The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) aims to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in academic promotion. This study led by the Medical Faculty of University of Bern (Switzerland) demonstrates that the rank of the JIF is a bad proxy measure for the actual citation impact of individual articles. The University signed DORA and replaced the JIF rank with the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), an article-level measure of citation impact developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Publishers agree to make journal summaries open and searchable in single repository. This new cross-publisher initiative, launched on 24 September by Stuart Taylor at OASPA Conference, calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research. Publishers involved in I4OA, the Initiative for Open Abstracts, have agreed to submit their article summaries to Crossref, which will make the abstracts available in a common format. It also aims to emulate I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations), an initiative established three years ago to make metadata and bibliographical references openly available through Crossref. Since its launch, 2,000 publishers have signed up to I4OC.

The paper provides a critical review of predatory journals phenomenon affecting the field of scholarly communication. This article highlights the main issues and establishes them as research subjects. The article concludes with research avenues that contribute to the analysis of mutation in digital scholarly communication. [Abstract in English, Article in French]

Recently, interest in utilising open source software tools to create and disseminate scholarly content has grown. A June 2019 report, funded by the Mellon Foundation, supported by MIT Press, noted the clear lack of incentives for collaboration, due in part to tool creators chasing the same philanthropic funding. In response to this, the new non-profit Knowledge Futures Group offers institutions opportunities for collaboration with other open source initiatives, as well as with commercial entities wishing to explore a more open offering in community publishing.

Publishing open access dramatically increases the impact of research beyond academia. Springer Nature shares further evidence of this in a four-part blog series that highlights the key takeaways from a survey Springer Nature conducted of over 9,000 researchers in June 2019, to better understand their attitudes towards societal impact.

Scientific journals are run by researchers, experts in the discipline, who work, in this framework, for scientific publishing houses. Some researchers have also understood the value of offering these publishing giants new scholarly journals which they propose to “manage” in order to make their activity and their field of research flourish. Two cases of system drift are explained.

Who owns the content of scientific research papers, and who has the right to circulate them? This CREATe Working Paper by Aileen Fyfe uses the history of academic publishing to explore the origins of our modern concerns in terms of claim to ownership, circulation reprinting and reuse of material during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ends by considering how things changed in the twentieth century, as commercial interests became increasingly influential in academic publishing and as new technologies brought new opportunities for circulating knowledge.

The nature and extent of predatory publishing is highly contested. Whilst debates have often focused defining journals and publishers as either predatory or not predatory. Kyle Siler argues that predatory publishing encompasses a spectrum of activities and that by understanding this ambiguity, we can better understand and make value judgements over where legitimacy lies in scholarly communication.

The SciELO Program has updated the document “Criteria, policy and procedures for the admission and permanence of journals in the SciELO Brazil Collection” [in Portuguese] with a new version that takes effect from May 2020. The document is referred to as SciELO Brazil Criteria for its purpose and function of contributing to the development of Brazil’s journals, and at the same time, it serves as a reference for the indexing criteria of all SciELO Network collections.

This article describes an international community-based effort to create metadata guiding principles for adopting and using richer metadata and advancing its application in scholarly communications. These principles can facilitate the dissemination, discoverability and use/reuse of many types of research and scholarly outputs. While much work remains to be done, these principles serve as a starting point for the evolution of processes that span the entire scholarly communication community.