Editorial

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), celebrates a significant milestone as it marks ten years of OA publishing in 2023. To commemorate this achievement, KU is thrilled to announce the launch of its tenth round of funding, which has to date supported the publication of over 4,000 scholarly books and 50 journals in a range of humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is pleased to announce a pilot project with Wiley to give libraries access to the publisher’s nearly 24,000 ebook titles as part of a shared evidence-based acquisition (EBA) program.

We are pleased to announce our participation in the recently launched Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund. Open Access (OA) publishing has transformed how scholars and the wider public access academic content. However, despite the many benefits of OA, the number of OA books published each year is still relatively low compared to OA journal articles.

For the first time, UKRI-funded report brings together views of 15 major stakeholders from across the UK research community. To gain an unprecedented insight into the UK’s academic research infrastructure assets, Jisc has collected the views of leading bodies from across the sector.

JMIR Publications and the Society of Digital Psychiatry (SODP) have announced a new partnership aimed at advancing research in the field of digital mental health. This collaboration will focus on supporting education and knowledge sharing in the fast moving world of digital psychiatry and establishing priorities for the space, including identifying current gaps in knowledge and determining areas for future study, with particular emphasis on addressing disparities in access to care. 

The Educational Research Institute of Slovenia has formed an institutional membership agreement for open access publishing with Frontiers. This institutional agreement means that eligible Educational Research Institute researchers may publish in any Frontiers journal at no cost to them and with a simplified process. Articles may benefit from a 10% membership discount. 

Oxford University Press (OUP) has today announced a new agreement with the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation (PALCI). Under the agreement, more than 500,000 users at PALCI’s member institutions will benefit from increased access to OUP’s high-quality scholarly content via Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO).

The Science family journals have announced a partnership with the nonprofit data repository Dryad that simplifies the process by which authors deposit data underlying new work – a critical step to facilitating data’s routine reuse. The partnership is yet another step taken by the Science journals to ensure data the scientific community requires to verify, replicate and reanalyze new research is openly available.

Today the British Ecological Society has published the results of a three-year randomised trial comparing double and single-anonymous peer review in the journal Functional Ecology. The findings indicate a reduction in reviewer bias when author identities are anonymised.

The quality and integrity of peer review in Higher Education research has been put firmly in the spotlight by the European Journal of Higher Education (EJHE), published by Taylor & Francis. All articles submitted from April 2023 will, if accepted, have their reviewer reports published at the same time, as part of a one-year pilot.

ChronosHub, the leading open-access management platform, is excited to announce the launch of its new submission user interface (UI) for publishers. The upgraded interface collects metadata via AI extraction from manuscripts, and verifies, corrects, and enriches the data, thereby solving issues upstream and avoiding unnecessary manual work for publishers later in the process.

Highly experienced integrity specialist, and Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Director - Chris Graf - becomes the latest appointee to the UK Committee on Research Integrity. Drawing on his extensive experience delivering on transparency, open research and publishing ethics, Graf will lend his knowledge to collaborate on ways in which to support, promote and align around research integrity across research and research publishing.