Jon Tennant writes both Web of Science and Scopus are critical components of our research ecosystem, providing the basis for university and global rankings, as well as for bibliometric research. However, both are structurally biased against research produced in non-western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities and social sciences. This viewpoint emphasises the damage that these systematic inequities pose upon our global knowledge production systems, and the need to research funders to unite to form a more globally-representative, non-profit, community-controlled infrastructure for our global research knowledge pool.

This article provides an overview of the ways in which the members of the Association of University Presses are working towards more inclusive practices in scholarly publishing. The authors document how bias has shaped universities and university presses, and propose actions to encourage inclusion and equity.

The SciELO Program has launched the SciELO Preprints server – http://preprints.scielo.org – with the aim of accelerating the availability of research articles and other scientific communications before, or in parallel with, their evaluation and validation by scientific journals through the peer review process. Although open to all thematic areas, SciELO Preprints will focus on immediately serving communications related to COVID-19.

Further to our announcement in October, the Steering Committee of Think. Check. Submit. is delighted to announce a new addition to its resources: a checklist for authors wishing to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of a book or monograph publisher. Drawing on existing expertise from experiences of their newest partner, OAPEN, the checklist for books offers sound advice along the lines of the recommendations already offered by the journal checklist.

The rest of the Think. Check. Submit. website has also been updated to make it more relevant for both books and journals.

Following on from the recent webinar entitled What is Scholarly Communication and Publishing in the 21st Century, OASPA asked their speakers to summarise their talks by offering a few key takeaways. This may be useful for those who missed it or wish to share with colleagues. You can also access the full audio recording and slides.

AmeliCA, a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO and led by Redalyc and CLACSO, seeks a cooperative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge. AmeliCA is taking the 16-year experience and technological resources from Redalyc to strengthen non-profit publishing beyond the region. It is strategic for the research community and libraries to join forces, as well as share and connect individual efforts to build a cooperative infrastructure, in order to guarantee that publishing is led by the scholarly community and that its openness is sustainable.

The French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has decided to support three international open science infrastructures as part of SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services initiative. The three supported infrastructures (OpenCitations, Public Knowledge Project and Directory of Open Access Books) were first evaluated by a jury composed by SCOSS, and also afterwards by the French Committee for Open Science, according to its key selection criteria set out in 2019. The results of this analysis were positive and prompted a dialogue with the projects on some minor points for improvement.

This study examines the role of learned societies as publishers in Finland based on bibliographic information from two Finnish databases. Finnish learned societies play an integral part in national scholarly publishing. They play an especially important role in journal publishing, as commercial publishers produce only 2.6% of Finnish journals and book series, and only 1.4% of the journal articles from scholars working in Finnish universities.

Robert Harington, as an Associate Executive Director of Publishing at the American Mathematical Society, attempts to disentangle the issues and paints a picture of how scholarly societies are an indelible part of the research and support system for academics across many disciplines.  In this way, they resemble private, non-profit academic institutions as a vital part of the academic landscape, which similarly receive public monies in support of their role.