Saturday, June 21, 2025
Linkedin Twitter
Linkedin Twitter
Home Blog Page 67

OCUL Announces EBA Ebook Project with Wiley

The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is pleased to announce a pilot project with Wiley to give libraries access to the publisher’s nearly 24,000 ebook titles as part of a shared evidence-based acquisition (EBA) program.  

Between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024, nineteen Ontario academic libraries are taking part in the pilot. Once the project concludes, based on usage statistics over the one-year period, titles will be purchased and form a shared collection of ebooks for participating OCUL libraries.  

“We’re delighted to increase access to the electronic resources available to researchers, faculty and students through this agreement with Wiley,” says Amy Greenberg, OCUL executive director. “This marks the first shared EBA program at OCUL and is reflective of our commitment to delivering robust and sustainable services that support academic success.” 

Through this project agreement, OCUL continues its work to advance research, teaching and learning by collaborating in the delivery of transformative resources and digital research infrastructure for Ontario’s universities.  

OCUL thanks the OCUL-IR EBA Working Group for their leadership in setting forth the recommendations for this project.  

Increasing access to open access books: SPARC Europe joins Open Book Futures (OBF) project

We are pleased to announce our participation in the recently launched Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund.

Open Access (OA) publishing has transformed how scholars and the wider public access academic content. However, despite the many benefits of OA, the number of OA books published each year is still relatively low compared to OA journal articles. In response to this challenge, the OBF project was launched with the intention of significantly increasing and improving the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of academic content, ensuring it is freely and easily available to not only scholars but also the general public. The intention is to build on the pioneering work conducted within the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. 

SPARC Europe’s role in OBF

SPARC Europe will contribute to the OBF project in various ways: 

  • We bring our experience establishing and running The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and our connections to Invest in Open Infrastructure to advise the project. The Open Book Collective Development Fund’s grant allocation work will address a gap in the funding landscape by offering financial support to smaller and newer OA book initiatives, and we look forward to supporting this effort.
  • We will contribute directly to the outreach work being conducted by Work Package 2, on behalf of the Open Book Collective, and Work Package 3, on behalf of the Opening the Future revenue model. 
  • Specifically, we will raise awareness of this important initiative and explore new opportunities for OA books to build a more sustainable infrastructure for OA books.

We are excited about the challenges that lie ahead for OBF. Our contribution will help initiate a step change in the ambition, scope, and impact of community-led OA book publishing. Together, we will improve the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of long-form publications ensuring they are freely and easily available to scholars and the wider public. 

You can read more about the project here and stay informed by regularly checking our news page. 

New Jisc research infrastructure assets report will drive collaboration

For the first time, UKRI-funded report brings together views of 15 major stakeholders from across the UK research community.

To gain an unprecedented insight into the UK’s academic research infrastructure assets, Jisc has collected the views of leading bodies from across the sector.

The new report, Optimising the UK’s university research infrastructure assets, aims to help identify more opportunities for collaboration, attracting investment, developing skills and reducing bureaucracy.

The UK’s university research infrastructure assets include equipment, facilities and the laboratories commissioned for research use across all disciplines.

The report outlines a range of perspectives from interviews with leaders and experts at 15 groups and stakeholder organisations from the UK’s higher education, research and innovation sector.

It highlights opportunities for new collaborative approaches to optimise the use, sharing, efficiency and sustainability of research infrastructure assets, and was funded by UK Research and Innovation.

The report identifies four key areas of opportunity for the research sector, which it recommends should receive extra investment to promote knowledge exchange and the commercialisation of research and development:

  1. Strategy and policy: the sector should work together to reduce bureaucracy, take a collective view on environmental sustainability and security, reduce the pressure on laboratory space, and plan for investment in assets across the UK
  2. People and culture: increase diversity and equity within research teams across the sector and help career progression and personal development for all research professionals
  3. Funding, costing and charging: develop new costing, charging and sharing models that reward the development of new and more accessible collaborative approaches, as well as the utilisation of assets by more groups, including SMEs
  4. Digital, data and technology: use high-quality data across the research infrastructure assets landscape to power new technologies for efficiency and innovation, including artificial intelligence, developing a strategy for more remote labs to extend access, using sustainable asset registers and persistent identifiers for open research

The stakeholder group will use the research to develop recommendations and sector-wide approaches. These will help the sector utilise the UK’s research infrastructure assets more effectively, efficiently and sustainably.

