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.

The Retraction Watch team takes a look at the most important publishing mistakes this year.

Kudos, the award-winning service for broadening research impact, has today provided an update on sponsors for its Brave New World research project, which will provide publishers, societies and providers of related services with vital insights to shape strategies for 2021 and beyond. The study will use desk research, teleinterviews and surveys to reveal the implications of COVID-19 for research funding policy, university budgets and practices, and researchers’ workload and workflows.

As 2020 nears its end, a counterintuitive picture is emerging for scientific output. Rather than suffering a COVID-driven slowdown, 2020 delivered extraordinary growth for journal content. To put it simply, journals are expected to grow by about 500k papers from 2019 to 2020, as much as they grew overall in the previous six years. Will a 2020 boom yield a 2021 bust? While the mechanism of this year’s growth is unclear, it may have implications for the scientific output of 2021.

In a Charleston Library Conference online session at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the discussion centered on the changes brought by open access for academic libraries, researchers, and publishers. Called “Charleston Library Conference Meets Frankfurter Buchmesse,” this digital program marks the start of a closer working relationship between the two big events.

The Ghanaian founder of Sub-Saharan Publishers outlines the importance of the Africa Publishing Innovation Fund’s program to assist the continent’s book business.

The 2021 Serials Price Projection Report from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is now available. The report projects that the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and medical libraries are expected to be in the range of two to three percent for individual titles and one to three percent for e-journal packages. EBSCO recommends caution when using these projections, as they rely on historical trends and current estimates. EBSCO will update the projection information if economic conditions warrant it.

Latindex is implementing a system to detect and prevent bad publishing practices that may affect all academic journals published in Latin America. They published a guide for the identification and treatment of spurious journals, a document aimed at the publishers in the Latin American region.