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The Microbiology Society’s founding journal is now fully Open Access – the transformation of Microbiology

Publishing advances across the field of microbiology for over 75 years, Microbiology – the Microbiology Society’s founding journal – has now transitioned to fully Open Access (OA). The exciting transformation for this established journal indicates the Society’s commitment to an Open Science future.  

Originally launched as the Journal of General Microbiology in 1947, the journal today reflects the diversity and importance of microbiology in addressing current global challenges – such as food security, environmental sustainability and health. Microbiology’s transformation to OA opens this research further to global readership, increasing opportunities for microbiologists to expand their reach.

Tracy Palmer, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, said: “This is a really exciting new chapter for Microbiology in continuing to champion the work of microbiologists. As a scientist, we all want our research to be read, and the best way is to publish Open Access. There’s research that says that papers that are published Open Access have more downloads, they have more citations and they’re read more widely, helping authors to make an impact.”

Gavin Thomas, Editor-in-Chief, said: “If I was talking to somebody who was thinking about publishing in one of [the Microbiology Society’s] journals, I would ask them to check first if they have one of our excellent Publish and Read deals. If an institution is subscribed, then any academic in that university can publish full gold Open Access for free.”

The Microbiology Society, a not-for-profit publisher, is increasingly moving its portfolio to OA to help researchers and institutions: 

Expand your reach 

OA research can be read by anyone, anywhere in the world, with no restriction on reading, sharing, or reusing. 

Increase your impact 

Articles published OA in Society journals get on average twice the citations and 3.7 times the usage of paywalled content, based on data from Web of Science across all Society journals. 

Support your community 

Publishing with the Microbiology Society raises funds for grants, events, and policy projects for microbiologists across the world. 

Find out more about Microbiology’s transformation here.

To help more researchers than ever benefit from OA, we currently have Publish and Read agreements with more than 300 institutions across the world. This comprehensive model entitles affiliated authors unlimited, fee-free OA publishing and full-read access to our journals with minimal administration for librarians. 

Find out more about Publish and Read with the Society. 

Nature announces support for authors from over 70 countries to publish open access

Authors from low-income and lower-middle income countries to be able to publish for free in Nature and the Nature research journals 

From today, primary research from authors from over 70 countries classified by the World Bank as low-income (LIC) or lower-middle-income economies (LMICs) accepted for publication in either Nature or one of the Nature research journals (e.g. Nature Chemistry, Nature Sustainability) can now be published Gold open access at no cost. This move recognises that local funding is rarely available for publishing OA in specialist journals like Nature, whose characteristics such as in-house editorial teams and low acceptance rates make it difficult for authors from these countries who are less well-funded.  

A key part of this initiative is that authors will not need to ask to benefit from the support. Corresponding authors from qualifying countries whose primary research papers are accepted in principle (AIP) for publication in these titles will be informed as part of the publishing process that their paper will be published gold OA, with the APC covered by Springer Nature. Authors can opt out if they do not wish their papers to be published OA. 

Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief of Nature, said:

“At the very core of our mission at Nature is our desire to publish the most significant advances in any branch of research. Open Access makes research available to the widest possible audience fostering open science and collaboration. I am excited that with this move we are taking another step towards making research publishing more equitable and scientific knowledge more accessible globally.”

Deborah Sweet, Vice President for the Nature Journals, added: 

“I am delighted that at Nature and the Nature Research Journals we are now able to offer Open Access to researchers from the low and lower middle income countries at no cost to them. As part of Springer Nature, we are committed to supporting the transition to OA and a part of this is to ensure that authors from less well-funded countries who wish to publish OA are able to do so.”

Simba’s Global Professional Publishing Report Reveals Top Trends in a Dynamic Publishing Market

Simba’s new report, Global Professional Publishing 2022-2026,  covers the latest trends and business performance in the four major professional publishing segments: Tax, Accounting & Business; Legal; Scientific & Technical; and Medical publishing.

