The Association of American Publishers has joined stakeholders across the worldwide scientific community in commending ideas set forth by the Finch Group report, the British government-funded project to identify sustainable strategies that could effectively expand access to published scientific research. The report, ‘Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications’ is the result of a year-long initiative that brought together disparate stakeholders from academia, funding groups, libraries, learned societies and publishing.
While the final report is focused on the UK research community, many recommendations have implications for driving policy worldwide. Among them, it calls for government to support the publication of research in open access or hybrid journals, fully funded by article processing charges. Where total funding is not available, it recognizes that publishers must have an appropriate embargo period to avoid undue impact on recouping costs.
AAP agrees with the report’s conclusion that a mixed economy of subscriptions, licensing, open access, repositories and pay-per-view will exist for the foreseeable future and all stakeholders need to work toward an environment for the best public good.
Tom Allen, President and Chief Executive Officer, AAP, noted numerous similarities between the Finch Report, tenets of the America COMPETES Reauthorization and collaborative practices already underway between US publishers, funding agencies and research institutions to broaden access to information. These include publishers’ engagement with such federal agencies as the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the recently-announced FundRef as one of several projects in development. In addition, publishers have launched Research4Life in collaboration with the United Nations, Emergency Access Initiative with the National Library of Medicine and patientINFORM with voluntary health organisations.
Drug information provider Elsevier / Gold Standard, US, has announced that Holliston, Massachusetts-based pharmacy chain Eaton Apothecary has purchased the new Predictive Acquisition Cost (PAC), developed by Glass Box Analytics and exclusively sold by Elsevier / Gold Standard.
Introduced earlier this year, PAC is a new drug price type that more closely tracks true acquisition cost. PAC employs predictive analytics techniques to estimate acquisition cost considering various factors, including MAC benchmarks, published price lists, existing price benchmarks, drug dispensing metrics, supply-demand measures, and survey-based acquisition costs. Independent tests show that PAC tracks drug acquisition cost with sufficient accuracy to support pricing activity.
Eaton Apothecary has 16 locations, including traditional retail pharmacies and those focused on home delivery and specialised care. As a classic community-centered pharmacy, Eaton Apothecary prides itself for its commendable one-on-one service with patients. With a reputation in the industry as an early-adopter of new, enhanced technologies and marketplace trends, Eaton Apothecary selected PAC, adding to the company’s competitive edge.
The pharmacy chain plans to utilise PAC for reimbursement analysis, wholesaler request for proposal processes with standards for deviations from the PAC price type, and as a cash pricing base.
Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, has announced the launch of PsyCh Journal, China’s first international psychology journal. The new journal will be published in partnership with the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IPCAS), China’s national psychology research institute.
PsyCh Journal will publish advanced research exploring basic mechanisms of the human mind and behaviour. The journal seeks to provide a forum for academic exchange and a ‘knowledge bridge’ between China and the world by showcasing high-quality research related to the science and practice of psychology both within and outside of China.
PsyCh Journal will join Wiley’s portfolio of international psychology titles which includes Child Development, the top-ranked journal in educational psychology, and Personnel Psychology. Lars-Göran Nilsson from Stockholm University and Kan Zhang from IPCAS will serve as editors of the journal. The editorial board comprises world-renowned psychologists from both within China and abroad.
As part of this partnership Wiley and IPCAS will inaugurate a Prize for Excellence in Psychological Science. The prize will award $5,000 to an outstanding Chinese author published in either PsyCh Journal or Acta Psychologica Sinica, the Institute’s Chinese-language journal.
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Foundation will continue their collaboration with Nature Publishing Group to host the 62nd annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, scheduled to be held from July 1-6, 2012, on an island off the shores of Lake Constance. This year's meeting is dedicated to Physics and brings together 27 Nobel Laureates and 592 young researchers from 69 countries. The http://lindau.nature.com website, bringing together blogs, tweets, photos and videos, opens a window to the meeting for science lovers worldwide of all ages.
The format of the meeting consists of plenary lectures every morning by the laureates, which will be live tweeted by a team of official bloggers. The afternoons feature behind-closed-doors mentoring sessions between the Laureates and the young scientists.
The Lindau Nobel Community site serves as the event’s interactive home, featuring all online Lindau coverage. The site includes the official Lindau blogs in English, German, Spanish and Chinese. Bloggers include NPG staff, and bloggers from the Scilogs.de and Scientific American blogging networks. The site aggregates tweets and external coverage and displays Instagram photos tagged with the #lnlm12 hashtag.
As part of their Lindau coverage, Scientific American is running a series of interviews with some of the young scientists called ‘30 under 30’ available at www.scientificamerican.com/section.cfm?id=30-under-30. A Nature Outlook supplement, published on October 11, will include Q&As with Nobel laureates as well as editorial pieces.
Nature Publishing Group and the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance will collaborate for the fifth year to produce films featuring Nobel Laureates and young scientists debating important issues in physics. The films and the Nature Outlook are produced with support from Mars, Incorporated. Produced by Nature Video, the films will be made freely available on nature.com and on YouTube at www.youtube.com/NatureVideoChannel later in 2012.
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, an international association for scholarly and professional publishers, has announced the appointment of Suzanne Kavanagh to the newly created position of Director of Marketing and Membership Services.
Suzanne has worked in the publishing industry for over 15 years, holding senior sales and marketing positions in at Routledge/T&F and Continuum Publishing Group. Her most recent position as Partnership Manager for Publishing at Creative Skillset has given her a unique insight into publisher training needs and cross-industry solutions.
