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Frontiers welcomes new partnership with World Economic Forum

As part of the new agreement, Frontiers will join the WEF’s Centre for New Society and Economy and will champion open science across the network. Supporting global initiatives in the field, Frontiers will work with its WEF partners to share and promote the evidence-based benefits of open science and to influence global thinking on its positive impact on society.   

Kamila Markram, Frontiers’ chief executive officer said: ‘our track record of collaboration with the World Economic Forum is one that we have long valued and becoming a Platform Partner is a natural transition for us. We share a common vision on how to address the challenges faced by society and I look forward to combining our efforts in support of this.’  

As a Platform Partner, Frontiers will actively participate in the WEF’s network, embedding its expertise within the Forum’s knowledge communities and taking an active role in dialogues and summits. This will build on Frontiers’ previous work with the WEF, which includes the curation of their transformation map on quantum computing, providing an RSS feed to integrate content into the classification engine supplying information to the map. 

Martina Szabo, head of knowledge communities at the World Economic Forum said: ‘it is more important than ever to identify and promote innovative and cutting-edge thinking if we are to address numerous economic, social, environmental, industry and technological challenges.  Our exciting new partnership will feed valuable insights and expertise into global initiatives across the Forum, particularly for the Centre for the New Economy and Society, that aims to shape prosperous, resilient, and equitable economies and societies that create opportunity for all.’  

Anna O’Neil, partner engagement lead at the World Economic Forum added: ‘we are delighted about this partnership and look forward to developing our collaboration, which will bring valuable insight and expertise to many of our global initiatives.’ 

The partnership, which formally began in November 2022, will initially run until the end of October 2025.

Scholastica becomes one of the first journal software providers to integrate with ROR

Scholastica, a leading software provider for academic journals, has announced ROR institutional identifier support for its peer review system, production service, and open access publishing platform, becoming one of the first journal vendors to integrate with ROR.

Scholastica now automatically applies ROR IDs to institutions when authors input them into its peer review submission form and when editors add them to any articles they send to Scholastica’s production service or publish via its OA hosting platform. Journals subscribed to multiple Scholastica products can import metadata, including ROR IDs, from one solution to another to save time. Scholastica also includes ROR IDs in metadata deposits for its discovery service integrations.

The ROR integration is part of Scholastica’s efforts to modernize all aspects of publishing, including generating standards-aligned, rich article-level metadata, to enable scholarly organizations of any size to operate high-quality journals as efficiently and affordably as possible.

“We’ve followed ROR since its launch and were eager to adopt the standard. ROR IDs are ideal for inclusion in article metadata to improve discovery and tracking of research outputs by affiliation, so we’re excited to include them in the metadata we produce and import into discovery services Scholastica integrates with, including Crossref and PubMed Central,” said Brian Cody, CEO and Co-Founder of Scholastica. “We’re also looking forward to becoming an active member of the ROR community — maybe we can all make this the ROR-ing twenties?”

ROR, which stands for the Research Organization Registry, is the only global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations. To date, the registry consists of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for over 102,000 organizations.

Speaking to Scholastica’s integration, Project Lead at ROR Maria Gould said, “This is a great example of an end-to-end ROR integration showcasing how journals can collect affiliation details from authors in a standard way and make this information openly available in publication metadata.”

Director of Member and Community Outreach at Crossref Ginny Hendricks added, “Enabling Crossref members to include ROR IDs in their metadata is essential for enriching the scholarly record and building a better research environment. Scholastica is leading the way and will hopefully encourage others to follow.”

The new ROR integration is available to all Scholastica customers at no additional cost. For more information, please contact support@scholasticahq.com.

Mercury Learning and Information joins De Gruyter

De Gruyter is pleased to announce the acquisition of publishing house Mercury Learning and Information.

Mercury provides print and digital content in the areas of science, technology and computing, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) designed for the professional/ reference, trade, library, higher education, career school, and online training markets.

For De Gruyter, an independent and global academic publisher founded and headquartered in Berlin, the acquisition forms part of a strategic growth initiative in North America. In addition to further amplifying its successful service and partner business via its Boston office and North American sales and partner team, the publishing house founded in 1749 is currently ramping up its editorial presence in North America to publish more titles from North American authors in the humanities, social sciences as well as science, technology and mathematics.