Dr Victoria Moody, director of research and higher education for Jisc, said:

“Managing, sharing and improving the sustainability of the UK’s university research infrastructure assets is a complex challenge: we hope to find ways to improve how all organisations involved in research and development collaborate and tackle new challenges, such as the rapid adoption of AI.
“We found a real appetite for improved ways of working and increased collaboration across the sector: for a more coherent approach to sharing what works and changing what doesn’t, using data, digital and technology solutions.”

 Willoughby Werner, senior strategy adviser at UKRI said:

“We want to deliver more from the same level of investment and this report will help us do that by boosting collaboration between the HE sector and industry, increasing inclusion and developing new cost models.”

Antony Chapman, senior portfolio manager, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UKRI said:

“Bringing this vital knowledge together  will help the sector expand the range of what is possible for research and development within the existing setup.”

Read the summary of the optimising the UK’s university research infrastructure assets report.

Biochemical Society opens EDI Survey 2023

The principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are central to the Biochemical Society’s activities and we’re pleased to open this year’s EDI Survey, which is designed to help us better understand our community and inform our working practices. 

We’re committed to providing inclusive environments and accessible activities; learning more about the people we engage with will help us tailor changes based on meaningful feedback and data, allowing us to identify gaps and barriers we can work to address.  

Feedback generated from 2022’s survey was influential in our decision to refresh the nominations process for our committee, panel, and board positions as we look towards more diverse and representative decision makers across our organisation. We also introduced guidance notes for our governance bodies, including the adoption of more inclusive meeting practices and the use of accessible communications.

In order to generate information that fully reflects the range of experience and expertise from across the molecular biosciences, we’d be incredibly grateful if you could take a small amount of time to complete our 2023 survey. Responses should take no more than 5-7 minutes and the deadline is noon (UK time), Friday 2 June 2023.

All answers are anonymous and will be treated in the strictest confidence, with a summary of responses produced for the Society’s EDI Advisory Panel and Council of Trustees as well as being made available on our website. 

Oxford University Press and CzechELib sign read and publish agreement

Oxford University Press (OUP) and the Czech National Library of Technology (CzechELib), via Albertina icome Praha s.r.o, have reached a three-year nationwide read and publish agreement. Under the new agreement, researchers at CzechELib‘s member institutions can access high-quality research content from OUP’s full journals collection and publish their work open access.

The agreement is OUP‘s first in the Czech Republic and 36th globally, reflecting the organization’s continued drive to increase open access publishing, in line with its mission to further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Speaking about the agreement, Alastair Lewis, OUP Sales Director – Academic, said: “At Oxford University Press, we are committed to ensuring that world class academic content is shared as widely as possible. Our read and publish agreements play a major role in supporting this important objective, and we are delighted to today announce a new contract with the CzechELib, whose members will now benefit from increased opportunity to publish open access.”

Martin Svoboda, Director of the National Library of Technology (NTK), said: “Although the OUP read and publish consortium is not among our largest (by the number of members or publications) we’re very happy about the result. We believe we have achieved a fair setup for both the publisher and consortium member institutions. A particularly appreciated added value is the opportunity for authors from these institutions to publish in open access mode across the entire – very prestigious – OUP portfolio, including purely open access journals, without any restrictions.”

16th Berlin open access conference: advancing global open science

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the seminal Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. In the upcoming 16th Berlin Open Access Conference, organized by the OA2020 Initiative and hosted by the Max Planck Society, we will return to the setting where the Berlin Declaration originated. There, we will refine and renew our approaches to achieving the vision for an open information environment in the service of science and society, with a particular focus on transformative agreements (TAs).

The current growing body of TAs negotiated worldwide—from Peru to Canada, from South Africa to Norway, and from Australia to China—demonstrates that this approach to dismantling the deficiencies and inequities of the subscription-based system in scholarly publishing is both viable and scalable. With the first movers to integrate TAs into their national open access strategies now nearing their goals of open access to 100% of their research outputs and setting their sights on broader open science objectives, the way is paved for the global research community to swiftly forge ahead, together.

