The ALPSP Conference and Awards was held on 12-14 September 2018. You can view the full conference programme, including speaker biographies, and browse the event website here. You can also access the audio recordings and slides for each session. Video footage of all plenary sessions is also available on the ALPSP YouTube page.

ATLA is announcing significant growth in the content of its core full-text products, ATLAS® and ATLAS PLUS® in the past year. ATLAS PLUS, ATLA’s largest online full-text collection, has grown to include more than 470 full-text titles. In addition, ATLA’s original full-text collection, ATLAS, continues to grow and now offers more than 335 titles.

ATLA is among the partnering databases whose data enhances the ISSN Portal.

Michael Mabe,  chief executive officer of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), reflects on a half-century for STM, and the continuing path of innovation.

Taking place in Lagos, Nigeria on 9 May 2018, this IPA (International Publishers Association) Regional Seminar covered a broad range of issues, from the socio-economic contribution of publishing in Africa, to Freedom to Publish, and the role of technology in overcoming illiteracy.

You can download the program and read the interview with Gbadega Adedapo, member of the IPA’s Executive Committee, President of the Nigerian Publishers Association and CEO of Ramsed Publications Ltd.

The International Publishers Association (IPA) chief Michiel Kolman, Elsevier’s senior vice president for global academic relations, made the opening address at 2018 Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference. As an answer to the event’s key question about “ramping up relevance”, he called for the industry to place its authority and intellectual rigor at the center of its work. He also pointed out that division in the business is not helping, and sharply condemned SciHub as a real threat of piracy.

Academic Publishing in Europe gathered more than 250 delegates in Berlin in January 2018. Publishing 2020: Ramping up relevance was the focus, and this notion led to the re-affirmation of the key themes of the conference series: transition to open access, the debate around peer-reviewed content versus uncontrolled data sharing platforms. There was also a focus on new technological challenges associated with the blockchain that likely will challenge academic publishing.

Cambridge University Press has just launched a new content sharing service called Cambridge Core Share. Authors and subscribers can now generate a read-only link to a journal article which can be shared online, allowing anyone to read the final published version of the article for free. This new sharing service is available to over 150 journals, and to content published from 2016 onwards, during an initial pilot. Cambridge Core Share allows article usage to be recorded, thus enabling authors to demonstrate the impact of their work.

An enhanced Metadata Downloader to replace the current MARC downloader has been launched by Springer Nature. This web tool provides librarians and library cataloguers with downloadable metadata updates which can be embedded into library catalogues, as well as title lists for a library’s licensed content.

With the launch of the Metadata Downloader, Springer Nature is also increasing the frequency of available data updates for books and journals hosted on its content platform SpringerLink. Records are updated on a daily basis.

SharedIt, Springer Nature’s free content sharing initiative, was launched in October 2016. A positive assessment is established after this first year of existence. As a matter of fact, SharedIt links were used to read Springer Nature articles 3,276,125 times, by readers in over 200 markets and from almost 29,000 institutions.

SharedIt covers over 2,700 journals including all the Springer Nature-owned portfolio and over 1,000 co-owned and partner-owned journals. It enables authors and subscribers to post links to free-to-read versions of research articles anywhere, including social media platforms, repositories, websites, scholarly collaboration networks and via email.

EBSCO Information Services and the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) launched ATLA Serials (ATLAS) PLUS and updated their ATLA Religion Database (RDB), which are both available on EBSCOhost. ATLAS PLUS has more than 425 full-text journals in the fields of religion and theology, including full-text content in 16 languages from 30-plus countries. ATLA RDB is merging with the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index (CPLI), which features more than 500,000 additional records on Catholicism.