Berlin-based De Gruyter, a mid-sized publisher with a strong focus on humanities scholarship, Publisher describes the digital transformation of its business.  The Managing Director explains that in a near future, they will no longer acquire books or journals as product formats, but rather content in which conventional format thinking no longer plays a role. Launching their new platform was just the first step of the digital strategy, including the optimisation of software systems, workflows and digital products that will further enable the publishing house to deliver excellent user-focused experiences and services to the scholarly communities.

In one month, there were two corporate acquisitions involving library services products: Clarivate, a major academic metrics company, bought ProQuest in spite of protests and Federal Trade Commission filings from librarians and advocacy groups, and Wiley bought Knowledge Unlatched, a crowdfunded open access provider. Librarians and researchers have watched dozens of academic journal publishers dwindle to a small, powerful publishing oligopoly that controls the research market. Invest in Open Infrastructures community believes that projects and services serving the open landscape need to be responsive to the research practitioners and knowledge communities they serve, rather than orienting their work solely around profit margins.

STM (the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) has published the latest edition of The STM Report, the organization’s comprehensive overview of the scientific and scholarly publishing market. The revised report reveals significant publisher-driven growth in Open Access (OA) and continued dynamism in the scholarly communication ecosystem. It also highlights emerging trends across journal publishing and article growth, the market dominance of formats and disciplines, whilst also exploring the variances across the different markets of the global economy.

Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky says that paper mills are the biggest organised fraud perpetrated on scientific journals ever, eroding scientists’ trust in the publishing system – and in each other. Paper mills serve up professional fakery for their customers on an industrial scale. Buyers can apparently purchase a paper, or authorship of one, on any topic based on phony results to submit to a journal. This makes them not only harder to detect and crack down on, but also exponentially increases the damage they could do.

Clarivate acquiring ProQuest, valued at $5.3 billion, is the largest transaction in recent memory in the scholarly information sector. Both companies are intermediaries — they each work extensively with publishers and libraries — and each has extensive interests in discovery, a lynchpin service in the research ecosystem. Will this transaction result in dramatically strengthened products and improved services for researchers, as its proponents foresee? Or will it result in information enclosure, lock-in, service deterioration, and price increases, as detractors forewarn?

This white paper explores how implementing agile project management methodologies can help journal publishers respond to change factors more effectively — from the COVID-19 pandemic to new OA initiatives — and find ways to make research more accessible and sustainable in the process.

Click here to read the full white paper.

Tough times lie ahead. This is the general feeling on almost everyone´s mind. That Covid-19 would turn into a world-crisis, with devastating effects that go beyond the economy, was quite clear right from the start. The publication system was also impacted. Thousands of articles have been published and several special issues dedicated to the coronavirus-19 disease were organized, but not in Brazil, where lack of funding is negatively affecting science in numerous ways. In addition, it appears that scientific journals published in the country are at the end of the list of priorities…

[Original article published in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências, vol. 93 no. 1, Perspectivas sombrias para periódicos do Brasil]

For the first time, a comprehensive picture of China’s science, technology, and medical (STM) journals and papers is available in the English language. Led by the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST), the Blue Book on China’s Scientific Journal Development 2020, originally published in Chinese and published by EDP Sciences, aims to provide an overall picture of China’s STM journals and papers in a comprehensive, systematic, and transparent way. It presents data to illustrate the overall status of China’s STM journals and provides analyses of current challenges as well as guidelines and rules for development.