IOP Publishing (IOPP) has signed three new Transformative Agreements (TAs) that will accelerate open access (OA) publishing and extend access to high quality research in the United States (US). The three-year read and publish (R&P) agreements with Princeton University, the University of Central Florida and Connecticut College offer unlimited publishing in all IOPP hybrid and gold OA journals.?
“A new global study from AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society (APS), IOP Publishing (IOPP) and Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA) indicates that the majority of early career researchers (ECRs) want to publish open access (OA) but they need grants from funding agencies to do so….
67% of ECRs say that making their work openly available is important to them. Yet, 70% have been prevented from publishing OA because they have not been able to access the necessary monies from funding agencies to cover the cost. When asked why ECRs favor OA publishing, agreeing with its principles and benefitting from a wider readership were cited as the top two reasons….”
“This week it was announced that IOP Publishing (IOPP) had signed a three-year “read and publish” transformative agreement with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) – the first such agreement for IOPP in North America. I posed a few questions about the agreement to Julian Wilson, IOPP’s sales and marketing director.”
Canadian institutions to benefit from IOP Publishing open access agreement for the first time
IOP Publishing (IOPP) is moving all its open access (OA) journals to transparent peer review, making it the first physics publisher to adopt the approach portfolio-wide.
Transparent peer review involves publication of the complete peer review process, from initial review to final decision.?This means that alongside the published article, readers can see a full peer review history, including reviewer reports, editor decision letters and the authors’ responses.
“Not-for-profit society publisher IOP Publishing (IOPP) and TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology have established a consortium agreement which enables researchers at participating German institutions to publish unlimited articles on an open access (OA) basis in 56 hybrid and 15 fully open access (OA) journals.??
The three-year transformative agreement brings the price of publishing services and reading access together in one central fee, eliminating any author-facing charges for OA publication in the eligible journals.?? …”
“IOP Publishing (IOPP) has joined the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), a collaboration between publishers, infrastructure organisations, librarians, and researchers to promote the open availability of abstracts.
IOPP will deposit abstracts of their scholarly communications with Crossref, the not-for-profit Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration agency bringing together abstracts in a common format in one searchable cross-disciplinary database.
By joining the initiative, IOPP will make all of its abstracts part of the fundamental metadata of the article so that they will be openly available and accessible to the scientific community for unrestricted machine reading. This expanded availability of article abstracts will boost the discoverability of scholarly research and increase their impact. …”
“To mark Open Access Week, which runs from 25-31 October 2021, IOP Publishing (IOPP) is planning to publish a series of video and interviews about open access, which you can find here….”
“Yesterday there was a big announcement from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) , namely that all its journals will switch to Open Access from 1st January 2022. This transition will affect the Astronomical Journal (AJ), the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), and the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (ApJS). Previously authors were able to opt for Open Access but from next year it will apply to all papers.
The positive aspect to this change is that it makes articles published by the AAS freely available to the public and other scientists without requiring the payment of a subscription.
On the other hand, these journals will require authors to pay a hefty sum, equivalent to an Article Processing Charge (APC), that increases with the length and complexity of a paper. AAS journals have in the past levied “page charges” from authors for standard (non-OA) publications. In the new regime these are merged into a unified scheme….
What’s on offer is therefore a form of Gold Open Access that switches the cost of publication from subscribers to authors. In my view this level of APC is excessive, which is why I call this Fool’s Gold Open Access. Although the AAS is a not-for-profit organization, its journals are published by the Institute of Physics Publishing which is a definitely-for-profit organization….”
“The largest funding body in the UK has announced a new open-access policy that will come into effect on 1 April 2022. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – the umbrella group for the UK’s seven research councils – will from that date mandate that all published papers written by researchers containing work carried out using UKRI cash must be free to read immediately upon publication. Yet the announcement has been met with concern by some publishers and researchers….”
IOP Publishing and the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB), in affiliation with the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, are launching a new open access journal covering all areas of basic and applied materials science and technology.
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Tell us about Materials Research Express (MRX)?
MRX is an open-access journal that focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Published by IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, it is devoted to publishing new experimental and theoretical research in the properties, characterization, design and fabrication of all classes of materials including biomaterials, nanomaterials, polymers, smart materials, electronics, thin films and more. The journal, which offers rapid peer review, has an international editorial board that is led by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Meyya Meyyappan from NASA’s Ames Research Centre in the US….”
“IOP Publishing has joined Research4Life, a multi-organisation partnership aiming to reduce the knowledge gap between high-income and low-and middle-income countries by making scholarly, professional and research information more accessible.
It means that IOPP’s journals – which span more than 40 subject areas reaching beyond physics and into materials science, biosciences, environmental sciences, mathematics, engineering and education– will be accessible to institutions and organisations in 120 lower income countries….”
“A key part of equality in open access is enabling as many authors as possible to publish on an open-access basis. There is also a wider ambition to be more inclusive and remove barriers to wider participation in science. At IOP Publishing, we have established a diversity and inclusion committee to make sure that anyone can become an author, reviewer or editorial board member across all our journals. We have also introduced a double-blind peer-review option on several of our journals. This is where the identities of the authors, their organization and other details that could identify the authors, such as where the study was conducted, are masked from the reviewers. This assures authors that their submission will be evaluated solely on the quality of the science.”
“IOP Publishing, the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics, has become the latest publisher to supply full-text articles to Jisc’s Publications Router for onward distribution to institutions’ open repositories. This helps the institutions capture and disseminate the articles their researchers have written, showcasing the results of their research programmes and helping them demonstrate compliance with funding bodies’ open access requirements….”