In May 2022, Springer celebrated 180 years of supporting researchers to advance discovery. Now, a new report, Springer: Serving the global research community, explores Springer’s evolution from its humble beginnings to the high-impact publisher it is today. This blog takes a look at some of the key highlights.

Nicola Nugent is the strategic lead for quality and impact across journals and books at the Royal Society of Chemistry. She provides her reflections on Peer Review Week 2022, which took place from 19-23  September, celebrating the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research.”

Read also the Peer Review Week blog series and the Research Information blog posts series about this event.

Frankfurter Buchmesse is back with plenty of events, conferences, readings, talks, performances and exciting surprises for publishing professionals and literary enthusiasts from around the globe. The 74th Frankfurter Buchmesse (19–23 October 2022) reaffirmed its position as the most important international meeting point for the book and media industry: 4,000 exhibitors from 95 countries and 180,000 visitors, the fair was well frequented.

All videos of events can be accessed in their media library and on the Frankfurter Buchmesse YouTube channel.

The ISSN IC Sales team was present for 2 days.

The report details the investment made by the company in new products and solutions for researchers, teachers, students and clinicians, faster and more efficient publishing systems, projects to drive sustainability and DEI initiatives, and training and development for its workforce. The Annual Progress Report builds on the recent Fully OA report and the Sustainable Business report, and is part of increased openness from Springer Nature into its activities.

Edinburgh University Press (EUP) and Wageningen Academic Publishers are the first to benefit from Get Full Text Research (GetFTR)’s decision to waive the service fees for publishers who have less than 40,000 article DOIs registered with Crossref. This is all part of GetFTR’s commitment to improving the journey from discovery to access, and to support publishers in helping their researchers quickly reach content they are entitled to read.

EBSCO has published the 2023 Serials Price Projection Report. Published annually, EBSCO’s Serials Price Projections is based on surveys of a wide range of publishers and reviews of historical serials pricing data to assist information professionals as they make budgeting decisions for the upcoming renewals season. This year’s report looks at market dynamics highlighting many issues that are currently driving the scholarly information marketplace including the economic effects of COVID-19, high inflation rates, currency impact, the decline of print and the trend toward various forms of Open Access (OA) content. The overall effective publisher price increases are expected to be in the range of 3 to 5 % for individual e-journal titles, 2 to 3 % for e-journal packages and 4 to 6 % for print titles.

A comprehensive analysis of Springer Nature’s fully open access (OA) portfolio of over 580 journals released in August 2022, shows the tangible impact publishing in these journals is having for its authors and the research communities it serves. Springer Nature continues to drive forward OA not only through its fully OA portfolio, but also through the introduction of new routes to OA, be that through its transformative agreements (TA), new fully OA journals, books and platforms, or through the development of transformative journals (TJ). The full report can be accessed here. Download the list of fully OA journals.

Clarivate has released the 2022 update to its annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The annual JCR release helps the research community to evaluate the world’s high-quality academic journals using a range of indicators, descriptive data and visualisations. The reports are used by academic publishers across the globe to understand the scholarly impact of their journals relative to their field and promote them to the research community.  

The JCR is based on 2021 data compiled from the Web of Science Core Collection, a collection of journals, books and conference proceedings in the world’s largest publisher-neutral global citation database.

Little is known about why journals discontinue despite its significant implications. We present an analysis of 140 Australian journals that ceased from 2011 to mid-2021 and present the results of a survey of editors of 53 of them. The survey showed that funding was an important reason for discontinuation, and lack of quality submission and lack of support from the owners of the journal also played a role. A fifth of journals indicated that they did not have a plan for the preservation of articles at the time of publication and the current availability of the content of ceased journals appeared to be sub-optimal in many cases with reliance on the website of ceased journals or web-archive platforms.