The 16th Berlin Open Access Conference: Together for Transformation, will assemble national-level delegations, including scientists and scholars, senior library, higher education, funder and government leaders from 38 countries around the world. Together, they will assess the performance of scholarly publishers in meeting the objectives and expectations set out by the research community engaged in transformative open access negotiations and formulate collective next steps to shape an open scholarly publishing paradigm in the service of science that is transparent, inclusive, sustainable and financially equitable on a global scale.

Outcomes of the conference will be shared with the broader research community on the B16 webpage.

New Read & Publish Open Access agreement between The Company of Biologists and the IISER Consortium India

The Company of Biologists is delighted to announce a new Read & Publish Open Access agreement with the IISER Consortium for 2023.

Corresponding authors at participating IISER institutions in India can publish an uncapped number of research articles immediately Open Access (OA) in our hybrid journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology) plus our fully Open Access journals (Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open) without paying an article processing charge (APC). Researchers at participating institutions also benefit from unlimited access to our hybrid journals, including their full archives dating back to 1853.

Dr P Visakhi for IISER – Mohali, Dr Umeshareddy Kacherki for IISER – Pune and Mr K Murugaraj for IISER Tirupati say:

“We are delighted with the new Read & Publish agreement between The Company of Biologists and the IISER Library Consortium. Researchers at participating institutions will benefit from the ability to publish an unlimited number of Open Access articles in all five journals. This mutually agreed arrangement is expected to yield excellent results within the Open Science landscape.”

Sarah Logan, Regional Sales Manager at The Company of Biologists, says:

“We are very excited about our first Read & Publish consortium partnership in India with the IISER Consortium. We have a long-established relationship for subscriptions with the IISER consortium and are pleased to see members embrace this transition to Open Access publishing. These new agreements come at a time of emergent interest in our Read & Publish model, and we are delighted to see IISER members from Pune, Mohali and Tirupati at the forefront of this transition.”

Claire Moulton, Publisher at The Company of Biologists, says:

“As a not-for-profit publisher dedicated to supporting the biological community worldwide, we have a long-standing commitment to Open Access publishing. Our journals were the first in the world to be awarded Transformative Journal status by Plan S and the success of our Read & Publish initiative has already driven a significant increase in Open Access research content in our hybrid journals. We welcome our new Read & Publish agreement with the IISER Consortium and look forward to working together to promote the growth of Open Access publishing in the biological and biomedical sciences in India.”

ConTech Pharma next month (8th June) has the answers, now here are some of the questions.

Can Large Language Models be tamed to solve pressing pharma problems? Peter Henstock – Machine learning & AI lead Pfizer says “It has become difficult to even mention AI these days without being pulled into a discussion about the hype of ChatGPT.  The recent advances in natural language processing have suddenly become visible to the public.

This talk will begin with conceptual examples of the large language models.  We will then discuss ways how they can be applied to some challenges across pharma domains.

How to Unlock the Value of Clinical Trial Data for Improved Decision-making? Eric Little

Industry Innovation Principal Director – Head of Strategy & Analytics, Accenture Life Sciences says

“Clinical trials data can be difficult to capture and effectively utilize for future decision-making activities, including finding the right patients, selecting appropriate sites, establishing cohorts, understanding valuable patterns and trends in the data (non-compliance, drop-out rates), and comparing data across different trials. This talk will show how Accenture is using semantics to integrate clinical data around standards in order to provide advanced types of search and analytics of clinical trials data.”

Just two of the insights that will be presented at ConTech Pharma – ensure you don’t miss it. And to round off the day we will look at The ROI of FAIR (explained with some examples)

Don’t miss Hans Constandt and Giovanni Nisato breaking down WHY it’s essential for us to implement FAIR principles in clinical datasets at this year’s ConTech Pharma.

AI, Data Science and other new technologies are enabling huge change in the Pharma, Drug Development and Digital Healthcare Landscape

ConTech Pharma is at the heart of these changes and has a phenomenal speaker line up.

ConTech Pharma 2023 on the 8th June will be a 1-day hybrid event, taking place both online and at the London Heathrow Marriott Hotel.

Come and hear how the world’s best minds in data science, digital healthcare and precision drug development are thinking about these changes and taking effective action.

