-faceted physiology taxonomy in partnership with the Physiological Society, to support search and discovery for the physiology and associated communities. And it will be flipping the AGU society journal Space Weather: The International Journal of Research and Applications, to open access from October 17.

Deals and partnerships

SAGE publishing has partnered with Editage to offer pre-publication services in manuscript formatting, translation, English editing, plagiarism checking, and artwork preparation.

Healthcare information and services provider the Thieme Group has formed a joint venture with the American-Danish learning technology specialist Area9 to develop adaptive e-learning solutions for physicians, residents, medical students, and allied health professionals.

Scholarly publishing technology provider HighWire has announced a new five-year journal hosting agreement with BMJ, extending a relationship that has existed since 2005.

Product/service launches

Customer insights provider DataSalon has launched PaperStack, a new cloud-based service providing publishers with a complete reporting suite for the scholarly submissions process, integrated with peer review systems such as ScholarOne and Aries Editorial Manager.

Kudos has launched a new tool for maximising the impact of and engagement with research. Kudos Pro is a toolkit for research groups, departments, faculties and institutes that enables researchers to create and manage research communication plans, share information about their research, and track and report on reach and engagement, throughout an entire project lifecycle.

Scholarly communications and technology solutions provider Enago has launched a new AI-powered manuscript assessment and automated copy-editing platform. AuthorONE can be integrated into editorial systems via APIs or used as a web app with a custom dashboard.

Cambridge University Press has announced the launch of a new journal to address issues with reproducibility and peer review. Experimental Results will give researchers a place to publish valid, standalone experimental results, regardless of whether those results are novel, inconclusive, negative or supplementary to other published work; it will also publish the outcome of attempts to reproduce previously published experiments, including those that dispute past findings.

Single sign-on provider OpenAthens has announced the launch of its new embeddable version of Wayfinder organisational discovery service, enabling users to use a single secure login to access all the online resources to which their organisation subscribes.

Appointments and departures

Daniel Roper has stepped down as CEO of Springer Nature, to be replaced by Frank Vrancken Peeters, who joined the company in September 2017 as Chief Commercial Officer. Vrancken Peeters has spent more than twenty years in the industry, after a successful career in management consultancy, and was keenly involved in the negotiations leading to the company’s recent transformative deal with Germany’s Projekt Deal.

The International Association for Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) has appointed Ian Moss as its new Chief Executive Officer. Moss, who currently serves as Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and has also worked in the civil service and as a researcher for the Labour Party, will take up his new role in December.

Alice Fleet, formerly of ProQuest and Cambridge University Press, has been promoted to technology director at Emerald Publishing, and will take up a seat on the board.

JISC has appointed Karen Foster to its leadership team as executive director of a new data analytics directorate; Foster comes from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), and is joined by 22 members of her team there.

Lindsey Dixon has joined De Gruyter as Global Journals Director from Taylor & Francis, where she spent ten years in a range of roles. Based in Hong Kong, Dixon will help develop the company’s journal and business partnership prospects in China, Japan and Southeast Asia in particular.