“Global independent academic publisher Sage has acquired IOS Press, an independent publisher founded in Amsterdam in 1987 that specializes in health, life, and computer sciences. With this move, Sage acquires nearly 100 journals and a frontlist of 70 plus books each year covering subjects such as neuroscience, medical informatics, cancer research, artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and the semantic web….”
“Around that time we realized the world lacked a comprehensive database of retractions. We saw how many were missing from sources researchers used, whether PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, or others – including Crossref, more about which I will say in a moment. We were cataloging them in spreadsheets ourselves, but couldn’t keep up.
The three foundations all agreed to support our work, not just the journalism, but to create what became The Retraction Watch Database, officially launched in 2018. Part of that funding was a grant to create a strategic plan for sustainability and growth. One of the pillars of that plan was licensing the Database to organizations – commercial and nonprofit – who could use it in products that would help researchers know when what they were reading had been retracted, among other purposes.
Those license fees – along with other income, particularly individual donations and a subcontract from a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) – have kept Retraction Watch and The Center for Scientific Integrity running for several years. We are deeply grateful for the support and show of confidence they represent.
But we also always wanted to make the Database available to as many people as possible, whether or not they had access to tools that licensed it, if we could find a financial model that did not rely on such fees. (We always provided the data free of charge to scholars studying retractions and related phenomena.)
Fast forward to today. We’re thrilled to announce that Crossref has acquired The Retraction Watch Database and will make it completely open and freely available….”
The Center for Scientific Integrity, the organisation behind the Retraction Watch blog and database, and Crossref, the global infrastructure underpinning research communications, both not-for-profits, announced today that the Retraction Watch database has been acquired by Crossref and made a public resource. An agreement between the two organisations will allow Retraction Watch to keep the data populated on an ongoing basis and always open, alongside publishers registering their retraction notices directly with Crossref.
by Cory Doctorow
Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to KKR, one of the world’s most notorious private equity companies. KKR has a long, long track record of ghastly behavior, and its portfolio currently includes other publishing industry firms, including one rotten monopolist, raising similar concerns to the ones that scuttled the PRH takeover last year.
[…]
By Elizabeth A. Harris, Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin
Paramount said on Monday it had reached a deal to sell Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the United States, to the private-equity firm KKR, in a major changing of the guard in the books business.
The deal, for $1.62 billion, will put control of the cultural touchstone behind authors like Stephen King and Bob Woodward in the hands of a financial buyer with an expanding presence in the publishing industry.
While private equity investors have had a significant footprint in the book business — different firms have owned literary agencies, publishing houses and the retailer Barnes & Noble — the acquisition of one of the largest publishers in the country vastly increases the hold of financial interests in the business.
[…]
Springer Nature today announces the acquisition of innovative digital writing aid, TooWrite. This is the latest addition to the publisher’s growing portfolio of digital solutions for academics designed to help improve their working lives.
[…]
London, UK and New York, NY — December, 1 2022. RSC comprises American Journal Experts (AJE), which provides best-in-class AI-powered and professionally delivered author solutions, and Research Square, the world’s number one multi-disciplinary preprint platform.
After a long partnership and period of partial ownership, Springer Nature has increased its investment in Research Square Company (RSC) to take full ownership.
The acquisition reflects the shared ambition of the two companies to provide faster, better, quality-assured author solutions. This includes helping authors improve their manuscripts prior to submission and share their research both before and after publication.
It will strengthen Springer Nature’s ability to provide solutions designed to better meet the needs of all researchers and bring forward the open science revolution. For example:
AJE’s best-in-class digital editing tools and leading Research Impact Solutions help authors get published and increase awareness of their research post publication
Research Square’s multidisciplinary preprint platform allows every author to enjoy the benefits of sharing their research early
The Emerald Group today announced they were acquired by Cambridge Information Group (CIG).
