The Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication is a report published in January 2019 and produced by a Group of Experts at the European Commission, created to support the Commission’s policy development on open science. The report proposes a “vision” for the future of scholarly communication. It analyses the current system – with its strengths and weaknesses – and its main actors. It reviews their roles and makes recommendations to each of them, identifying where there is room for collaboration and synergies. The report concludes that funding agencies, with their access to money and their relative freedom to act, are probably best suited to shape and develop the scholarly publishing landscape of the near future, and their growing collective commitments to open science are positive signals in this regard.

Robert Kiley and Michael Markie discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a publishing system would have for research and research assessment.

While journal articles are still considered the most important sources of scholarly reading, libraries may no longer have a monopoly on providing discovery and access. Many other sources of scholarly information are available to readers. This international study examines how researchers discover, read, and use scholarly literature for their work. There are still significant differences found in the reading and use of scholarly literature by discipline and geographical location. Researchers show they are willing to change or adopt new strategies to discover and obtain articles.

Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director of Cambridge University Library, reports on the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference that was held on late February 2019. In her comprehensive and personal take on the issues raised at the conference, Dr Kingsley gives an update on Plan S, and highlights Cambridge Elements – a publication format that straddles the Book and Journal formats.

Eight years after their successful 2011 Conference in Beijing, ICSTI’s 2019 Annual Conference and Workshops will take place in China on 24-26 September. This year’s conference is titled Open Science and Open Innovation. The Shanghai Library/Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of Shanghai (ISTIS) is hosting the event. The Conference will also include ITOC and TACC workshop sessions that will provide significant insights on the theme of Open Science – Latest Developments and Initiatives and Technology Enabled Innovation in Open Science respectively.

The preliminary schedule is announced.

In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories over the last three decades as a new model of scholarly publishing has emerged as one of the major developments. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. However, for the preprint repositories to sustain, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.

This paper examines issues relating to the perceptions and adoption of open access (OA) and institutional repositories. Using a survey research design, data was collected from academics and other researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) at a university in Australia. This study contributes to the growing literature on scholarly communication by offering evidence from the HASS field, where limited studies have been conducted. Based on their findings, the authors recommend that academic librarians engage with faculty through outreach and workshops to change perceptions of OA and the institutional repository.

On September 4th, 2018, the second HIRMEOS Workshop was organised on Entity-Fishing for Digital Humanities and Scholarly Publishing. Entity-fishing, a service developed by Inria with the support of DARIAH-EU and hosted at HUMA-NUM, enables identification and resolution of entities: named entities like person-name, location, organizations, concepts, artifacts, … The workshop aimed to discuss and clarify practical concerns arising when using the service and possible new use cases presented by Edition Open Access, ScholarLed and Septentrio Academic Publishing. This report describes challenges related to the development of these applications and provides recommendations for its integration and use on digital publishing platforms.

Wikidata, a knowledge base for structured linked data, provides an open platform for curating scholarly communication data. Because all elements in a Wikidata entry are linked to defining elements and metadata, other web systems can harvest and display the data in meaningful ways. Thus, Wikidata has the capacity to serve as the data source for faculty profiles. Methods for contributing to Wikidata and displaying the data with Scholia, are explained, as part of a pilot project.

Consultant Tao Tao offers an overview of the Chinese academic market. As in any other country, the academic market in China consists of universities and research institutes, and hospitals for medical content. The market demand and buying power can be found mostly in the top 20% of universities and a few research institutes. The author intends to answer the question on where  efforts should be concentrated.