The integration of Mercury’s portfolio will add to and complement De Gruyter’s existing list in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to the benefit of researchers in these fields. De Gruyter will distribute all Mercury content globally via its sales teams and its digital platform degruyter.com, thus increasing the global reach and discoverability of Mercury’s titles.

“We are excited to welcome Mercury to the De Gruyter family,” said Steve Fallon, Vice President, Americas and Strategic Partnerships at De Gruyter. “Mercury’s excellent portfolio is a great addition to our existing STEM list and this acquisition is an important step further for our ambitious growth plan in North America.”

“We are proud to join a prestigious publisher like De Gruyter and we look forward to expanding their STEM offerings into new markets throughout the world,” said David Pallai President & Founder of Mercury Learning and Information.

JAMA Network partners with Data Licensing Alliance for AI/ML

JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum datasets now available on DLAdata.com

Data Licensing Alliance, Inc. (DLA), the first marketplace for licensing STEM data for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) purposes, today announced the addition of the JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum datasets on the DLA marketplace.

“Making these JAMA datasets easily accessible to data scientists to train their AI is strategically important to the JAMA Network.  We are interested in using innovative technology such as DLA to advance our mission of publishing and disseminating medical research of the highest quality to physicians around the world. ” said Vida Damijonaitis, JAMA Network’s Director of Worldwide Sales.

David Myers, CEO and founder of DLA says “We are delighted with the addition of the JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum datasets on the DLA Marketplace. Training AI/ML algorithms with high-impact peer-reviewed data from the JAMA Network is essential for comprehensive knowledge and will result in far better results for data scientists.”

The addition of JAMA content helps build DLA’s mission making both the acquisition and licensing of reliable data quicker and more efficient for Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, providing users with an easy and cost-effective way to access data.

We are grateful for the support of the JAMA Network in joining our mission to make researchers’ AI smarter.

cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024

Transformative arrangements – including Transformative Agreements and Transformative Journals – were developed to encourage subscription journals to transition to full and immediate open access within a defined timeframe (31st December 2024, as specified in the Plan S Implementation Guidance). After careful consideration of the outcomes of transformative arrangements, the leadership of cOAlition S reaffirms that, as a principle, its members will no longer financially support these arrangements after 2024.

Exceptionally, individual cOAlition S funders may still choose to financially participate in Transformative Agreements beyond 2024 as part of their respective national strategies. Such exceptions will be communicated on the cOAlition S website.

Support for Transformative Journals will also cease at the end of 2024. In anticipation of this, no new applications to this programme will be considered after the 30th of June 2023.

Why financial support ends

Plan S was launched in 2018. At that time, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest. We maintain this timeline. We believe that the strategy of providing financial support for these arrangements – endorsed by many cOAlition S members – beyond 2024 would significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.

This position on the hybrid model of Open Access is in line with the principles and statements of the research performing organisations participating in the OA2020 initiative and the understanding that the current global investment in subscriptions is more than enough to support the transition of today’s academic journals to Open Access.

Transformative Agreements remain an instrument that is in the remit of library consortia to pursue. We continue to recognise that articles published via such arrangements in Open Access with CC BY allow full compliance with Plan S requirements.

We encourage library consortia to consider including in any future publishing agreements the requirement that publishers make their prices transparent, for example, through the Plan S Journal Comparison Service, and that they support authors’ rights retention.

Towards new Open Access initiatives

To help secure a fair and equitable open access landscape – and mindful that Funders’ budgets are finite – cOAlition S members will direct their efforts to more innovative and community-led Open Access publishing initiatives that aim to deliver full and immediate Open Access in a shorter timeframe. To incentivise subscription publishers to transition to full and immediate Open Access, we will also encourage the development of Full-OA Publishing Agreements, which support the publication in venues that make all peer-reviewed research articles immediately Open Access.  Individual cOAlition S funders may financially contribute to such agreements negotiated between institutions, library consortia, and publishers.

Jisc announces partnership with open access publisher Copernicus

Jisc has announced a new agreement with Copernicus Publications, a fully open access, not-for-profit publisher, whose portfolio of journals covers engineering, geosciences, humanities, and life sciences. 

The agreement helps institutions streamline administering open access publication, making it quicker and easier.

Copernicus uses simple, fair and reasonable article processing charges (APCs) and created one of the first public and fully transparent peer-review processes for academic journals.

Jisc members can now set up a prepayment account or choose to be invoiced for several papers on a single invoice.

