Much has been written about ‘predatory publishing’ over the past decade. In this discussion document, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) will describe the basic phenomenon, identify the key issues, describe the impact on the various stakeholders involved, analyse proposed interventions and solutions, and present COPE’s perspective on addressing the problem going forward. This discussion will synonymously refer to predatory publishing and predatory journals/publications as fake scholarly publishing and fake scholarly journals/publications, respectively, and will elaborate on the issues with terminology. While the focus of this discussion paper is primarily journals, there are also predatory conferences and predatory proceedings of those conferences. COPE welcomes feedback and comments from publishers, journal editors, reviewers, researchers, institutions, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders on this subject.

It is now possible to upload article metadata containing ORCIDs to DOAJ. ORCIDs are displayed on article pages in accordance with the ORCID display guidelines. Changes have been made to the search interface and API to allow search and retrieval of ORCIDs. Also, the code lists for countries, currencies and languages have been updated through a service called Pycountry.

An independent report published in January 2020 by Information Power aims to improve the transparency of Open Access (OA) prices and services. The report is the outcome of a project funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of cOAlition S to inform the development of Plan S. During the project, libraries, funders, publishers, and universities worked together to inform the development of a framework intended to provide information about OA services and prices in a transparent, practical, and insightful way.

A study reveals that research scientists in Ghana may have more awareness of predatory journals than expected, but they may lack the training or tools necessary for deciding whether or not a journal is legitimate.

Springer Nature appealed to cOAlition S in an open letter not to lose the opportunity Transformative Journals offer to speed up the transition to OA. Unless changes are made to the conditions being proposed the publisher believes it would be unable to commit to its journals participating. Springer Nature proposed an alternative timeframe and workable set of metrics in place of the cOAlition S requirements. This is cOAlition S’ reponse.

SciELO publishing serves as a framework for the implementation of national public policies for the development of peer-reviewed journals under national conditions while at the same time being part of an international network following the state of art in scientific communication. Moreover, the SciELO Network embodies a program of international cooperation for the progress of research and its open communication with a view towards an inclusive global flow of scientific information that considers the diversity of geographies, thematic areas, cultures, multilingualism and the resulting richness of asymmetries.

Alicia Wise of Information Power was invited to deliver a plenary presentation at the Charleston Conference. In just ten minutes, she was to discuss Our Open Future: how we will achieve Open Access, Open Infrastructure, and Open Research. This article develops the theme of how new – sometimes unexpected – collaborations will be available and essential to moving into the new open world.

ALPSP believes in the value of community-led publishing as a vital part of a thriving research ecosystem, and that this is recognized in the transition to open access. ALPSP members hope that cOalition S will continue to listen to feedback from the community in formulating its final guidelines. They are encouraging their members to respond to the consultation, using the survey.

The closing dates for comment is 6 January 2020.

This article reports on selected findings from the pilot African Open Science Platform landscape study, conducted by the Academy of Science of South Africa ASSAF, on request of the South African Department of Science and Technology, and funded by the National Research Foundation. Direction was provided by CODATA (International Science Council).

Agreements with open access (OA) elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) have been increasing in number in the last few years. Consortia and academic institutions need to monitor the number of OA publications, the costs and the value of these agreements. Publishers are therefore required to account for the articles published OA to consortia, academic institutions and research funders. One way publishers can do so is by providing regular reports with article-level metadata. This article uses the Knowledge Exchange (KE) and the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) initiative recommendations as a check-list to assess what article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia.