Springer

The 20th anniversary of the first World Water Day is March 22nd. The United Nations has specifically highlighted the importance of this vital resource by declaring 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation. Springer is underscoring this initiative by launching a new, interdisciplinary platform on water at springer.com/aboutwater. Springer’s new Water Program brings together Springer publications from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Researchers, policymakers and administrative decision makers, engineers, lawyers and water sector experts can access interdisciplinary specialist information to help them make far-reaching, sustainable decisions. The content will be drawn from more than a thousand new specialist articles from journals and books each year. The most popular water-related downloads from journals are posted on the website and can be accessed free of charge at any time. Open access articles are also clearly marked and available to anyone interested.

Pearson, the British media conglomerate, said Thursday that it was in talks to combine its Penguin publishing house with Random House, owned by Bertelsmann of Germany.

The deal, if completed, would bring together two of the biggest book publishers in the world, uniting Penguin and its iconic orange logo with the owner of Crown Publishing and Knopf Doubleday. The combination would create a division with greater scale that could compete in a rapidly evolving e-book market.

Apress, a leading publisher of technology books, announces the launch of ApressOpen, a program that offers technology companies and professionals the opportunity to publish technical and business content under an open access model. With ApressOpen, content will be freely available through multiple online distribution channels and electronic formats with the goal of disseminating professionally edited and technically reviewed content to the worldwide community.

Today Springer will begin migrating its global library customers to its new and improved version of its platform, SpringerLink. The platform was re-engineered with a focus on improving the user experience based on three principles: speed, simplicity and optimization.

Springer and the British Society for Immunology (BSI) have entered into an agreement to publish six books per year, to be included in Springer’s long-running book series, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. The edited volumes and monographs by renowned scientists will present the latest scientific advances in immunology research.

Springer will publish a series of books in cooperation with The Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF)  starting in 2013. Four books will be published annually, and will be included in the Springer series Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. The scope and focus of the volumes will encompass important cohesive themes in the area of breast cancer research, with the aim to conceptually advance the field.

I have often reflected on a passage from Jared Diamond's magisterial ”Guns, Germs, and Steel” when the question of the relative success of for-profit and not-for-profit (NFP) publishing enterprises comes up. Although there are some conspicuous exceptions, most of the big dogs in scholarly communications are commercial enterprises.  What is it about the for-profit world of publishing that has enabled it to become dominant over its well-intended, hard-working fellows in the NFP camp?

Effective 16 July 2012, Springer Science+Business Media has acquired the works of Canopus Academic Publishing Ltd. (CAP), a UK-based physics and astronomy publisher. CAP is a sister company of Canopus Publishing Ltd. The acquired assets consist of more than 50 published and contracted, or planned, monographs, proceedings, and major reference works such as the recently published Handbook of Visual Display Technology. The titles will become part of Springer’s physics portfolio.

IF THERE is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense. And science advances through cross-fertilisation between projects. Barriers to that exchange slow it down.

There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government.

The European Union, which controls one of the world’s largest science budgets, said on Tuesday it would give free access to all research funded by European taxpayers, in a move that could hit the profits of scientific publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Wiley and Springer.

Plans by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to release for free and to a wider audience articles usually held by expensive academic journals would benefit innovation, but would force publishers, which currently generate about $8bn in revenues, to revolutionise their business models, analysts said.