In 2021, the top ten competitors in the professional publishing market delivered revenue of $40.9 billion, with a healthy gain of 8.4% over 2020. The new report reveals how the major professional publishers, including RELX, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer are dominating the market.

Analysis of the market structure, drivers, and leading competitors forms the foundation of the report, encompassing market performance, business strategies, acquisitions and divestitures, and new product launches. The reader of the report will gain a deeper understanding of overall market dynamics.

The study defines trends that are shaping the marketplace, such as the impact of new government legislation, as well as the sharp increase in tax rates around the globe. The growing automation of tasks across business functions creates new opportunities in the Business segment, while publishers in Scientific & Technical and Medical segments adapt their business models to the open access publishing trend. 

The new Simba report outlines extensive M&A activity, and its effect on the professional publishing landscape. Several major acquisitions herald a period of transformation in the category— as some competitors exit the space, while newcomers identify promising segments of the market.  

Global Professional Publishing 2022-2026 provides an in-depth analysis of innovation strategies employed by top competitors, showing how major competitors are fueling growth. This market report reviews the growing application of artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing in new platforms, tools, and solutions. 

Elsewhere in the report, the reader will find insights about product customers, trends in product use, geographic skews, product formats, and challenges facing the industry. The report closes with Simba’s near-term outlook for the leading competitors, which are expected to deliver growth of 6.7% for 2022, and a forecast for product segments and the overall category over the 2022-2026 period. Simba forecasts that the total professional publishing market will reach $88.4 billion by 2026, driven by high single-digit growth in the platforms/tools & solutions segment.

This report provides detailed analysis of the performance and strategies of leading competitors, including RELX, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Gartner, S&P Global, IHS Markit, Intuit, Kantar, Sage Group, and Springer Nature.

OhioLINK and IOP Publishing sign uncapped transformative agreement

OhioLINK, Ohio’s academic library consortium, has entered into a three-year unlimited transformative agreement with society publisher IOP Publishing (IOPP).  

Beginning January 1, 2023, the agreement enables authors affiliated with participating OhioLINK member institutions to publish their work open access (OA) at no cost to them. It also provides reading access to all 72 IOPP journals across the fields of physics, materials science, biosciences, astronomy and astrophysics, environmental sciences, and mathematics.  

“We’re happy to add options to publish barrier-free research at no cost to authors and to increase the global profile of Ohio scholarship,” said OhioLINK Executive Director Amy Pawlowski. “OhioLINK has enjoyed a longstanding and productive working relationship with IOPP, and we look forward to our continued collaboration.”  

The worldwide availability of OA articles results in broader dissemination of scholarship and more citations for authors, which in turn can help to accelerate innovation.  The importance of public access to research is acknowledged worldwide, including in the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, which stated that by the end of 2025 all federally funded research papers and data must be freely and immediately available to the public upon publication.  

Julian Wilson, Sales and Marketing Director at IOPP said: “Our agreement with OhioLINK consolidates our relationship with forward-looking consortia and our presence in the region. More than half of US researchers who publish their work with us choose to do so OA and benefit from a wider readership and greater impact of their work. We expect that percentage to grow in the run up to the implementation of the OSTP requirement – this agreement takes authors affiliated with OhioLINK a step closer to fulfilling the conditions.”  

IOP Publishing has transformative agreements with over 500 institutions in 22 countries and sees them as key to accelerating the OA transition. Details of all IOPP TAs can be found on their dedicated TA hub.    

Considered one of the leading library consortia in the United States, OhioLINK has 88 academic library members from public and private institutions, including ten very high and high research-intensive institutions, as well as most two-year colleges. OhioLINK negotiates more than 65 consortia agreements for statewide, shared library resources and services each year.  

OhioLINK member institutions can find more information about publishing in IOPP journals at IOPP Journals Open Access Publishing: Information for Authors   

SCELC Consortium and IOP Publishing strengthen their commitment to OA publishing

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has finalised an uncapped  transformative agreement (TA) with theStatewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) allowing corresponding authors at subscribing institutions to publish their work open access (OA) at no cost to them. The fees for publishing their work openly will be covered by institutional subscription fees paid by participating academic and research institutions. 

