Elsevier

Many academic authors by now have heard the phrase "predatory publishers." It's usually associated with a list of fraudulent  pseudo-publishing operations maintained by Jeffrey Beall, whose crusade to name and shame these shady opportunists has made it to The New York Times. What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue stream that can be both open and closed - earning money through subscriptions and author fees.

Dutch universities have vowed not to soften their groundbreaking demands for publishers to permit all papers published by their academics to be made open access for no extra charge.

In January last year, Sander Dekker, the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, decreed that 60 per cent of Dutch research articles must be open access by 2019 and 100 per cent by 2024. Dutch university presidents responded by agreeing to make their renewal of subscription deals dependent on publishers taking steps to realise this goal.

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced it added five new subject areas to its Legacy eBook Collection on ScienceDirect.

One form that the sharp competition in journals publishing takes is spirited auctions for the rights to the publications of professional societies. The head of a scientific society sometimes stumbles into this situation like a yokel coming into the big city for the first time. "They are really proposing to pay us that much? And with all these guarantees????" Yes, it is surprising to see what the commercial value of highly specialized research publications has become. The reason for this is that the largest publishers know very well what the prize is

The latest interviewee in our What is a Publisher Now? series is Gemma Hersh, Policy Director of academic publishing giant Elsevier. Next month Gemma will appear at the ALPSP International Conference in a session called 'Welcoming the Robots', in which she will discuss the currently hot topic of data mining. Gemma was instrumental in Elsevier's recent launch of its new policy on data mining. Ahead of ALPSP we caught up with her to learn more about data mining, wits potential importance and what publishers are doing to address it.

Google is allegedly working on a free, open access platform for the research, collaboration and publishing of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

At least, that is apparently what one individual wants us to believe. Wired.co.uk is in possession of a document, sent anonymously, detailing how "Google Science" would bring together existing services such as Google Docs, Google Plus, YouTube and more to create a platform that challenges the paid-for model of scientific publishing and provides academics with an opportunity to connect with each other more efficiently.

Yoav Lorch explains how Total Boox’s pay-as-you-read model is intended to meet the digital age expectations of ease and immediacy.

Digital Science, a division of the Macmillan publishing giant, has invested an undisclosed amount in London startup called WriteLaTeX, which provides a collaborative paper-writing tool for researchers called Overleaf.

Overleaf is a WYSIWYG editor that allows researchers to work together on scientific documents that use the LaTeX markup language - ubiquitous in the physical sciences in particular - for displaying and typesetting formulae.

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), an industry leader in organizing and converting content into digital formats, announced today its collaboration with Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, as their new partner in a multi-year conversion initiative to enrich and enhance content on the Scopus database.
 

Starting with courses for nursing and health professions students, Elsevier will use Knewton's infrastructure to power personalized digital solutions that continuously adjust to each individual's unique learning needs. "Today, the demand for health and medical professionals around the world is growing rapidly, and higher education institutions need the best materials to help students prepare for careers in the health industry," John Danaher, President, Elsevier Education, said in a statement. "Our Knewton-powered solutions will help transform health science education for professors and students, inside and outside the classroom.