Anna Vernon, Jisc’s head of portfolio for content licensing, said:

“This new agreement with Copernicus Publications will provide administrative efficiencies for our members. We’re pleased that, with new features that allow open access teams to choose which papers they want to pay for from centrally managed funds, we can finally add Copernicus to our portfolio and further increase our partnerships with small open access publishers.”

Dr Johannes Wagner, business development publications manager for Copernicus Publications, said:

“Copernicus Publications is delighted to sign this agreement with Jisc offering streamlined settlement schemes to all members in the UK, many of which we have been working with successfully for many years. Working with Jisc greatly helps overcome the administrative challenges involved in signing agreements with individual institutions and thereby clearly benefits both researchers and the learned societies we serve.”

The University of Exeter is already seeing the benefits of a membership agreement with Copernicus, having previously signed up independently. Its centralised billing options enable better financial planning and minimise time-consuming administration for the university library. 

It found that a more streamlined and seamless publishing process encourages authors to submit their research to smaller, non-profit, fully open access publishers, supporting a healthy and diverse scholarly communications marketplace.

Imogen Ward-Smith, open access publications officer at the University of Exeter said:

“To be able to offer a workflow with Copernicus Publications that is as simple for authors as the workflow of transitional agreements with big for-profit publishers is really important. They can choose to submit to whichever journal is most appropriate for their research without being put off by having to deal with invoicing.”

For more information about the new agreement with Copernicus and to sign up for it, visit the dedicated page on the Jisc subscription manager.

Wiley and CzechELib Sign First Open Access Agreement in Czech Republic

Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in research and education, today announced an open access agreement with Czech National Library of Technology (NTK) (CzechELib).

The four-year agreement will provide CzechELib participants access to view and publish in Wiley’s complete hybrid journal portfolio, which includes 1,400 journals, beginning January 16, 2023. Wiley is pioneering the open access movement in Czech Republic, being one of the first publishers to sign an open access agreement within the country. Participating researchers will be able to publish nearly 650 articles open access within the first year.

“We’re thrilled to be entering into this new agreement with CzechELib and to be working together to ensure that research produced by the academic community in the Czech Republic reaches the widest possible audience via increasing opportunities to publish open access,” said Kathryn Sharples, Vice President, Open Research, Wiley.

“It is not surprising to me that after more than 20 years of experience with Wiley as a reliable supplier of valued electronic journals, it was Wiley who was the first of the Big Three to offer CzechELib a truly cost neutral transformative agreement for open publishing to our scientific community,” said Martin Svoboda, Director of the National Library of Technology.

Wiley is accelerating the growth of open access publishing in eastern Europe and globally. Wiley has signed more than 40 open access agreements worldwide, including with new partners such as b-on in Portugal, HEAL-Link in Greece, and Tulane University Libraries in the United States.

The MIT Press opens spring 2023 list of scholarly monographs via Direct to Open model with support from over 240 libraries worldwide

To allow for expanded library participation, the D2O commitment window has been extended through June 30, 2023 

The MIT Press today announced that it will open its spring 2023 list of monographs via the Direct to Open (D2O) model. First launched in 2021, D2O harnesses the collective power of libraries to support open and equitable access to vital, leading scholarship.

So far this year, 240 libraries from around the world have signed on to participate in D2O. Institutions include Duke University Libraries, Rocky Mountain College, KU Leuven, EPFL Switzerland, Johns Hopkins University Libraries, University of Manchester, University of Toronto Libraries, Massey University Library, Southern Cross University and more. To allow for expanded library participation, the D2O commitment window has been extended through June 30, 2023. 

Thanks to these supporting institutions, over 40 scholarly monographs and edited collections from 2023 will now be freely accessible worldwide. These new works join the collection of 80 monographs made freely available during the first year of the D2O model. Titles published via D2O are always accessible on the MIT Press Direct platform.

List of MIT Press 2023 spring monographs and edited collections included in the Direct to Open model: 

To learn more about Direct to Open, visit direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open.

IEEE launches new program for free access to AI Ethics and Governance standards

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) announce the availability of a program that provides free access to global socio-technical standards in AI Ethics and Governance that provide guidance and considerations towards trustworthy AI.

Under the IEEE GET Program, selected standards are made available, free of charge, to encourage adoption and use of standards that contribute to advancing technology for humanity in key areas.

