Editorial

Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today released the 2022 update to its annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR)™. The annual JCR release enables the research community to evaluate the world’s high-quality academic journals using a range of indicators, descriptive data and visualizations.

Karger Publishers has acquired the British company Research Publishing International (RPI) for an undisclosed amount. Together, RPI and Karger will support researchers and the Health Sciences/Healthcare ecosystem in making scientific findings more accessible and comprehensible to a wider audience.

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has published the first articles from the new, open access journal, Environmental Research: Climate featuring research from world-renowned climate scientists. The journal represents one of three new interdisciplinary titles for 2022 that will extend IOP Publishing’s Environmental Research series to six open access journals that provide universally accessible publishing options for the global environmental science community. 

Developed during the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, DORA commits to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. Under the agreement, participating publishers agree to provide a range of article-level metrics to encourage assessment based on the scientific content of the article rather than the journal in which it was published

The Nature Index Annual Tables, released today, examine the institutions and countries that contributed most to high-quality natural-sciences research in 2021. China had a strong year, second for research output overall, as measured by Share* and with 14.4% growth in output in 2021 compared with 2020, the largest increase among the top ten countries in the Annual Tables.

Springer Nature has made Nature Masterclasses’ on-demand online training content free to access for researchers in lower income countries through Research4Life. Nature Masterclasses offers highly targeted courses designed to enhance the skills and boost the confidence of early career researchers, with over 60,000 researchers globally having benefited from the platform to date.

De Gruyter, independent scholarly publisher and founder of the University Press Library distribution model, is launching De Gruyter eBound, a not-for-profit foundation, in the United States. The initiative’s goal is to support the publishing, sustainability, and accessibility of mission-driven scholarly monographs for not-for-profit and Open Access publishers.

Data released today shows that in 2021 Springer Nature’s Transformative Journals (TJs) published 40% more gold open access (OA) research articles than in 2020. 730 Springer Nature journals also met cOAlition S’s challenging TJ requirement targets, meaning that more Springer Nature titles achieved the required metrics than those from all other TJ publishers put together.

Jisc Collections and De Gruyter have signed an agreement to publish up to 30 eBooks in immediate Gold Open Access, crowdfunded by participating libraries.

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is pleased to announce the launch of two new journals this spring, ACS Applied Engineering Materials and ACS Applied Optical Materials. The journals will be guided by ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Editor in Chief Kirk Schanze, Ph.D., and each will be under the leadership of a deputy editor.

We have announced the upcoming launches of three new journals themed around sustainability, as part of our ongoing commitment to support the chemical sciences in facing up to global sustainability challenges.

Research Square Company and the Medical Agency for Research and Statistics (MARS) have signed a collaboration agreement to support the success of clinical and regulatory scientists in the Middle East and North Africa. Through this joint agreement, Research Square Company will support MARS’ training and consulting efforts through discounted services to MARS trainees via the company’s American Journal Experts (AJE) division. These services include English-language editing and translation, manuscript formatting, webinars, and conferences.