Teri Oaks Gallaway, Executive Director at SCELC, says: “We are pleased to have negotiated an affordable value-based agreement with a mission-driven not-for-profit society publisher. It enables even the smallest institutions to access the full range of content and allows their authors to publish openly without having to seek out individual funds.” 

Commencing on the 1st of January 2023, the agreement exemplifies IOPP’s dedication to influencing real change when it comes to open physics and aligns with SCELC’s endeavour to support open publication of its institutions’ faculty research output. This three-year agreement is expected to significantly increase the number of research papers published open access by authors affiliated with the 17 participating SCELC institutions.  

Julian Wilson, Sales and Marketing Director at IOPP said: “We are delighted to welcome SCELC and their libraries into our growing global family of Transformative Agreements. Supporting researchers to publish their work OA and providing the tools to make this content visible as widely as possible lies at the heart of everything we stand for as a learned society.”  

IOP Publishing has transformative agreements with over 300 institutions in 17 countries and sees them as key to accelerating the OA transition. IOPP’s effort to expand TA coverage in the Americas has resulted in over 40 new individual institutional TAs to date including sites as diverse as Princeton University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and University of Notre Dame.  

Find out more about IOP Publishing’s activities to encourage and support greater access,transparency and inclusivity here.  

For more information about SCELC’s ongoing goals, values, and activities related to transformative agreements, please visit the SCELC Transformative Agreements LibGuide. 

Latest transformative agreement for Greece signed between Springer Nature and HEAL-Link

Springer Nature continues its support for open access publishing with its latest transformative agreement (TA) in Greece. The TA withHEAL-Link, the consortium of Greek academic libraries, will see authors from 43 academic and research institutions able to publish open access (OA) in over 2,300 Springer, Adis and Palgrave journals. This agreement will also give authors full access to subscription content in these journals. 

Commenting on the new agreement with HEAL-Link, Caroline Nevison, Director, Open Access Agreements, Springer Nature said:

“At Springer Nature we are committed to driving forward the sustainable transition to OA for all authors regardless of discipline, background or location. We are proud to be working with organisations such as HEAL-Link and others around the world to further support the drive towards open science both regionally and internationally.”

Nevison continued: “Alongside the other 17 national agreements we have in place, this deal is another step in making real progress in the advancement of open science. This agreement will see the opening up of knowledge and will enable the wider global dissemination and reach of the important research being published by Greek researchers which is looking to address the pressing problems we are facing globally.”

Professor Theodora Ioannidou, Chairperson, HEAL-Link added: “The open access agreement of HEAL-Link with Springer Nature is a milestone for the Greek academic institutions and their libraries. It shows that HEAL-Link is determined to make open access in Greece a reality. Springer Nature has a wide portfolio that allows all disciplines to be expressed openly and increases the competitiveness of the research that is performed in our institutions.”

The researchers at the 43 Greek institutions covered by the deal will benefit from more citations, greater usage and better reach for their research when publishing OA, opening up their research to the world. 

This agreement is the latest in a year which has seen Springer Nature sign Japan’s largest OA deal to date, agree the largest institutional deal to date in Latin America, sign a new deal in Italy and extend agreements in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The publisher’s Nature titles have also seen a number of TAs extended. The agreements form part of Springer Nature’s commitment to driving forward sustainable open research for all, with these agreements allowing researchers from over 2,650 affiliated institutions to publish open access, enabling an expected 41,400+ OA articles to be published a year.

More on Springer Nature’s TAs can be found here, with further information on the publisher’s commitment to open science and its wider principles available here.

JUSTICE Consortium and Taylor & Francis Sign New Open Access Agreement for Japan

The Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) and Taylor & Francis have announced a new transformative agreement to increase open access (OA) publication of Japanese research.

