Publishers Category

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Publishers’ Group Reportedly Hires P.R. Firm to Counter Push for Free Access to Research Results

By
Karen Fischer
– February 13, 2007Posted in: Open Access, Publishers

Excerpt:
The Association of American Publishers has hired a public-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to counter the open-access publishing movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available to the public, the journal Nature reported on Wednesday.

The firm, Dezenhall Resources, designs aggressive public-relations campaigns to counter activist groups, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that monitors the public-relations business.

The firm’s founder and head, Eric Dezenhall, apparently has suggested that traditional publishers should link their business model with peer review and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles,” the Nature article says.

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/01/2007012601n.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 26, 2007

See the original article in Nature,
Published online: 24 January 2007; Corrected online: 25 January 2007 | doi:10.1038/445347a

PR’s ‘pit bull’ takes on open access: Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement.
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html

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Wiley Completes Acquisition of Blackwell

By
Karen Fischer
– February 13, 2007Posted in: Publishers

John Wiley & Sons this week announced that it had cleared all financial and regulatory hurdles and finalized its acquisition of Blackwell Publishing for a hefty purchase price of £572 million ($1.1 billion). With the deal now done, Blackwell’s publishing program will now merge with Wiley’s global scientific, technical, and medical business, becoming the largest of Wiley’s three business divisions, which also include Professional/Trade and Higher Education publishing.

Combined, Wiley and Blackwell publish approximately 1250 scholarly peer-reviewed journals, and over one million total pages, as well as an extensive collection of books. William J. Pesce, Wiley’s president and CEO, announced that Eric A. Swanson, Wiley senior VP of STM, will lead the merged business, and Blackwell CEO Rene Olivieri will serve as its chief operating officer. Pesce said that the merger will allow the company to “benefit [from] more investment in online capabilities than either could as separate entities.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 8, 2007

Planned Merger of 2 Big Journal Publishers Worries Many Academic Librarians

The venerable publisher John Wiley & Sons will celebrate its bicentennial next year, and it has already given itself a present: In mid-November, the company made the surprise announcement that it would purchase Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for £572-million, or roughly $1.13-billion, an acquisition likely to have broad consequences for the world of academic journals and libraries.

Assuming that the deal is completed, Wiley’s scientific, technical, and medical division will henceforth be known as Wiley-Blackwell. That combined division will publish more than 1,200 scholarly journals, bringing the company within shouting distance of the giants Reed Elsevier (2,200 journals) and Springer (1,500). Taylor & Francis, which made unsuccessful overtures toward Blackwell in 2002, will drop to fourth place, with 1,050 journals.

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/12/2006120402n.htm
The Chronicle Daily News, 12/4/06

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Editorial Board of Elsevier Journal Resigns in Protest

By
Karen Fischer
– September 6, 2006Posted in: Publishers

Another journal declaration of independence is in progress. Yesterday the entire editorial board of Topology resigned to protest Elsevier’s refusal to lower the subscription price.

Excerpt from the letter:

Dear Mr [Robert] Ross [of Elsevier Science],

We regret to have to tell you that we, the Editorial Board of Topology, are resigning with effect from 31 December 2006.

As you are well aware, the Editors have been concerned about the price of Topology since Elsevier gained control of the journal in 1994. We believe that the price, in combination with Elsevier’s policies for pricing mathematics journals more generally, has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology’s reputation in the mathematical research community, and that this is likely to become increasingly serious and difficult, indeed impossible, to reverse in the future.

As you know, we have made efforts over the last five to ten years to negate this effect….

The journal Topology has an illustrious history with which we, on becoming editors, were extremely proud to be associated. It owd its foundation to the inspiration and vision of the great Oxford topologist JHC Whitehead in the late 1950s, and the Honorary Advisory Editorial Board and also our predecessors on the Editorial Board have included some of the greatest names in 20th century mathematics. We believe that the journal’s ethos and structure, based around a group of editors making editorial decisions jointly in Oxford with the expert assistance and advice of highly eminent editors elsewhere around the world, has many strengths and has provided a great service to the mathematical community in the past. However we feel that Elsevier’s policies toward the publication of mathematics research have undermined that legacy.

Therefore, with great reluctance and sadness, we have made the difficult decision to resign.

[signed] Martin Bridson, Ralph Cohen, Nigel Hitchin, Frances Kirwan, Marc Lackenby, Jean Lannes, Wolfgang Lück, John Roe, and Ulrike Tillmann.

Open Access News, Aug. 11, 2006

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Three big publishers offer Open Access Options

By
Karen Fischer
– September 6, 2006Posted in: Open Access, Publishers

BMJ Journals Announces the Launch of Unlocked – a New Open Access Initiative

BMJ Journals, a division of the BMJ Group, today announced the launch of a new open access service, which, if supported by authors, will make some of the important medical research being published today freely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection.

Unlocked is a new service that gives authors the option to make their articles freely available online for a fee. Unlocked is available to any author publishing an article in a BMJ Journals specialty journal. This includes some of the world’s pre-eminent medical titles including: Gut, Heart, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Archives of Disease in Childhood, Thorax and Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Read more….
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3244.html

Cambridge Open Option

From August 14th 2006 authors submitting articles to selected Cambridge Journals will be able to make their articles freely available to everyone, immediately on publication. Building on the success of Breast Cancer Online, the first Cambridge Open Access project, and Neuron Glia Biology, which provides Open Access after 6-12 months, Cambridge Open Option introduces a new Open Access model to a further 15 journals from the Cambridge list.

Gavin Swanson, STM Editor-in-Chief at Cambridge Journals said: “I’ve been involved in the Open Access world for some time and the launch of Cambridge Open Option is the result of a great deal of painstaking research into best practice. I’m confident that we have a robust model that will benefit both authors and researchers equally. We’re hoping that this will become a major part of our journals publishing in the future and that it will help us give greater access to the results of scientific research reported in our journals.”

Read more…
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3253.html

Wiley Announces New Funded Access Service

Hoboken, N.J., August 7, 2006 – Global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced a new funded access service forauthors of journal articles. Through this new program, authors will have the option of paying a fee to ensure that their article is available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley InterScience , Wiley’s online publishing platform, as well as the author’s funding agency’s preferred archive if applicable.

“Wiley developed the funded access program as a response to journal authors whose funding might have certain requirements,” said Mike Davis, Vice President, Global Life and Medical Sciences. “For those authors who want to publish in a Wiley journal, and whose funding agency requires deposit in an archive, this new program supports these requirements.”

As an initial offering, funded access will be available for 45 biomedical journals. Only authors of primary research articles qualify for this new service, and only those authors whose articles have been accepted for publication will be offered the funded access option at the point when the article is accepted, to ensure that the funded access option has no influence on the peer review and acceptance process. Wiley will deposit the final PDF of the article into the funder’s archive; this is the final, authoritative version of the article, after peer review, editing, any final corrections, online and print formatting, and publication. The fee for ensuring articles are made available through the funded access program is $3,000 per article.

Read more….
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/3247.html

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