Sign up today – go to https://www.contech.live/contech-pharma-2023 and learn more and book.

With thanks to Elsevier –Main conference partner and Morressier, Gold sponsor

There are so many ways to become part of the ConTech community. Visit our website tofind out more about all of our events https://www.contech.live/

De Gruyter’s Subscribe to Open program continues to grow, furthering open access in the humanities and social sciences

De Gruyter continues the transformation of its journals in the humanities and social sciences into open access. Four additional titles have been transferred to the publisher’s Subscribe to Open program in 2023 due to popularity of the model among subscribers, editorial boards and authors. These are the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (Yearbooks of National Economy and Statistics), the Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft (Journal of Tourism Science), the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Journal), and the journal Arbeit (Work).

Launched as a pilot project in 2021, the Subscribe to Open (S2O) program was successfully expanded to include eleven journals in 2022. This allowed a total of almost 500 articles to appear directly in gold open access last year. This corresponds to 8% of De Gruyter’s total annual open access output.

S2O is a model that enables the year-by-year open access transformation of journals by continuing existing subscriptions without incurring publication fees for authors. Institutions with an existing subscription continue to subscribe as before, thereby enabling the journal to be published in open access and authors to publish in them without having to pay article processing charges. S2O is thus an alternative to the APC model and transformation mechanisms such as Publish & Read.

Dr. Christina Lembrecht, Senior Manager Open Research Strategy at De Gruyter, emphasizes: “We are very pleased with the positive response to our S2O program. The addition of four more journals in 2023 shows that the model is gaining traction and is an important step towards sustainable OA transformation in the humanities and social sciences.”

She adds, “De Gruyter remains committed to creating sustainable open access models in HSS that reflect the publishing cultures and funding situations in these disciplines. Ensuring the best possible access to research results is an integral part of our mission at De Gruyter, which is why we are pleased to be able to further expand this important program.”

For more information on De Gruyter’s S2O program, click here.

Taylor & Francis Joins the Business for Societal Impact Network

Taylor & Francis has signaled its ongoing commitment to making a positive difference to communities around the world, by joining the Business for Societal Impact (B4SI) Network, a forum that helps organizations effectively measure and manage their social impact.

Last year Taylor & Francis provided free or heavily discounted products and services, worth over £3 million, to more than 74,000 disadvantaged individuals, academic community groups, and charities. Initiatives supported by Taylor & Francis include accessibility partnerships providing eBooks to students with a print or visual impairment; open access publishing support for researchers in low-income countries; and Special Terms for Authors and Researchers (STAR), a Taylor & Francis scheme giving readers in the Global South free access to journal articles.

By using B4SI’s Framework, the global standard for measuring corporate social impact, Taylor & Francis will now be able to analyze these activities in a consistent way and benchmark them objectively against the community investment of other companies in the Network. Taylor & Francis plans to multiply its impact by using insights from the B4SI Framework to grow its community investment strategically.

Catherine Hodgson, Sustainability Manager at Taylor & Francis, explained: “community investment is a well-established part of what we do at Taylor & Francis but joining B4SI will help us to measure and better understand the difference our charitable partnerships and programs make to society. The collaboration aspect of B4SI will also be very valuable and we look forward to learning from other organizations about the challenges they’ve overcome and the approaches they’ve found to be most effective”.

Taylor & Francis is part of Informa, whose FasterForward sustainability commitments include contributing the value of at least 1% of profit before tax to community groups and enabling one million disconnected people to access networks and knowledge by 2025.

Examples of Taylor & Francis community investment in action include partnerships in India with the National Federation of the Blind of India, providing accessible education resources for 1,000 children; volunteering events with the Ina Raja Memorial Education Trust, which delivers training to children from underprivileged backgrounds; and skills development activities with Nirantar Prayas, an organization dedicated to supporting children with developmental disabilities.

ResearchGate integrates with GetFTR

GetFTR has today announced that ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, has integrated with the service as part of an expanded offering for publishers. 

