ChronosHub, the leading open-access management platform, is excited to include agreement management in its offering to publishing companies. The new addition to the platform gives publishers total control of agreements.

Publisher customers subscribing to the ChronosHub platform can now access the new agreement management feature, where agreement information can be maintained. Moving away from Excel spreadsheets and into a platform enables publishers to manage the complexity of business rules efficiently. Import tools, bulk editing, and immediate editing rights make the process much faster and updates easy.

“Our most important task is to simplify complexity and give the publishers the tools they need to handle new deal types in an easy way to deliver great customer value and employee satisfaction,” says Founder & Co-CEO, Christian Grubak.

The flexibility you need, at your fingertips

The built-in platform flexibility allows publishers to cater for the variation in agreements with institutions or consortia. For example, different deciding dates when an article is counted as part of an agreement – this could be the date of submission, date of acceptance or even the final publication date.

In addition, individual journals or collections of journals can be assigned to each agreement, as well as specific licenses, and of course, the business rules around required payment – I.e., whether an agreement covers the full APC cost, a set APC, or a discount on the APC, and if a cap applies.

Constructing sales deals with institutional and consortia customers is made easy as it’s possible to listen to and deliver on requirements without constraint by legacy systems or manual work. Furthermore, allowing a custom text to be displayed for an agreement will simplify delivering on an open access agreement and help bring clarity to authors.

Any changes made within the agreement management feature are automatically applied throughout all aspects of the ChronosHub platform, including the pre-submission Journal Finder, as well as any post- acceptance processing. There’s no waiting around for a service provider to do this – instead, as soon as a new agreement is signed or there are amendments to an existing one, it’s possible to log into the platform and make the changes immediately.

Symplectic – a Digital Science company that provides technology solutions to research organisations and their funders – is now celebrating 20 years of powering the global research ecosystem.

Founded initially by four friends studying theoretical physics at Imperial College London – John Fearns, Daniel Hook(who is now Digital Science’s CEO), Marko Ivin, and Philip Parkin – Symplectic has gone on to develop flexible solutions that help universities, institutions and funding organisations on every continent to achieve their research goals.

With its flagship products Symplectic Elements (a research information management system, enabling institutions to showcase their expertise, equipment and facilities) and Symplectic Grant Tracker (a grants management platform for research funding organisations), Symplectic’s deep industry expertise and team-led approach has attracted a global client base of more than 180 organisations worldwide. 

Among many others, Symplectic currently serves:

• Thirteen of the Top 25 universities in the world, and 25 of the Top 100 (Times Higher Education rankings)
• Nine Russell Group universities in the UK
• Three Group of Eight universities in Australia
• Leading long-term clients such as the University of Oxford, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Auckland, and the National History Museum (UK)
• Research funding and philanthropic clients such as The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Macmillan Cancer Support, and Worldwide Cancer Research.

Over 20 years, Symplectic has proved its worth to its clients around the world in some of the most prestigious organisations:

“With this partnership, we have the opportunity to position ourselves as a world leader in the development of the scholarly ecosystem.”
—Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives, Carnegie Mellon University.

“Leveraging the interoperability between Symplectic Elements and DSpace has increased policy-driven institutional repository deposits by over 350%.”
—Ellen Phillips, Open Access Specialist, Boston University.

“It is critical to our state’s economy that we utilise every aspect of our knowledge and innovation talent across the public and private sectors. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve created with OIEx [Ohio Innovation Exchange] – better connecting the experts and resources at our state research universities to the industries that can utilize them to push their breakthrough ideas to fruition.”
—John Carey, Chancellor, Ohio Department of Higher Education (2013-2018).

“Digital Science demonstrated that they understood the drivers of higher education: the complexities of institutional data, the decentralized and myriad ways this data is often managed; but most importantly, they could point to proven strategies and ways to deal with that.”
—Tim Cain, PhD, Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Ohio University.

Symplectic was the first company to become part of Digital Science in 2011, shortly after Digital Science was launched out of Nature Publishing Group, and has played a key role in the growth of the company. 

Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science and co-founder of Symplectic, said: “When we founded Symplectic, we aimed to create software that more represented the perspective of the primary user of many administrative systems – researchers. It was a time when software that was written to meet institutional needs often forgot that it was researchers who were the principal users.

“Symplectic has been an innovator – using automation to save time for researchers while empowering them to own their own data, and helping institutions to have confidence in their data so that they can reuse it in many systems, saving even more time.

“Symplectic remains very close to my heart. The idea that we save researchers a few minutes a year and those minutes add up across the more than half million academics who use Elements around the world is very satisfying.”

Jonathan Breeze, CEO of Symplectic, said: “One of the best parts of the Symplectic story is that we have continued to evolve our solutions in collaboration with our international client-base, and it is through these trusted relationships that we have been able to both grow as a business and as a community. 

