Taylor & Francis Group and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) are pleased to announce a new publishing partnership for 2013. Beginning January 1, 2013 Taylor & Francis will publish and distribute ALIA’s two highly regarded journals, The Australian Library Journal and Australian Academic & Research Libraries under the Routledge imprint.

The partnership is a positive step for both parties and will bring The Australian Library Journal and Australian Academic & Research Libraries to the attention of a wider audience internationally through Routledge’s state‐of‐the‐art online publishing, high‐quality production, and innovative marketing strategies.  

Dr. David Green, Group Journals Publishing Director for Taylor & Francis, notes: “We are delighted to have signed a partnership agreement for Routledge to publish The Australian Library Journal and Australian Academic & Research Libraries on behalf of ALIA from 2013. Under this agreement we shall be offering ALIA members and the communities of the two journals a wide range of choice in the rapidly changing landscape of research publishing and dissemination.  Both titles will be included in our LIS (Library and Information Science) pilot project, allowing contributors to the participating journals to retain the copyright to their work, and to post their accepted ‘second‐stage’manuscript  ‐ following peer review  ‐ within a subject or institutional repository, without an embargo period. ALIA’s two prestigious journals are a welcome addition both to our global LIS journals publishing program as well as to our list of more than 100 journals edited from the Asia Pacific region, and we look forward to a hugely beneficial partnership with the Association and its journal editors.”

The Australian Library Journal (The ALJ) is an internationally recognized journal that showcases the best of Australian library and information research and practice. It has been reaching discerning and influential Australian libraries since 1951. Published quarterly, it contains a wide coverage of Australian library issues ranging from ongoing research to day‐to‐day articles from practitioners in the workplace.

Australian Academic & Research Libraries (AARL) is a quarterly journal devoted to all aspects of librarianship in university and college libraries, including the Technical and Further Education sector, and in research libraries of all types. It publishes original, refereed contributions on all aspects of librarianship past and present, pure and applied bibliography, publishing, information science and related subjects.

The ALJ and AARL will join Routledge’s extensive list of more than 30 library and information science journals, covering a range of topics and issues related to librarianship. These journals are packaged through Taylor & Francis’ Library & Information Science Online Journal Subject Collection and the Library

UBM plc today announces that it has appointed Adrian Barrick as UBM’s Chief Content Officer. In this new role Adrian will work across UBM to develop a robust and compelling content strategy to support UBM’s commercial and professional community-focused business development. Adrian will take up his role with immediate effect, reporting to UBM’s CEO David Levin.

Over the course of the last two decades Adrian has built an unparalleled professional track record as a journalist, a publisher and as a media business leader. Adrian joined UBM in 1991 and was appointed editor of Building magazine, one of the UK’s oldest professional titles, in 1996, having already established himself as an award-winning business news reporter and feature writer specialising in the built environment. Under his leadership Building won the PPA’s coveted Magazine of the Year three times in five years and Adrian himself won four Editor of the Year trophies. As editorial director for UBM’s Builder product group, Adrian launched a graduate training scheme whose alumni include two award-winning business title editors and several current national newspaper journalists.

Adrian first moved into a commercial role in 2004 and two years later he was appointed Group Director of UBM’s Property & Construction Media, a £35m business with 200 staff. In 2007, he was named PPA business publisher of the year and Building won business website of the year. In 2008 he was appointed Chief Executive of UBM Built Environment and over the last four years has led its transformation from a print-based business into a content-led, multi-channel business. The business’s traditional brands like Property Week and Building remain the voice of the UK’s built environment community but are complemented and balanced by a wide range of events and data services serving professionals from across the built environment industries both in the UK and increasingly in emerging markets such Brazil and China.

The UBM Built Environment business will be merged into its sister division UBM Live under the leadership of Simon Foster, UBM Live’s current CEO. The businesses will continue to be run separately but their combination will allow each to better access the strengths, expertise and experience of the other as their business development paths continue to converge. UBM Built Environment continues to internationalise its activities, particularly its events such as Ecobuild, while UBM Live continues to add content as key driver of its business. These ambitions are mutually supportive and both have content creation and community development skills at their core. This reorganisation closely parallels the successful reorganisation undertaken earlier in the year to integrate UBM’s US technology businesses into UBM Tech and to bring the UBM Medica US and UBM Canon businesses together into UBM Connect.

Adrian Barrick, Chief Content Officer, UBM plc said:

“I’m really excited to take up the opportunity and challenge of being UBM’s first CCO. UBM has a great flair for creating and curating high-value content. Our challenge is to deploy that capability to our competitive advantage. We believe that superior, original content will accelerate the development of our professional communities, giving us a significant edge over our rivals. I’m looking forward to helping UBM understand what content our communities really value and what skills we need to deliver it, as well as providing exciting career opportunities for our most talented content creators.”

David Levin, CEO of UBM plc, said:

“I am delighted to announce Adrian’s appointment to the role of UBM’s Chief Content Officer. The creation of this new role recognises the key role high quality content creation plays in building successful professional communities and how content underpins and strengthens UBM’s competitive position in its key markets.

The progression of Adrian’s career makes him uniquely well-qualified to take on the Chief Content Officer role. Having been a multiple award-winning journalist and publisher he earned the respect of the community he and his brands served. He has complemented his experience of being deeply embedded in a professional community with his commerical experience as CEO of UBM Built Environment, leading its evolution from a business driven by print publishing to one which is powered by events and data services, and he has done so while retaining high-value content creation at the heart of his business and embedding its brands at the centre of the built environment community.

I am looking forward to working with Adrian as we put content creation at the centre of our community-focused business development, particularly for our events business where content must play an even greater strategic role in the future. Equally important is Adrian’s role in developing and structuring career paths for our talented content creators.”