“The IEEE Standards Association and industry collaborators have taken a significant step toward supporting global AI literacy by creating this new program,” said Konstantinos Karachalios, Managing Director, IEEE SA. “We believe in this need so substantially that we intend to include additional approved socio-technical IEEE global standards in the oncoming years.”

By making available vital building blocks, the IEEE GET Program for AI Ethics and Governance Standards will help contribute to creating AI systems which are more trustworthy and further the goal of raising awareness and understanding of the importance of the AI ethics issues and how they can be addressed. The program can help AI developers incorporate human-centric design principles into their product roadmaps and organizational and governance structures, and to level up business processes such as procurement, marketing, and risk management.

“These steps taken by IEEE to offer an end-to-end level of access around the human-centric design of AI from principles to practice was a key reason why TÜV SÜD sees the IEEE as the natural collaborator for responsible innovation and functioning as the base community that enables realization worldwide,” said Dr. Andreas Hauser, CEO Digital Service at TÜV SÜD. “What makes it interesting is that the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) references many of the components that the IEEE makes available in this package. And, recognizing this, why TÜV SÜD sees a strategic advantage for those looking to demonstrate eventual compliance to human-centric regulatory measures or market pressures to leverage these IEEE standards and certifications.”

“Internationally operating organizations need internationally compliant AI Ethics and Governance standards,” said Dr. Eva-Marie Muller-Stuler, Partner, Ernst and Young. “AI Standards Literacy is an important facet to demonstrating compliance and encouraging ongoing trustworthy relationships with users. At Ernst and Young, we were involved in both the development of the IEEE standards and a big supporter of the certification program from the start. It supports our clients and stakeholders to achieve their aims as we move towards an ever more-responsible world.”

With support from the IEEE SA, industry sponsors and government, a number of IEEE standards are available for download at no cost through the IEEE GET Program. Access the new IEEE GET Program for AI Ethics Governance Standards on the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

OhioLINK and De Gruyter reach agreement for eBooks from 6 prestigious university presses

OhioLINK and De Gruyter are pleased to announce an agreement to provide OhioLINK’s 89 member libraries with newly published frontlist eBooks from University of California, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Toronto, and University of Pennsylvania Presses. Starting December 1, 2022, OhioLINK libraries have perpetual access to the 2023 complete frontlist eBook collections for these presses from De Gruyter’s University Press Library. The content will be accessible via the new award-winning De Gruyter digital platform with no simultaneous user limit.

“I have worked with OhioLINK over more than 20 years and owe much of what I have learned about libraries and scholarly publishing to mentors in OhioLINK. It is a high honor and responsibility for our publisher partners and De Gruyter to be selected by OhioLINK. We are also delighted to further expand the availability of our partners’ content and thereby help them to more fully achieve their mission. We look forward to engaging in this new partnership in 2023,” said Michael Zeoli, Director of the Publisher Partner Program at De Gruyter.

“OhioLINK is happy to work with De Gruyter to bring these useful library resources to our more than 800,000 faculty and students in Ohio,” said Amy Pawlowski, executive director of OhioLINK. “We are especially gratified that our De Gruyter agreement allows us to offer Ohio faculty more choices for no-cost-to-student teaching materials across a broad curriculum.”

De Gruyter’s University Press Library is a subset of De Gruyter’s Partner Press Program. De Gruyter hosts the complete book output of some of the world’s leading publishers, from well-known Ivy League presses to renowned scholarly presses around the world such as Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications, Iberoamericana Vervuert, Gorgias Press, and Academic Studies Press.

Digital Science acquires knowledge graph and decision intelligence software company metaphacts

Digital Science has completed the acquisition of metaphacts, which has become the newest member of the Digital Science family.

Based in Germany, metaphacts is a knowledge graph and decision intelligence software company. Its main product metaphactory is a platform that supports customers in accelerating their adoption of knowledge graphs and driving knowledge democratization. Knowledge graphs are knowledge bases that use graph-structured, semantic data models to interlink data and support intuitive search and exploration of knowledge.

metaphacts is the 12th portfolio brand for Digital Science. metaphacts operates in the pharmaceutical, engineering, manufacturing, finance, insurance, retail and energy markets, and will be working most closely with Digital Science portfolio product Dimensions.

Expanded offer to address new markets

This acquisition will see metaphacts and Digital Science build new, joint knowledge democratization solutions, facilitating the interface between humans and machines, and helping transform vast amounts of raw data into human and machine-interpretable, actionable insights to power business decisions. 

metaphactory’s semantic knowledge modelling approach will be applied to the Dimensions linked information dataset to expose new, meaningful knowledge through metaphactory’s next-generation semantic search and graph exploration capabilities.