Researchers at Japanese institutions participating in the agreement will be able to publish OA in Taylor & Francis and Routledge Open Select (hybrid) journals without paying an article publishing charge. JUSTICE members can also choose to help researchers publish in fully OA journals through the agreement.

The three-year deal has been designed to align with the JUSTICE OA 2020 roadmap, which charts a course for transition from journal subscriptions to OA. Under the agreement an increasing proportion of libraries’ spend each year will be used to support OA publishing, while ensuring their users continue to have access to subscription journals.

Yasuhiko Hamao, Chair of the JUSTICE Steering Committee, commented, “We are very pleased that the deal agreed with Taylor & Francis will contribute to an increase in the number of transformative agreements, which the JUSTICE consortium has identified as an important route to making Japanese research open access. We hope this proposal will be adopted by many JUSTICE member libraries, towards realization of the open access goals set out in the JUSTICE OA 2020 roadmap.”

Ian Jones, VP and APAC Commercial Lead at Taylor & Francis, said, “The JUSTICE consortium is a great advocate in Japan for the transition to an open future, so we were delighted to partner with them to design this new agreement. All the 550 JUSTICE members now have the opportunity to choose OA and to supercharge the potential of their institution’s research.”

JUSTICE is the largest consortium of libraries in Japan. Each member that opts-in to the deal will gain access to the Taylor & Francis Research Dashboard where they can monitor publications from their institution and approve articles for OA publication under the agreement.

The American Society of Civil Engineers partners with ChronosHub for processing author fees

ChronosHub and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) are proud to announce a new collaboration for processing ASCE’s author fees, including article processing charges (APCs) for open access (OA) publications, as well as color charges for both OA and hybrid publications.

The service will go live for authors on January 4, 2023. ASCE authors will be guided through what would otherwise be an increasingly complicated process, allowing for a much simpler and less time-consuming author experience, through clear communication and a consistent workflow for all types of charges.

The collaboration includes an integration with ASCE’s peer review system, Aries Systems Editorial Manager, where authors can see an APC quotation during the submission process. Post-acceptance, authors are guided to the ASCE environment on the ChronosHub platform where APCs and/or color charges can be paid by credit card or invoice. Credit card payments are fully integrated via ASCE’s own payment gateway.

Dana Compton, Managing Director and Publisher at ASCE commented on the collaboration: “We are very excited to partner with ChronosHub to provide our authors with this new platform. As ASCE continues to grow its OA publishing options with the upcoming launch of our first gold OA journal, ASCE OPEN, we strive to offer exceptional service to our authors through the entire publishing process, including invoicing and payment.”

Christian Grubak, co-CEO at ChronosHub adds: “It’s a pleasure for us to be able to assist ASCE on this journey to make the billing process easier for their authors. Fostering a simple and smooth author experience is key and we’re excited to have another publisher join our platform.”

Japan’s lack of infectious diseases research exposed by COVID-19 pandemic

Japan’s government has drawn criticism from some of the nation’s researchers following a new analysis that shows Japan has for years been lagging in the field of infectious diseases research, including after the COVID-19 pandemic had hit.

Despite performing relatively well in managing the pandemic, analysis by research technology company Digital Science shows Japan has lost its research edge in infectious diseases.

A number of Japan’s infectious diseases researchers – including those who’ve worked with the government on measures to help stop the spread of COVID-19 – say the data confirms what they’ve known for some time.

The data – sourced from the Dimensions database of 130 million publications and journals included in the Nature Index – shows that although Japan has a strong international standing across all fields of research (ranked 5th in the world for all research articles in Dimensions for 2019-2021), it lags well behind on infectious diseases (12th in the world for all infectious diseases research articles in Dimensions for 2019-2021).

While China, the UK and Germany have surged ahead when it comes to the output of research across 90 different infectious diseases in Nature Index journals (tracked in Dimensions), Japan has fallen behind the likes of Switzerland and The Netherlands. Japan has also failed to match the huge spikes in coronavirus-related research seen in other major industrialized countries such as the US.