Antibodypedia, a searchable online database of publicly available antibodies hosted in collaboration with Nature Publishing Group (NPG), is pleased to announce that it now catalogues more than 500,000 individual antibodies, which collectively detect 88% of the proteins encoded by the human genome. Antibodypedia also holds the results of nearly 145,000 experiments performed with these antibodies, as well as 32,000 links to publications related to their use.

Antibodypedia is a free, open-access, and growing resource for data and commentary on antibodies from both commercial and academic providers. The database’s antigen-centric structure allows users to compare the properties of a range of antibodies detecting a particular target. Antibodies are ranked according to their spectrum of efficacy, with peer-reviewed user data contributing to their rankings such that the scoring system recapitulates the community’s preferences.

Mathias Uhlén, a director of the Human Antibody Initiative and co-founder of Antibodypedia, comments that “While Antibodypedia was originally developed with human antigens in mind, we have now incorporated mouse antigens with human cognates and hope soon to complete the input of mouse antigens. This added functionality makes this resource more broadly applicable and benefits many more users.”

Version 7 of Antibodypedia, released in November 2012, provides a more robust search experience through its inclusion of filters users can apply to refine their queries. Additionally, integration with Nature journal manuscript annotation tools, such as gene and protein highlighting and the “Inside this article” box, provides a real-time snapshot of Antibodypedia’s contents to scientists browsing nature.com.

Christopher Surridge, Associate Publisher, NPG, said: “With this updated version of Antibodypedia we have taken what was already a very powerful way for researchers to find the antibodies they needed for their research, and made it quite simply the best database of antibodies anywhere on the Web.”

Antibodypedia continues to forge collaborations with academic working groups such as the Human Protein Atlas, based in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Recombinant Antibody Network, an antibody-generating consortium run by researchers at the University of Chicago, UCSF, and the University of Toronto. According to Tony Kossiakoff of the University of Chicago, principal investigator of RAN, “Antibodies are essential tools for advancing our understanding of biology; however, researchers often spend too many resources on antibodies that do not work for their applications. Antibodypedia and the Recombinant Antibody Network share a common goal in helping scientists accelerate their research by facilitating access to validated antibodies. We believe the natural collaboration between an open-access antibody database and renewable, validated, open-source antibody production initiatives will be a synergistic force toward advancing and accelerating biological research.”

Shanghai is now home to two editors from one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journals, the first time that Nature Publishing Group has based full-time editors in mainland China. Ed Gerstner, PhD, moved to Shanghai this month from NPG’s London office to take up the role of Executive Editor, Nature Communications. He is joined by Assistant Editor Congcong Huang, PhD. Both are based at the growing office of Macmillan Publishers Limited located in downtown Shanghai. Gerstner and Huang are part of a global team of editors for Nature Communications, and the Shanghai team is expected to expand in the coming months.

Congcong Huang gained a PhD from University of Cambridge and her undergraduate degree in physics from Peking University. She joins Nature Communications following post-doctoral research into the structure of liquid water at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California

“I’m proud to join this global team as an editor for Nature Communications, and to be returning to China at such an exciting time for science and research in my native country,” said Huang.
Gerstner joins Nature Communications following seven years as Senior Editor for Nature Physics, the leading primary research journal in the field. He has also served in editorial positions on Nature and Nature Materials. He gained his undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Sydney, and held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Surrey and the University of Cambridge.
“These are exciting times for Chinese science. I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of labs and institutions in China over the past two years, and I’m really impressed by the pace of development and increasing quality of research being conducted here,” said Gerstner. “Our goal is to provide author services to researchers in China and bring this excellent research to a global audience through Nature Communications and other NPG titles. I am delighted to be a part of this endeavour.”

Launched in April 2010, Nature Communications is a multidisciplinary online-only journal publishing high quality research across the biological, physical, chemical and earth sciences. Nature Communications has seen submissions increase rapidly as it builds its reputation. In 2012, Nature Communications received its first Impact Factor of 7.396*, placing it fourth among all multidisciplinary science primary research journals by Impact Factor, with Nature being first. Nature Communications offers authors the option to make their published article open access.

“Macmillan is committed to serving the fast growing science and education community in China,” said Charlotte Liu, Managing Director, Macmillan Science (Greater China) and Education (Asia). “We’re very pleased to have recently established our office in Shanghai, and Ed and Congcong are the first of a number of editors and colleagues we expect to join us here.”

As a key element in its long-term business development strategy, Portland Press Limited has announced that it will move its customer and client service operations, Portland Customer Services, along with its IT, marketing and sales operations, to its London headquarters from the current Colchester base by the end of 2013. This will allow the integration of these operations with the publishing, membership, conference and educational activities that are carried out in London.

This transition, together with other operational improvements, is part of Portland Press’s plans to enhance and improve support for its valued clients, through an even more efficient, streamlined and cohesive service.

22 years after Portland Press was founded, developments in client needs and technological infrastructure, as well as a strategic plan to grow the client services business, mean that now is the ideal time for the organization to integrate its operations at one site that not only fits its business needs better but also provides a base at a convenient central London location.

Caroline Black, Managing Director of Portland Press, said: “This development marks an exciting new phase for Portland Customer Services and we look forward to seeing our client support business going from strength to strength. Having all our activities under one roof will bring tremendous strategic and operational benefits to all parts of the organization.”

Kate Baillie, Chief Executive of the Biochemical Society, said: “The Biochemical Society is committed to developing collaborations across the bioscience community. Capitalizing on the success of Charles Darwin House, reintegrating the business at our London home provides the opportunity to support the needs of the Society and the wider sector.”