Customers can leverage this curated, packaged data solution and enrich and gain additional context for their proprietary knowledge. Additional integrations with complementary products from the Digital Science portfolio, such as OntoChem’s text analysis and data mining products, will deliver further benefits for customers.  

Digital Science Chief Technology Officer Mario Diwersy said he sees great benefits for Digital Science: “metaphacts is a very strong strategic fit for Digital Science. The acquisition will help metaphacts and its existing customers to draw on Digital Science’s infrastructure and enable us to create synergies by adding Dimensions data into metaphacts’ solutions. This will provide our existing customers with another option to utilise Digital Science data – in addition to combining their own internal knowledge with what we can deliver externally.”

metaphacts CEO Sebastian Schmidt said he sees tremendous opportunities for new solutions: “Joint solutions based on metaphactory, Dimensions, and other products from the Digital Science portfolio will prove to be extremely powerful and will allow joint customers to tap into new insights and build knowledge-driven organizations. We’re excited about the opportunities that this collaboration opens for both metaphacts and Digital Science, across a range of sectors, be it pharma and life sciences, engineering and manufacturing, finance and banking, or retail. We see real opportunities for both companies to better serve existing customers and expand into new markets.”

Customer solutions with knowledge graphs at the core

metaphacts will continue operating as an independent company and serving its existing customers. The metaphactory product will be further developed and enhanced to meet customer needs and expectations, with a big metaphactory 5.0 release already scheduled for mid-2023. “One of the reasons we entrusted Digital Science as an investment partner is because we will be able to continue doing what we do today while exploring a variety of new business opportunities together,” said Sebastian Schmidt.

metaphacts founder Peter Haase additionally expressed confidence about the positive effect the acquisition will have for both the technology metaphacts develops but also for the wider knowledge graph community: “As a long-standing member of the Semantic Web community, I am thrilled to see how knowledge graphs have gained traction in research, science, and enterprises over the last years. Digital Science has recognized this and I am excited about the opportunity to drive the research and commercial impact through our collaboration with Digital Science.”

ACS inks ‘read and publish’ agreements with German consortia

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) proudly announces two new “read and publish” agreements with the Helmholtz and Niedersachsen consortia in Germany, effective January 2023. The agreements — ACS Publications’ first transformative agreements with German consortia in almost three years — offer researchers at 24 German institutions the opportunity to publish open research with one of the world’s most trusted publishers at no cost to the researcher, while also meeting funder requirements for open access. ACS invites researchers in this community to take full advantage of this agreement by submitting their next paper to the ACS journal of their choice. 

“We are keen to ease the process of open access publishing for researchers at our member institutions and look forward to working with ACS to raise the profile of German science,” says Bernhard Mittermaier, library director at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Research Center Jülich), on behalf of the Helmholtz consortium.

With both the Helmholtz and Niedersachsen consortium agreements running until the end of 2025, thousands of researchers from Germany in chemistry and related disciplines will be able to publish their research with a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) in more than 75 of the most-respected peer-reviewed journals in science. These arrangements underscore ACS’ commitment to enable open access publication and to broaden German researchers’ ability to publish in ACS journals. They also represent a significant expansion of available compliant routes to publication.

“We’re excited to be working with both consortia to bring read and publish access to more researchers,” says Frankie Martin, Europe, Middle East, and Africa sales director at ACS Publications. “These agreements help ensure a sustainable transition to open access and the widest possible audience for high-impact science.”

“We are pleased that we could reach this significant agreement that enables our researchers to publish freely in ACS journals,” says Alexander Pöche, head of license management at Technische Informationsbibliothek (German National Library of Science and Technology), on behalf of the Niedersachsen consortium. “Our member institutions produce outstanding science, and this new agreement will expand its visibility across the world.”

The new agreement illustrates ACS’ commitment to developing sustainable routes to open science by supporting organizations as they forge their unique paths. “Transformative agreements such as read and publish help more researchers publish open access, making their research freely available to the world,” says Sybille Geisenheyner, director of open science licensing and strategy at ACS. “ACS is constantly innovating new solutions that reduce the burden for authors, funders and librarians to support open science. We are excited to work with organizations to help them take their next steps towards open science.” 

Learn more about ACS read and publish agreements.

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