When it comes to the number of patents established for vaccines, Japan is also lagging: 11th place in the world for COVID-19 patents recorded from 2020-2021, according to data in Dimensions – behind countries such as South Korea, India, Canada and France.

For more figures and charts, see the full blog post.

Dr Norio Ohmagari, Director of Disease Control and Prevention at Japan’s National Center for Global Health and Medicine (NCGM), says he is not surprised to learn that the data shows Japan lagging on infectious diseases research.

“There is little interest in infectious diseases in Japanese medical research,” says Dr Ohmagari, who is also Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“I have been an independent infectious disease physician for 18 years now. During this time, however, infectious disease research has been at a low ebb. The development of new drugs has gradually declined in activity.”

Professor Makoto Suematsu, Dean of the School of Medicine at Keio University, one of Japan’s research hospital universities, describes the hierarchy of Japanese research interests as: “Cancer is king, and the genome is queen. Infectious disease is just a pathogen.”

He says because Japan is suffering from an ageing population, the budget has increased in that direction accordingly. “The budget for the elderly is huge – imagine it is a watermelon and one seed is the budget for infectious diseases research,” Professor Suematsu says.

“We’ve failed to create any effective vaccine so far,” says Professor Hiroaki Kitano, President & CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. and Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School (OIST), a leading researcher who was actively involved in the effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Japan.

“Japan used to be at the forefront of vaccination; we had a very strong vaccination program, and very strong companies that would create vaccinations. Many companies have actually withdrawn from the vaccine business, so that has substantially reduced the capability for manufacturing and quick response.”

Professor Masanori Fukushima, Representative Director of the Learning Health Society Institute (LHSI) and Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, raises a further issue: the pandemic could have enabled Japanese researchers to better understand the impact on patients, but due to a lack of access to patients at research hospitals this hasn’t been possible on a large scale.

“Patients admitted to university hospitals are referred from other hospitals, seriously ill, and typically emergency cases, making it difficult for university hospitals to establish a system for continuous research on them,” he says.

For the full story – including comments from researchers in which they praise Japan’s response to the pandemic – see the blog post.

Nine more institutions to join The Company of Biologists’ Read & Publish Open Access agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians in 2023

Our 2022-2024 Read & Publish Open Access agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) continues to be a great success, and we are delighted to announce that the number of institutions participating in 2023 will increase from 11 to 20.

All institutions that participated in the agreement in 2022 have chosen to renew, and a further nine institutions will be joining in 2023. Three institutions have also upgraded their Read & Publish package to include all our journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open – bringing the total number of institutions with our five-journal package to 15.

Mike Wall, University Librarian at the University of Otago and CAUL Content Procurement Committee member, says:

“It is pleasing to see more institutions taking up Read & Publish agreements in 2023, such as this one with The Company of Biologists. Uncapped agreements like this provide certainty to Australian and New Zealand researchers that their research will be published immediately Open Access and made available to the world.”

Rich Blount, Regional Sales Manager – Europe and Australasia at The Company of Biologists, says:

“It is great news that researchers at 20 institutions in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from uncapped, immediate and fee-free Open Access publishing in our journals in 2023 through our Read & Publish agreement with CAUL. Not only have all existing participants renewed, we are very pleased that nine more institutions are joining and that 14 institutions have opted to include all five of our leading peer-reviewed biological science journals in their Read & Publish package.”

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

“We are thrilled with the response from the library and research communities in Australia and New Zealand to our Read & Publish Open Access agreement with CAUL. There has already been a year-on- year increase in the number of OA articles published by authors at participating institutions in 2022 – the first year of the agreement – and we look forward to continuing to work with CAUL and member institutions to further accelerate OA publishing in the biological and biomedical sciences in 2023 and beyond.”

Read the announcement online at https://www.biologists.com/library-hub/read-publish/library- consortia/caul/caul-announcement-2023.

