Academic Publishing in Europe gathered more than 250 delegates in Berlin in January 2018. Publishing 2020: Ramping up relevance was the focus, and this notion led to the re-affirmation of the key themes of the conference series: transition to open access, the debate around peer-reviewed content versus uncontrolled data sharing platforms. There was also a focus on new technological challenges associated with the blockchain that likely will challenge academic publishing.

Cambridge University Press has just launched a new content sharing service called Cambridge Core Share. Authors and subscribers can now generate a read-only link to a journal article which can be shared online, allowing anyone to read the final published version of the article for free. This new sharing service is available to over 150 journals, and to content published from 2016 onwards, during an initial pilot. Cambridge Core Share allows article usage to be recorded, thus enabling authors to demonstrate the impact of their work.

An enhanced Metadata Downloader to replace the current MARC downloader has been launched by Springer Nature. This web tool provides librarians and library cataloguers with downloadable metadata updates which can be embedded into library catalogues, as well as title lists for a library’s licensed content.

With the launch of the Metadata Downloader, Springer Nature is also increasing the frequency of available data updates for books and journals hosted on its content platform SpringerLink. Records are updated on a daily basis.

SharedIt, Springer Nature’s free content sharing initiative, was launched in October 2016. A positive assessment is established after this first year of existence. As a matter of fact, SharedIt links were used to read Springer Nature articles 3,276,125 times, by readers in over 200 markets and from almost 29,000 institutions.

SharedIt covers over 2,700 journals including all the Springer Nature-owned portfolio and over 1,000 co-owned and partner-owned journals. It enables authors and subscribers to post links to free-to-read versions of research articles anywhere, including social media platforms, repositories, websites, scholarly collaboration networks and via email.

EBSCO Information Services and the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) launched ATLA Serials (ATLAS) PLUS and updated their ATLA Religion Database (RDB), which are both available on EBSCOhost. ATLAS PLUS has more than 425 full-text journals in the fields of religion and theology, including full-text content in 16 languages from 30-plus countries. ATLA RDB is merging with the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index (CPLI), which features more than 500,000 additional records on Catholicism.

The African Academy of Sciences, in partnership with F1000, is launching a publication platform, AAS Open Research, to enable AAS funded and affiliated researchers to publish immediately and without barriers. AAS Open Research will showcase African research on the global stage in an immediate and transparent way. The platform will launch in early 2018.

The ability to access and review the data behind research is a well sought after, but often elusive, resource. In recognition of this, Scopus has been working to incorporate new tools that can make it easier to search and share data. As part of a new initiative introduced earlier this year, Scopus has established two key partnerships: Scholix and DataSearch. Each provide different but complementary ways to connect researchers to each other’s data.

OPERAS is a a distributed research infrastructure project in Europe to support the development of open scholarly communication.

The OPERAS Design Study is the outcome of the OPERAS-D project. The main part of the OPERAS Design Study is comprised of four studies that explore the landscape of OPERAS field of activity, establish the technical mapping of the OPERAS consortium, present a survey on users’ needs concerning scientific communication and academic publishing, and finally foresee the development of the governance scheme and business model of the future infrastructure within the ESFRI framework. The studies’ main finding is the fragmentation of OPERAS field of work. Thus, OPERAS vision and mission is integration.

Each year since 2013, Jisc Collections has asked UK institutions to submit data on their article processing charges (APCs). Last year, we published an analysis of APCs and subscription costs in the UK for the years 2013-2015.

As large publishers fight via legal means illegal scientific article downloading, such as via Sci-Hub, empirical findings show that over 85% of paywall-protected article catalogues are accessible through no-fee, controversial repositories. Major journal publishers deriving the majority of their revenues from traditional, toll-based, paywall-protected business models may need to revise their business strategies in response to illegal research-article sharing.