In Review, developed by Research Square, the innovative service which integrates early sharing and increased transparency with the journal submission and peer review process, is now available on over 1,000 Springer Nature journals, including the Discover Journals platform. With the service already integrated across its BMC, Nature and Springer portfolios, the latest roll out means In Review is now available on over a third of Springer Nature’s portfolio, enabling more authors to benefit from the service. You can find a list of the participating journals.

Wiley will cease using the beleaguered Hindawi brand name, the publisher announced. Wiley plans to integrate Hindawi’s approximately 200 journals into the rest of its portfolio by the middle of next year.

Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, has cost the company $18 million in revenue in its latest financial quarter.  Hindawi’s journals have been overrun by paper mills, leading to thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles.

Snapp (Springer Nature’s Article Processing Platform) aims to improve the publishing process and provide a more agile response to the growth in Open Access (OA). Its rollout marks a key investment from the company in the future of publishing. Since initial introduction in 2019, Snapp has supported over 5.6 million authors, 55,000 editors and over half a million reviewers. Over a third of Springer Nature owned journals and nearly half of its OA journals are now live on Snapp, with the rest of its portfolio to follow. More on Snapp and the roadmap for its continued development can be found here and a summary of key outreach to date can be found here.

Two events took place in September and October about Peer Review: the Peer Review Week, with a theme of Peer review and the future of publishing and COPE Forum on peer review models. The COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) team is commenting both the reflections made on the topic in a series of 2 posts.

In Part 1, COPE outline some of the problems, solutions, and tools facing peer review. In Part 2, they address perhaps the most lively area of debate on this topic at the moment: the role of artificial intelligence (AI).

Global independent academic publisher Sage has acquired IOS Press, an independent publisher founded in Amsterdam in 1987 that specializes in health, life, and computer sciences. With this move, Sage acquires nearly 100 journals and a frontlist of 70 plus books each year covering subjects such as neuroscience, medical informatics, cancer research, artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and the semantic web. The acquisition marks significant growth in Sage’s open access (OA) program with the addition of more than 20 fully OA journals. It also expands core subject areas for Sage, such as psychology and engineering, and marks an investment in new areas such as AI and image processing.

Brill, a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law and Biology founded in 1683, and De Gruyter jointly announce that they have reached a conditional agreement on a recommended all-cash public offer to be made by De Gruyter. The transaction creates the leading academic publisher in the Humanities and presents a unique opportunity to accelerate organic growth and achieve necessary scale.

STM joined 26 organizations representing thousands of creative professionals around the world, including the academic publishing sector, news, entertainment, magazine, and book publishing companies, to release Global Principles for Artificial Intelligence (AI). A first of their kind, these pioneering Global Principles provide guidance for the development, deployment, and regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and applications to ensure business opportunities and innovation can thrive within an ethical and accountable framework. The Global Principles for AI are aimed at ensuring publishers’ continued ability to create and disseminate quality content, while facilitating innovation and the responsible development of trustworthy AI systems.

STM Solutions has announced the launch of a pilot program to detect duplicate submissions to scholarly publications, which is against publisher policies and often indicates the work of paper mills, which produce and sell fraudulent research. This workflow, part of the STM Integrity Hub, allows to detect duplicate submissions across different journals, publishers, and submission systems while upholding robust confidentiality and privacy standards. IEEE, IOP Publishing, ACS Publications, Taylor & Francis, Sage, and PeerJ are among the publishers who have already signed on.

Nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews announced that it has acquired Charleston Hub, home of the Charleston Conference, the premier international library event, and Against The Grain, the journal connecting publishers, vendors, and librarians. Librarian and entrepreneur Katina Strauch organized the first Charleston Conference in 1980, with just 20 people in attendance. Over the years, the event has expanded into ’something of an institution in the library world.’ In 2020, Charleston Hub was created to bring together the various websites associated with the conference.