PLOS unveils a new way to measure Open Science practices

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced the release of the first results of a new initiative to measure researchers’ Open Science practices across the published literature, ‘Open Science Indicators’ (OSI). These initial results show increasing prevalence of good practices in research data and code sharing, and increasing use of preprints by researchers. PLOS is releasing the OSI dataset, and the associated framework used to develop it, to support Open Science initiatives in the wider community.

Earlier this year PLOS partnered with DataSeer to develop and measure, using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, a set of numerical “indicators” linked to specific Open Science characteristics and behaviors observable in thousands of published research articles. Today, PLOS is making available the data on three Open Science Indicators: data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting, and will be developing additional indicators in 2023 guided by feedback from the community.

OSIs will help PLOS better understand researchers by establishing a baseline for the current state of adoption for Open Science practices and allow PLOS to track progress over time. As a framework for measuring and monitoring Open Science, OSIs have broad potential applications, from complementing the aims of the UNESCO Open Science Monitoring Framework Working Group to meeting the needs of organizations that wish to better understand Open Science practices, and assessing the impact of policy changes, like those set forth in the recent OSTP memo.

“To support our goal of increasing adoption of Open Science practices we need reliable evidence to understand those practices, but until we developed Open Science Indicators, there were no tools that could tell us everything we needed to know,” said Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions at PLOS. “Open Science Indicators will enable us to better understand and support the researchers we serve, and by sharing OSIs openly we can help others support the adoption of Open Science practices.”

“We’re very proud to be helping PLOS with the OSI project,” said Tim Vines, Founder and Director of DataSeer. “It’s so much easier to make good choices around Open Science incentives when you’ve a clear picture of sharing behaviors across the whole of your portfolio.”

PLOS’ initial dataset examines data-sharing and code-sharing behaviors, and preprint posting in both PLOS articles, and the same Open Science practices in the wider scientific literature. The data cover approximately 61,000 PLOS research articles published between January 2019 and June 2022, as well as a comparator set of 6,000 publicly available research articles from PubMed Central (10% of the PLOS sample). The OSI method will be further developed and improved over time.

SAGE Publishing and Council of Australian University Libraries reach new “Read and Publish” agreement

SAGE Publishing and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), the negotiating body representing universities in Australia and New Zealand, have announced a new Open Access Agreement which will expand publishing opportunities for ANZ researchers. The three year agreement, which begins on the 1st January 2023 and will last through to the 31st December 2025, provides researchers with:

  • Unlimited open access publishing rights in SAGE’s 900+ hybrid journals.
  • A discount on article publishing charges for SAGE’s 150+ pure Gold Open Access journals.

Researchers at member institutions will have access to SAGE’s vast collection of journals in the social and behavioral sciences, and growing quality STM research portfolio. With the help of SAGE’s Open Access Portal, a platform dedicated to supporting OA workflows, authors will benefit from a seamless experience that guides them through licenses and streamlines the OA publication process.

“SAGE is committed to providing accessible publishing routes to open access and in championing social and behavioral science researchers who historically receive less funding than others,” says Bob Howard, Executive Vice President, Research Editorial, Journals at SAGE, “We are delighted to announce this agreement with the Council of Australian University Librarians and to support Australian and New Zealand researchers in sharing their crucial work on a global scale.”

Angus Cook, Director of Content Procurement, CAUL, said, “Introducing an Open Access Agreement with SAGE is a vital step in ensuring authors from CAUL Member Institutions can publish to a broader array of subject areas. We’re looking forward to strengthening the relationship with SAGE and working collaboratively to provide great outcomes for local researchers.”

An early driver of OA, SAGE is committed to increasing transparency and accessibility of scientific research so that it has the best chance of creating real-world impact. As an independent publisher, SAGE is free to think long-term in providing sustainable paths to open access. To learn more about SAGE’s OA agreements, visit the SAGE Publishing website.

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