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.

The African Academy of Sciences, in partnership with F1000, is launching a publication platform, AAS Open Research, to enable AAS funded and affiliated researchers to publish immediately and without barriers. AAS Open Research will showcase African research on the global stage in an immediate and transparent way. The platform will launch in early 2018.

The ability to access and review the data behind research is a well sought after, but often elusive, resource. In recognition of this, Scopus has been working to incorporate new tools that can make it easier to search and share data. As part of a new initiative introduced earlier this year, Scopus has established two key partnerships: Scholix and DataSearch. Each provide different but complementary ways to connect researchers to each other’s data.

OPERAS is a a distributed research infrastructure project in Europe to support the development of open scholarly communication.

The OPERAS Design Study is the outcome of the OPERAS-D project. The main part of the OPERAS Design Study is comprised of four studies that explore the landscape of OPERAS field of activity, establish the technical mapping of the OPERAS consortium, present a survey on users’ needs concerning scientific communication and academic publishing, and finally foresee the development of the governance scheme and business model of the future infrastructure within the ESFRI framework. The studies’ main finding is the fragmentation of OPERAS field of work. Thus, OPERAS vision and mission is integration.

Each year since 2013, Jisc Collections has asked UK institutions to submit data on their article processing charges (APCs). Last year, we published an analysis of APCs and subscription costs in the UK for the years 2013-2015.

As large publishers fight via legal means illegal scientific article downloading, such as via Sci-Hub, empirical findings show that over 85% of paywall-protected article catalogues are accessible through no-fee, controversial repositories. Major journal publishers deriving the majority of their revenues from traditional, toll-based, paywall-protected business models may need to revise their business strategies in response to illegal research-article sharing.

To share a better understanding of author’s perspectives on APC payments, Knowledge Exchange has carried out a study among authors of six research organisations in Northern Europe. It was concluded that OA publishing is supported by authors because of the larger exposure and the freedom of reuse of the article. As a result, their discretionary research funds are often used to pay the APCs.  Thus, authors need to be supported in areas such as Financing APCs, Administrative procedures for APCs and Communication about OA publishing.

Both reports are freely available :

• Financial and administrative issues around article publication costs for Open Access
• Paying for Open Access: The Authors perspective

Using Springer Nature as a case study, it is shown that major challenges exist around the integrity, efficiency and speed of research communication. Supporting researchers and advancing discovery systems could facilitate publishers efforts to develop policies, practices and solutions that help scientists to publish robust and insightful research, support the development of new areas of knowledge, and make ideas and information accessible to all.

Five months after the Beall’s list of possible ‘predatory’ scholarly journals and publishers was shut down, another index of untrustworthy titles is appearing — although this version will be available only to paying subscribers.

Scholarly-services firm Cabell’s International will launch its own list of predatory journals. The firm described its work on 31 May, at the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, Massachusetts.

When a journal is first suggested for Scopus, it must undergo a rigorous evaluation and selection process to ensure it meets all the high-quality title selection criteria required for acceptance. However, journals must also demonstrate the ability to maintain their quality status year over year. This is where the re-evaluation program comes into play. Now in its second full year, this year’s annual title evaluation has been completed and journals that must undergo the full re-evaluation process have been notified.