As an advocate for open access, David Cameron Neylon is answering to the questions: What are journals for? How well does a specific journal serve a specific community? David Cameron Neylon expresses his views on the role of the journal that should be to support the privileging of local interactions and content, and to build a community. In this sense, it is precisely those journals that claim to be “international” that are of the least value where it really matters.

Derek Krissoff, Director of West Virginia University Press, provides a positive health check-up of university presses. There are more of them than ever before, and sales are up.

SciELO has been a shining example of how a publicly supported infrastructure could bolster scholarship and knowledge as public goods. However, its focus on “professionalization” and “internationalization” may serve to reduce the intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity of the region, while subjecting the evaluation of quality to “standards” largely set by multinational corporations that are more interested in profit extraction than in local development.

In Japan, scholarly journals are mainly published by academic societies. J-STAGE is a journal platform on which Japanese academic societies can publish their journals. Although more than 80% of them are freely accessible, most of them do not claim to be open access. Some barriers to open access publishing are described based on conversations held between the Science Council of Japan and academic societies.

The 2018 Peer Review Week aims to highlight the theme of diversity in peer review. After looking at how diversity in peer review has evolved over the Royal Society’s history, some of the challenges in diversifying peer review are examined.

Further to a NISO webinar on Discovery: Where Researchers Begin, a historian wonders about her relationship to the use of archives and documentary resources offered by research libraries. She highlights the potential institutional bias inherent in archives: the purposes for which these archives were formed, how the material was organized and how it was catalogued. Finally, she considers libraries as active producers of knowledge, not only providers of resources.

At the 2018 World Library and Information Congress in Kuala Lumpur, the Serials and Other Continuing Resources group (SOCRS) held an open program on scholarly communication. It featured papers from across Asia and Africa, whose main takeaway was the steady march of Open Access (OA) within the world of scholarly communication.  Yet, OA does not end completely the challenges of rights management, digital preservation and funding. Besides challenges, exciting new uses of bibliometrics were also highlighted. Read the papers.

The International Conference Open Scholarly Communication in Europe: Addressing the Coordination Challenge was organised by the Greek National Documentation Centre (EKT), from 31 May to 1 June , in Athens as part of the European funded project OPERAS.

Distinguished speakers from Europe, North and South America  (John Willinsky, Public Knowledge Project and Abel Packer, SciELO) presented the latest developments in Open Scholarly Communication. The conference targeted all those who promote open scholarly communication, highlighted the challenges arising during the transition to an Open Science paradigm, focusing particularly on the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

There has been tremendous growth in the amount of digital content created by libraries, publishers, cultural institutions and the general public. While there are great benefits to having content available in digital form, digital objects can be extremely short-lived unless proper attention is paid to preservation. Reflecting on their experience with the digital preservation service Portico, four managers provide background on Portico’s history and evolving practice of sustainable preservation of the digital artifacts of scholarly communications. An overview of the digital preservation landscape is also given, with some thoughts on current requirements for preservation, and on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

The Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework, developed and implemented by African Journals Online (AJOL) and INASP, has been chosen as a finalist for the 2018 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. JPPS provides detailed assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices of Global South journals. The framework has been used to assess more than 900 journals. The JPPS team will make a presentation at the ALPSP international conference in Berkshire, UK on 12-14 September 2018, where the winner of the award will also be announced.