Jisc, the UK’s technology solutions organisation for higher and further education, and Eduserv, which specialises in digital transformation in local government, public bodies, healthcare, charities, higher education and emergency services, are coming together to form a unique powerhouse of world-leading expertise to benefit all UK and overseas clients. The two charities will begin operating as one from 1 January 2019, in a move that will retain existing staff and services.

Redalyc decided to require the signing of DORA declaration as an expression of adherence to its principles, so that the journals remain indexed. For Redalyc, it is important to value a journal based on its content rather than basing its impact only on citations; it is crucial that research results are assessed by their own merits and not by where they are published. Redalyc highly values publications that address local challenges, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.

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.