In her new position, Suzanne will be responsible for strengthening the ALPSP brand, improving member benefits and support, and will seek to grow the Association’s membership. She will join the senior management team of ALPSP and will report to the Chief Executive, Audrey McCulloch.
NoveList, a division of databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has introduced new features to Novelist Select, its catalogue enrichment resource. The new features seek to improve the user experience, as well as offer new upgrade options, including book jackets, professional book reviews, sample excerpts and tables of contents, from Content Café, a database offered by Baker & Taylor.
NoveList Select is the catalogue enrichment component of NoveList readers’ advisory resources. This component pulls NoveList content into a library’s catalogue. The tool makes reading recommendations, series information, book discussion guides, reviews, library newsletters and events available to library patrons from within the catalogue record. Patrons can expect to find similar titles and authors based on their searches, and discover more of the library’s collection and sign up for library newsletters and upcoming events.
Improvements to the display and usability of the NoveList content within the catalogue records will reportedly make it easier for users to access the information. Recommendations for similar series in the library catalogue will also be easier to find with a list of series titles added to the existing title and author recommendations that have always been part of NoveList Select in the You might Like These section. Lexile reading levels are also being added where appropriate. These will primarily be available in juvenile records to help determine whether a title is appropriate for a child’s age and reading level.
Content Café now available through NoveList Select as well, is projected as a comprehensive database with more than 22 million data elements, with new additions made daily.
The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the British Library have released a report titled “Researchers of Tomorrow: the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students”. According to the study, Generation Y students, born between 1983 and 1992, need more face-to-face and informal support tailored to their own subject to help them embrace open web technologies and social media fully.
The project spoke to 17,000 doctoral students over the course of its three year longitudinal study to set a benchmark for the research behaviour of the students. The final year of the study looked in detail at researchers’ use of social media applications within the research setting. It was found that, over the three-year period, there had been only a gradual increase in the use of social web and social media, which may seem surprising considering our increasingly digitalised culture.
Active take-up of institutionally-provided open web resources was also low, with students requesting more information about technologies and applications such as Google Scholar, cloud computing, EndNote and Mendeley.
Other findings from the report include a continuing lack of understanding about the nature of open access. Generation Y students felt that putting their own work out openly would bring them no positive benefits, and may even have a negative impact. Equally, doctoral students’ understanding of the intellectual property and copyright environment appeared to be a source of confusion, rather than an enabler of innovation. The debate about open access continues to be prominent in the media, and JISC and the British Library will continue to engage with researchers to ascertain how attitudes might be changing.
The study also highlighted a marked dependency on published secondary sources rather than primary sources, such as archival materials and data sets, as the basis of students’ own original research, regardless of discipline. This marks a significant change in the nature of doctoral research from only a decade ago, with potential significant implications for doctoral students’ experience of finding and using primary research sources.
Academic publisher Oxford University Press (OUP), UK, and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has announced a new publishing partnership.
Under the deal, OUP will assume publication of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Geophysical Journal International, and Astronomy & Geophysics, from January 2013.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, started in 1827, is a scholarly journal for astronomy and astrophysics, publishing original research in positional and dynamical astronomy, astrophysics, radio astronomy, cosmology, space science, and the design of astronomical instruments.
Geophysical Journal International is the primary solid-earth geophysics journal based in Europe, publishing the results of research on the earth's internal structure, physical properties, evolution, and processes covering all aspects of theoretical, computational, and observational geophysics.
Astronomy & Geophysics is an accessible journal publishing articles, news, and reviews on topics in astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, planetary science, solar-terrestrial physics, global and regional geophysics, and the history of these subjects.
UK-based online publishing services provider Semantico Ltd has announced the launch of Scolaris, the new digital publishing platform for scholarly and academic publishing. The product launch took place at The Royal Institution of Great Britain, and was attended by a select group of industry professionals.
Scolaris is the next generation integrated content platform, engineered to manage the complexities of journals, reference works and dictionaries. It builds on the success of its predecessor SIPP and features specific new functionality for the journals sector.
According to Richard Padley, Managing Director of Semantico, Scolaris is a blazingly fast system that has been designed around the company’s industry successful SIPP platform. It features new functionality and enhanced features.
Academic publisher De Gruyter, Germany, has announced that IBZ Online, an international index of journal literature in the humanities and social sciences, now lists 1,323 open access journals that have never before been systematically indexed. IBZ Online will now add an additional 5,000 journal issues to its database each year, including 16,000 articles and 21,000 abstracts. The database is updated on an ongoing basis, and now contains over 3.3 million articles from about 11,500 journals.
IBZ Online helps to make the latest findings in the humanities and social sciences accessible to academia. Content is indexed with a keyword system that uses an interdisciplinary approach and features intentional overlap in the natural sciences. The database registers publications in over 40 languages.
For over 100 years, the IBZ index has been the international reference database for journal articles in the humanities, social sciences, and neighbouring fields. The IBZ serves the purpose of documenting and indexing the most recent scientific articles. The bibliography focuses on German and international periodicals of the humanities and social sciences but the interdisciplinary character – with deliberate intersections into the natural sciences – need to be emphasised. Publications from 40 countries in more than 40 languages are taken into consideration.
AAP supports Finch report recommendations for expanding access to research publications
62nd annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting to bring together Nobel Laureates and young researchers from 69 countries
ALPSP appoints Suzanne Kavanagh as Director of Marketing and Membership Services