“Ultimately, Elsevier’s user acquisition and monetization strategy here is as sophisticated as anything we have seen in scholarly publishing to date. Open access advocates might be concerned about some of these directions, but my sense is that many of these scientists and librarians remain largely focused on trying to compete with, or at least influence, scientific publishing. Building businesses that support, and potentially monetize, researcher workflow is a very different animal. While the Center for Open Science and the SHARE initiative are trying to offer up counterweights, there is little evidence that the open access community as a whole is engaged with Elsevier’s transformation. Springer Nature’s sibling Digital Science is probably Elsevier’s foremost competitor in this space, albeit with a different investment and integration model….”
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers, announced the acquisition of BehavioSec®, an advanced behavioral biometrics technology provider. Solutions from BehavioSec will become a part of the Business Services group within LexisNexis® Risk Solutions.
Bloomsbury has acquired California-based academic publisher ABC-CLIO in a $22.9m (£17.3m) deal, expanding its academic and digital publishing presence in North America.
Located in Santa Barbara, the publisher produces a range of reference, non-fiction, online curriculum and professional development materials in both print and digital formats for schools, academic libraries and public libraries, primarily in the US.
“At COPIM, we have noted the recent acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley, which itself follows Knowledge Unlatched’s opaque transition in 2016 from a UK Community Interest Company (a non-profit organisation) into a German GmbH (roughly equivalent to a UK PLC, i.e. a for-profit company). This move by Wiley is one of several recent acquisitions of open access (OA) infrastructure by large commercial organisations, such as bepress by Elsevier in 2017, and F1000 Research by Taylor & Francis in 2020. It reflects an ongoing consolidation of research infrastructure by major publishing corporations, and in particular the increasing attempts to monetise and, potentially, monopolise the infrastructures of open knowledge dissemination.
From its beginning, COPIM has been driven by the belief, held by all its partners (a consortium of universities, libraries, scholar-led OA publishers and research infrastructure providers) that the infrastructure we rely on to publish and disseminate OA books should itself be open, and owned and governed by the research communities that use it. We have repeatedly cited the widely-quoted argument by Bilder, Lin and Neylon that ‘Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures’undefined and this motivates and shapes our work. The recent acquisitions of OA infrastructures by large for-profit corporations pose precisely this threat….”
A statement by the COPIM project addressing our stance towards the corporate acquisition of OA infrastructure, and the structures and safeguards we are putting in place to ensure that our infrastructure will remain community-owned and governed.
At COPIM, we have noted the recent acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley, which itself follows Knowledge Unlatched’s opaque transition in 2016 from a UK Community Interest Company (a non-profit organisation) into a German GmbH (roughly equivalent to a UK PLC, i.e. a for-profit company). This move by Wiley is one of several recent acquisitions of open access (OA) infrastructure by large commercial organisations, such as bepress by Elsevier in 2017, and F1000 Research by Taylor & Francis in 2020. It reflects an ongoing consolidation of research infrastructure by major publishing corporations, and in particular the increasing attempts to monetise and, potentially, monopolise the infrastructures of open knowledge dissemination.
From its beginning, COPIM has been driven by the belief, held by all its partners (a consortium of universities, libraries, scholar-led OA publishers and research infrastructure providers) that the infrastructure we rely on to publish and disseminate OA books should itself be open, and owned and governed by the research communities that use it. We have repeatedly cited the widely-quoted argument by Bilder, Lin and Neylon that ‘Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures’ and this motivates and shapes our work. The recent acquisitions of OA infrastructures by large for-profit corporations pose precisely this threat.
By contrast, the central philosophy of COPIM, which we have discussed publicly and written about extensively, is that of ‘scaling small’:
an alternative organisational principle for governing community-led publishing projects based on mutual reliance, care, and other forms of commoning […] this principle eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale. Instead, it puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community-driven projects that promote a bibliodiverse ecosystem while providing resilience through resource sharing and other kinds of collaboration.
“Global research and education leader Wiley today announced the acquisition of Knowledge Unlatched, an innovator in online open access solutions.
The open access movement promises to make more research broadly available to democratize information and to accelerate academic discovery. As the market for open access publishing grows, libraries and publishers are increasingly challenged to manage new workflows. Knowledge Unlatched helps libraries and publishers reduce complexity through seamless online services to approve, pay, and manage their open access transactions and maximize the impact of library budgets to make more content open access….”