Angela Cochran,  Associate Publisher and Journals Director at the American Society of Civil Engineers, is offering some thoughts on how Sci-Hub harms OA journals. Many of these reasons are the same for subscription journals and the amount of harm may be more, less, or the same depending on the business model of the journals affected.

Trevor Lane and Helena Wang, COPE Council members, report on the COPE China Seminar held in March 2017, in conjunction with the 2017 ISMTE Asian-Pacific Conference.

If the world’s published research were a building in progress, then its structural integrity would balance on the three ethical pillars of research publishing—honest authorship, sound peer review, and prevention of plagiarism. These were the three themes of the first COPE China Seminar. The presentations are on the COPE website.

Springer Nature is giving a boost to researchers with the launch of its new Springer Nature SciGraph. The new Linked Open Data (LOD) platform aggregates data sources from Springer Nature and cooperating partners, making it easier to analyze information related to Springer Nature publications.

The European Commission may follow the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds. The aim is to try to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe. If the commission is only “considering” the idea, a “decision” to create the platform had already been made. This decision is warmly welcomed by open access experts. The benefits for scientists are outlined, as well as the obstacles set by traditional publishers.

The CAB Direct platform launched in July 2016 is a single point of access to all of CABI’s databases. It has been rated as ‘highly recommended’ for researchers, professionals and practitioners in the March 2017 issue of CHOICE magazine. CHOICE magazine notes how this enormous collection of scientific research and policy studies has more than doubled in size since its last review of CAB Abstracts almost a decade ago, and details its substantial number of references.

Recommended, a new service which connects the research community with the most relevant content, was launched by Springer Nature in February 2017. This service makes suggestions of primary research papers which are drawn from over 65 million papers ; they are chosen irrespective of publisher, and are algorithmically tailored to the individual researchers’ interests.

ProQuest is partnering with Jisc to enable UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to build strong, user-centered research collections that better support their research focus areas and budgets. This common project is a group purchasing program aimed at supporting HEIs with a more efficient, coordinated and transparent approach to the acquisition of digital archival primary source collections.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Gates Foundation have formed a partnership to advance scientific communication and open access publishing. As a result of this partnership, AAAS will allow authors funded by the Gates Foundation to publish their research under a CC BY license in the Science family of journals. This means that the final published version of any article from a Foundation-funded author submitted to one of the AAAS journals after January 1, 2017 will be immediately available to read, download and reuse.

Peer review is currently facing a transition moment, and many believe that it is necessary to redefine its principles and practices so as not to delay or hinder the progress of science. Open peer review is one of those practices and many survey tend to prove that a growing number of authors, editors and publishers authorize it. Some of them even stated that open peer review should be adopted as a routine.