Many society publishers, concerned about the disruptive implications of Plan S, are nervously considering selling off their publishing assets.

Within a set of feature articles gathered under the name Postcards from a Collective Ecosystem, Heather Staines and Lisa Hinchliffe introduce us to some thought-provoking ideas concerning publishing platform infrastructure and interoperability in a rapidly changing world.

Library publishing is both a growing area of interest in academic libraries and an increasingly visible subfield of scholarly publishing. This article introduces the field of library publishing from the perspective of the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). In its first five years, LPC has produced a robust set of resources to support library publishers. It has also built a strong community of members and an extended network of affiliates. This paper presents and contextualizes these accomplishments,  and shares new developments and future directions for the Library Publishing Coalition.

On the same subject, see also this blog post by the same author.

Wiley and Projekt DEAL, a representative of nearly 700 academic institutions in Germany, have established a groundbreaking partnership for Germany to pilot new publishing models, better enable researchers to create and disseminate knowledge through Wiley’s journals, and continue to provide participating German institutions access to Wiley’s portfolio of academic journals.

Under an annual fee, this transformative three-year agreement provides all Projekt DEAL institutions with access to read Wiley’s academic journals back to the year 1997, and researchers at Projekt DEAL institutions can publish articles open access in Wiley’s journals.

A survey carried out by the Think. Check. Submit. initiative has revealed a strong demand from both researchers and librarians for guidance about where to publish and an appreciation of the services that the initiative offers. However, it also revealed a need for further educational resources and wider reach for the initiative. In-depth analysis of the findings is still ongoing. In 2019, the committee will focus on extending the reach of the initiative and further developing educational resources to assist researchers and librarians worldwide.

The ALPSP Conference and Awards was held on 12-14 September 2018. You can view the full conference programme, including speaker biographies, and browse the event website here. You can also access the audio recordings and slides for each session. Video footage of all plenary sessions is also available on the ALPSP YouTube page.

ATLA is announcing significant growth in the content of its core full-text products, ATLAS® and ATLAS PLUS® in the past year. ATLAS PLUS, ATLA’s largest online full-text collection, has grown to include more than 470 full-text titles. In addition, ATLA’s original full-text collection, ATLAS, continues to grow and now offers more than 335 titles.

ATLA is among the partnering databases whose data enhances the ISSN Portal.

Michael Mabe,  chief executive officer of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), reflects on a half-century for STM, and the continuing path of innovation.

Taking place in Lagos, Nigeria on 9 May 2018, this IPA (International Publishers Association) Regional Seminar covered a broad range of issues, from the socio-economic contribution of publishing in Africa, to Freedom to Publish, and the role of technology in overcoming illiteracy.

You can download the program and read the interview with Gbadega Adedapo, member of the IPA’s Executive Committee, President of the Nigerian Publishers Association and CEO of Ramsed Publications Ltd.

The International Publishers Association (IPA) chief Michiel Kolman, Elsevier’s senior vice president for global academic relations, made the opening address at 2018 Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference. As an answer to the event’s key question about “ramping up relevance”, he called for the industry to place its authority and intellectual rigor at the center of its work. He also pointed out that division in the business is not helping, and sharply condemned SciHub as a real threat of piracy.