Over the last few months, GetFTR has been building, and ResearchGate testing, a new opt-in service that provides a faster way to check entitlement information between publishers, academic discovery services like ResearchGate, and reading platforms

Publishers that opt-in to using this integrated service offering from GetFTR will be able to benefit from a high performing and easy way to manage their entitlement information in content syndication arrangements. Whilst researchers will benefit from quick, effortless access to the articles that they are entitled to. GetFTR is in talks with additional discovery and reading platforms to extend this offering. Mathias Astell, Product VP, ResearchGate commented:

“GetFTR has gone from strength to strength since its launch three years ago. With our aligned commitment to enabling quicker and easier access to research, working with GetFTR to deliver this new service enables us to facilitate greater access to high quality research content for our 25m+ researcher users, both on- and off-campus. This service will also increase the reach and accessibility of the content our publisher partners share through the network. All our Publisher partners will soon be able to benefit from this service and we look forward to working with them on this.”

Since launch, GetFTR has been focused on providing value to researchers by making their journey to find and access trusted content easier, as well as supporting publishers by optimizing researchers’ pathways to authoritative content. GetFTR remains committed to enhancing its core offering of addressing this gap between discovery and access, and continues to explore use cases such as reference list and discovery service integration, to do this. 

The introduction of these capabilities to support content syndication and provide faster links to content – now in use by ResearchGate – are the next step in GetFTRs evolution of service offerings for the community. Global academic publisher Springer Nature is the first publisher to take advantage of  this service, as part of its content syndication agreement with ResearchGate.

 Dianne Benham, GetFTR Product Director, commented:

“We are delighted to be working with ResearchGate to support content syndication arrangements for those publishers who wish to use the service. It speaks directly to our goal of enabling improved discovery and streamlined access to trusted scholarly content. We have valued ResearchGate and Springer Nature’s expertise as we have developed and tested this new service, and look forward to working with additional partners.”

Antonia Seymour elected President of the Publishers Association

Antonia Seymour, CEO of IOP Publishing, has been elected to the position of President of the Publishers Association. Antonia succeeds Nigel Newton, CEO and Founder of Bloomsbury, who remains an Officer of the Publishers Association.

The Presidency transferred at the Publishers Association’s Annual General Meeting, which was held yesterday at the Science Gallery London (Tuesday, 25th April 2023).

Perminder Mann, CEO of Bonnier Books UK, has been elected to the position of Publishers Association Vice-President and Treasurer.

Antonia Seymour, CEO of IOP Publishing said: “I am excited and honoured to be taking up the role of President of the Publishers Association at a time when the publishing industry is enjoying record breaking growth. Publishers matter and my priority is to showcase the value of publishing and to promote the publishing sector as a great place to work.“

In her inaugural speech as President, Antonia highlighted three key messages:

  1. “Publishers matter – we all know the work we do has purpose, that’s a big part of why we went into publishing in the first place, but let’s make sure everyone else knows that. As an example, if the UK government wants to be a science superpower then we need to make them aware there’s a thriving UK publishing industry they can look to help them achieve that.”
  2. “We need an industry value proposition that excites people from all walks of life to want to work in publishing. Let’s set out our stall and make it clear we’re an industry open to everyone.”
  3. “Under the auspices of the PA, the UK publishing community can speak with a single voice on these issues that matter to all of us – large/small, academic, education and consumer – giving us the very best chance of being heard by government, and other key parties, and helping ensure our rightful place as an indispensable partner in the knowledge economy.”

You can read Antonia’s full speech here.

Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, Dan Conway said: “I can’t wait to begin working with Antonia in her new role as President of the Publishers Association. Having already served as Vice-President and a PA Officer, she knows our organisation back-to-front and I know will lead with purpose and with a genuine passion for the value that publishing brings.”

Perminder Mann, CEO of Bonnier Books UK said:  “I’m delighted to become a PA Officer at the Publishers Association as Vice President and Treasurer, to champion the contributions of this sector and advocate on behalf of all its people. I am excited to work ever more closely with my colleagues to further highlight the importance of this remarkable industry, the tireless work and innovation of our members, and its invaluable impact on the culture and economy of our country.“

In addition, the following elections to the Publishers Association’s Council were announced:

  • Stephen Page, Faber & Faber
  • Rebecca Sinclair, Penguin Random House
  • Steven Inchcoombe, Springer Nature
  • Kate Elton, HarperCollins
  • Kathryn Sharples, Wiley
  • Joanna Prior, Pan Macmillan
1...666768...485Page 67 of 485
© STM Publishing News 2025