Online search engines and academic indexes require machine-readable metadata to ingest and interpret information about journal articles. Without rich machine-readable metadata, the potential reach and impacts of journal articles are sure to be stunted because search engines and indexes will struggle to parse the articles and return them in relevant search results. Scholastica automatically produces machine-readable metadata for all of the articles published using their open access publishing platform, and they make it easy to apply metadata collected during peer review to published articles saving journals time. ISSN is among the core metadata required by publishing standards organizations and open access initiatives like Plan S.

COPE’s first survey aims to identify publication ethics issues specifically for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) journals. The report takes you through the study methodology, its findings on issues identified by the 650 editors who responded, and their awareness of COPE and its resources. The study also compares the responses of the AHSS respondents to those of STM journals in a study by Wager et al in 2009.

The report can be downloaded here.

Jasmin Lange, Chief Publishing Officer and a member of Brill’s Executive Committee, presents Brill’s endeavors in open access (OA) and about Plan S. Brill is a 336-year old publishing house, and the author explains how the last 12 months have changed her perspective on academic publishing, first presented at the STM conference in Washington in April 2019 (slides available here).

With more than 20 years of experience in research, advice and training to publishers, Latindex promotes this online course Publishing and visibility of scientific journals. This project involves researchers specialized in librarianship and information science and partners of Latindex. The objectives are multiple: to provide Central American publishers with the basic knowledge for publishing and managing printed and electronic academic journals; to promote an improvement in the editorial quality of scientific publications; to promote journals acquiring a better visibility at a global level, and finally to promote Open Access.

Springer Nature sets out a new approach to research publishing with the goal of increasing the demand from authors to immediately publish their research open access (OA). The other goal is to increase the supply of journals able to publish OA, potentially enabling even highly selective journals such as Nature to transition to OA. The new approach would see publishers become active drivers of the transition to OA, with this demonstration of commitment increasing institutions and funding bodies’ confidence and support. This blog post describes a potential significant way to progress.

Since 2017, Springer Nature has provided an optional Research Data Support service to help researchers deposit and curate data that support their peer-reviewed publications. This service builds on a Research Data Helpdesk, which since 2016 has provided support to authors and editors who need advice on the options available for sharing their research data. This paper describes a short project which aimed to facilitate an objective assessment of metadata quality, undertaken during the development of a third-party curation service for researchers (Research Data Support). The curation services which have been developed and introduced are also described.

Many society publishers, concerned about the disruptive implications of Plan S, are nervously considering selling off their publishing assets.

Within a set of feature articles gathered under the name Postcards from a Collective Ecosystem, Heather Staines and Lisa Hinchliffe introduce us to some thought-provoking ideas concerning publishing platform infrastructure and interoperability in a rapidly changing world.

Library publishing is both a growing area of interest in academic libraries and an increasingly visible subfield of scholarly publishing. This article introduces the field of library publishing from the perspective of the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). In its first five years, LPC has produced a robust set of resources to support library publishers. It has also built a strong community of members and an extended network of affiliates. This paper presents and contextualizes these accomplishments,  and shares new developments and future directions for the Library Publishing Coalition.

On the same subject, see also this blog post by the same author.

Wiley and Projekt DEAL, a representative of nearly 700 academic institutions in Germany, have established a groundbreaking partnership for Germany to pilot new publishing models, better enable researchers to create and disseminate knowledge through Wiley’s journals, and continue to provide participating German institutions access to Wiley’s portfolio of academic journals.

Under an annual fee, this transformative three-year agreement provides all Projekt DEAL institutions with access to read Wiley’s academic journals back to the year 1997, and researchers at Projekt DEAL institutions can publish articles open access in Wiley’s journals.