Commencing in 1993, the two companies have evolved their relationship from distributing scientific journals originating in the former USSR, to comprise all aspects of digital delivery, including extensive subscription agreements (often referred to as “Big Deals”). The new contract preserves the reach of Pleiades’ base of some 190 English journals (emanating from some 270 local language journals), which comprise the core of the Russian Library of Science. The new arrangement enables authors from thousands of non-translated journals to seamlessly submit their articles to thematic journal clusters at all levels of the Pleiades and Springer Nature collections.

Four members of the Society for Scholarly Publishing attended the Academic Publishing in Europe  conference held in January 2020 in Berlin. They share their brief impressions, take-aways, and notable points.

Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty. STM report, STM Online Services 2019-2023, focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2016 and 2018, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books.  The report analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2023. It includes an in-depth review of 10 leading scientific and technical publishers, including Wolters Kluwer, Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, …

Predatory journals find most of their prey in developing countries, and in particular, among emerging economies where research output is rapidly growing. Professor Patwardhan is a researcher and the founder of a medical journal published by Elsevier. He is also the current Vice Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) which plays a key part in India’s anti-predatory journals efforts. In this interview, Professor Patwardhan tells us about India’s battle against predatory journals.

Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed upon a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. Everyone agrees that predatory publishers sow confusion, promote shoddy scholarship and waste resources. What is needed is a consensus on a definition of predatory journals. This would provide a reference point for research into their prevalence and influence, and would help in crafting coherent interventions.

A new comment article in Nature, headed up by lead-author Agnes Grudniewicz, unveils a new consensus-formed definition of predatory publishing, and provides some suggestions of steps to take in the future to tackle the problems developing from the phenomena.

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. The authors of this study examined data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded in the University of California system during a period of six years. They came to the conclusion that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

STM and its members continue to stand ready to work with cOAlition S and individual funders to make a vision of a high-quality, sustainable, and more open scholarly communication environment a reality.

The University Press Library is the result of a five-year pilot project initiated by De Gruyter, the three prestigious presses of Harvard, Columbia and Princeton with collaboration from LYRASIS and ten participating academic libraries. The pilot project sought to address the challenges of acquiring complete DRM-free frontlist eBook collections of university press content for both the press and the academic library. The data gathered from this successful pilot inspired the University Press Library, a sustainable model that meets the financial and academic needs of both university press partners and the library in a digital environment.

Online search engines and academic indexes require machine-readable metadata to ingest and interpret information about journal articles. Without rich machine-readable metadata, the potential reach and impacts of journal articles are sure to be stunted because search engines and indexes will struggle to parse the articles and return them in relevant search results. Scholastica automatically produces machine-readable metadata for all of the articles published using their open access publishing platform, and they make it easy to apply metadata collected during peer review to published articles saving journals time. ISSN is among the core metadata required by publishing standards organizations and open access initiatives like Plan S.