“Today, Symplectic helps institutions to understand the breadth and depth of their research capabilities, to showcase their quality research expertise and facilities, to attract more interest in their work from collaborators and industry partners, to provide more coordinated approaches to funding, and to build on their outstanding research efforts.

“While we look forward to highlighting Symplectic’s past achievements throughout the year, we’re also excited about where Symplectic is headed. This includes continuous improvement of our existing services as well as expansion through new functionality and integration capabilities that offer unique features to our clientbase.” 

Wolters Kluwer Health today announced the launch of Lippincott® Medical Procedures, a new clinical point of care solution to better prepare novice clinicians, and Lippincott® Connect Courseware, aimed at improving the educational process for both students and teachers. These new offerings support learning wherever and whenever it is convenient – building on Lippincott’s full suite of essential medical products.

Assignability, feedback, and insights becomes easier for faculty and students

Lippincott Connect Courseware provides faculty – teaching anatomy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, exercise science, and Intro clinical courses – with better insights on what students are mastering or misunderstanding in their course by tracking performance across proficiency quizzes and adaptive learning questions. Additionally, faculty can create assignments containing a variety of engaging videos, images, and media that generate instant feedback and remediation for students to optimize their learning journey.

Students can test their learning with quizzes, highlight and take notes on key passages of the textbook, and view engaging videos and media. Lippincott Connect Courseware also gives students access to and improves learning practices with the most trusted educational content, helping them transition to the workplace more smoothly. Key titles in the digital learning solution include Motor Control: Translating Research into Clinical Practice; Exercise Physiology: For Health, Fitness, and Performance; Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking; and Moore’s Clinically Oriented Anatomy.

Students and residents get real-world ready by safely mastering common medical procedures

Based on research conducted with hundreds of program directors, clinical department chairs, attending physicians, and residents, Lippincott Medical Procedures is an easy-to-use, comprehensive, evidence-based resource that supports procedural training in internal medicine rotations, Physician Assistant programs, and residency programs. Program directors must ensure that residents can perform core procedures, such as point-of-care ultrasounds, line insertions, and wound care. Additionally, institutions can track usage for streamlined reporting to educational accrediting bodies.

This new solution provides a comprehensive procedural training collection with step-by-step techniques for over 60 core medical procedures performed in a hospital or ambulatory setting.Presenting engaging, just-in-time content that shares the “how” and “why” behind specific procedures allows for additional learning moments beyond the time spent in clinicals. Being able to access video tutorials, alongside “pearls” and “pitfalls” helps build confidence and provides practical insight that better prepares novice clinicians to perform procedures safely. Mastering common medical procedures prior to residency can help with a smooth transition into practice.

“As caseloads for medical professionals continue to grow and become more complex, the need for new clinicians to be as practice ready as possible is more important than ever. Our goal is to leverage the power of technology to help achieve that vision,” said Vikram Savkar, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Medicine Segment, Health Learning, Research & Practice at Wolters Kluwer Health. “Lippincott Medical Procedures and Lippincott Connect Courseware showcase the continual evolution of medical education to meet the demand in today’s landscape.”

Kudos, the platform for showcasing research, has today announced a major new initiative to support better understanding of research relating to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The Sustainable Development Knowledge Cooperative is being launched in partnership with Impact Science, a brand of Cactus Communications (CACTUS). Together with publisher partners, Kudos and Impact Science will showcase and promote plain language summaries of research that can help reduce poverty and inequality; improve health education and economic outcomes; and protect our environments.

The Knowledge Cooperative model provides publishers with a way to collaborate 
in tackling the issues of our time. Working together to summarize and publicize 
research achieves greater visibility and impact, and is particularly effective for targeting audiences beyond academia who are less familiar with publisher platforms and brands. Readers benefit not only from contextualized explanations of research but also from a single entry point, consistently promoted across a range of channels. 

“Research has an important role to play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals,” says Melinda Kenneway, CEO and co-founder of Kudos. “But achieving these outcomes requires greater effort to ensure research findings are summarised and interpreted for wider audiences – from policy makers, educators and industry to the media and general public. Publishers have a vital and unique role to play here.”

“We know publishers are keen to scale up their efforts to champion the SDGs, during this Decade of Action,” adds Nikesh Gosalia, Senior Vice President, Global Academic & Publisher Relations at CACTUS. “As a sector, we need to commit to making research more accessible – beyond Open Access. The new frontier is cognitive accessibility, and we’re proud to be working at the forefront of helping more people understand and act on sustainability research.”

Publisher sponsors will identify content to be summarized and promoted via the cooperative, with subject matter drawn from any of the sustainable development topics – for example, poverty, hunger, sanitation, energy or climate research. Plain language summaries, videos and infographics will be created by the professional research & impact communication team at Impact Science. A long-term media and advertising campaign will drive widespread visibility and readership.

To find out more about promoting your content or brand through the Sustainable Development Knowledge Cooperative, please visit the website or contact Colin Caveney.