Industry Leadership
IEEE Conducts Search for New Executive Director
IEEE, Voting Member Organization, News Release, April 25, 2022
IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, today announced that the tenure of Stephen Welby, IEEE Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, will conclude on 1 January 2023.
Mr. Welby joined IEEE as Executive Director in 2018.
The IEEE Board has retained Korn Ferry to conduct the search for a new Executive Director.
Robert Sellers to be Appointed as Member of The President's Committee on the National Medal of Science
University of Michigan Library, L.S.A. Member, Press Release, April 5, 2022
On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, President Joe Biden announced his intent to appoint several individuals to serve in key roles on the President’s Council on the Commission of Fine Arts, the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science, and Sports, Fitness & Nutrition.
Robert Sellers, Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion, Chief Diversity Officer, and Charles D. Moody Collegiate Professor of Psychology will be appointed as a member of the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science.
Open Access, Open Science
Penn Libraries Joins Elsevier Open Access Pilot
University of Pennsylvania Libraries, L.S.A. Consortia Member, Press Release, April 18, 2022
The Penn Libraries is pleased to join Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth, and other members of the NERL consortium on a first-of-its-kind open access agreement with Elsevier, the largest academic publisher in the world. The agreement was negotiated by a committee made up of representatives of NERL consortium members, including Katie Brady, the Penn Libraries’ Head of E-Resources and Licensing. “I’m delighted by this innovative agreement, which takes a completely novel approach to open access,” says Brigitte Weinsteiger, Gershwind and Bennett Family Associate Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications, who serves on the NERL Program Council.
As part of this three-year pilot, authors who have published with many Elsevier journals and who were affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania at the time of publication will retroactively have their articles made open access. For each year of the agreement, Elsevier will flip five years of publications; that means that by the end of the pilot, 15 years of published work, constituting tens of thousands of articles authored by leading researchers, will be newly available to everyone at no cost to them and regardless of institutional affiliation.
Springer Nature expands fully OA portfolio with new medical technologies title
Springer Nature, Voting Member, Press Release, April 5, 2022
As the largest publisher of open access (OA) primary research, Springer Nature continues to explore new outlets and platforms for the advancement of scientific discovery. BMC’s (part of Springer Nature) latest addition to the fully OA journal portfolio BMC Digital Health, is a key example of that. Providing a venue for research on virtual healthcare, wearable technology, as well as the role of social media and other communications technology in digital health - this journal will sit at the cutting edge of research around developments in digital medical practice.
Speaking on the launch of the new title, Maria Hodges, Executive Editor at BMC said:
“BMC has been leading on open access publishing for more than 20 years, having been the first commercial publisher to pioneer a sustainable OA model. That model soon became the industry standard, and today we continue to take a progressive, innovative and community led approach, expanding our commitment to open research. Joining our portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, Digital Health is an exciting new area. The journal will enable multiple stakeholders - from clinicians and researchers to policymakers and health informaticians - to connect, discover and access information that can transform medical and health practices.”
Wiley journal renewal offers open access publishing options
John Wiley & Sons, Voting Member, News Announcement, April 5, 2022
As part of Washington State University Libraries’ renewal of their Wiley journal contract, WSU authors can now have articles published in roughly 1,400 different Wiley journals using an open access license without paying an article processing charge (APC). The service is available until the end of 2024, barring a cancellation of the Wiley package.
To cover publication costs, Wiley open access journals typically charge a publication fee. The APC is the price an author, institution, or funder pays on acceptance for publication of an open access article.
Leading Nonprofit Science Publisher to Make All Content Freely Available through New Open Access Model
Annual Reviews, Voting Member, Press Release, April 5, 2022
Today, the leading nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews announced that over the next 18 months they will make their entire portfolio of 51 academic journals freely available to everyone under a new model called Subscribe to Open. These highly cited journals cover topics across the sciences, including astronomy, environmental science, genomics, marine science, public health, and sociology.
Last year, Annual Reviews published 1,200 articles that synthesized and integrated information from more than 144,000 individual research publications. “Each article is a treasure trove of knowledge that captures the current understanding of a topic and helps map out the future of science,” said Annual Reviews President and Editor-in-Chief Richard Gallagher. “By making them available to all academics and students, wherever they live and work, and also to a broader audience of policy makers and activists, corporations and workers, doctors and patients, we can contribute to more rapid and inclusive societal progress based on research.
Partnerships and Collaborations
GOBI® Library Solutions from EBSCO Partners with Knowledge Unlatched to Support Open Access Initiatives in Academic Libraries
EBSCO Information Services, Voting Member, Press Release, April 25, 2022
GOBI® Library Solutions from EBSCO (GOBI Library Solutions) now supports the Knowledge Unlatched (KU) Open Access (OA) e-books funding model, providing the opportunity for academic libraries to support OA funding initiatives within their GOBI workflow. The addition of the Knowledge Unlatched Open Research Library E-Book platform will make the complete collection of Knowledge Unlatched OA crowdfunding products available to GOBI customers worldwide.
Knowledge Unlatched is a worldwide service provider that values the development and visibility of Open Access e-books and provides libraries with a convenient place to support OA collections and models. Knowledge Unlatched makes scholarly content freely available, supporting the development of the OA infrastructure and bringing scholarly content to communities who otherwise would not have access to such materials.
ORCID and OA Switchboard work to “connect the dots” of PIDs in the Open Access Journey
ORCID, Inc., Voting Member, Blog Posting, April 19, 2022
Open scholarly infrastructure organizations collaborate to navigate the OA research and publishing maze to help solve compliance with emerging requirements.
We are excited to announce the first of a series of planned collaborations between ORCID and the OA Switchboard with the launch of ORCID-enabled smart matching in OA Switchboard. With their April 2022 release, OA Switchboard users will be able to leverage authoritative affiliation data from authors’ ORCID profiles to corroborate affiliation or organizational identifiers (such as ROR or Ringgold IDs) and ensure more accurate routing of the messages being shared between participants throughout the Open Access (OA) research cycle and publication journey, ultimately resulting in more complete and better quality metadata in the OA Switchboard messages for each article published.
PLOS and Kudos team up to break boundaries and empower researchers
Public Library of Science (PLOS), Voting Member, Blog Post, April 4, 2022
Kudos, the award-winning service for helping more people find, understand and use research, has today announced a new partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the non-profit Open Access publisher. PLOS authors will benefit from additional audience growth via Kudos’ research showcases; PLOS editorial and marketing teams will gain additional insights into authors’ communication activities and networks, enabling them to better support and amplify these.
The companies share a focus on transformation in research communication. Kudos has demonstrated the value of summarizing research and promoting it to broader audiences, both within and beyond academia; analysis shows articles showcase via Kudos achieve significantly higher usage.
Grants and Awards
Ohio University Libraries’ Mahn Center receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant
Ohio University, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, April 18, 2022
Ohio University Libraries is pleased to announce that Miriam Nelson, director of the Mahn Center, Preservation and Digital Initiatives, has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The $50,000 grant will be used for a preservation assessment to create a roadmap for the digitization of more than 2,000 audiovisual materials from the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection. The project also seeks to create additional access points to a growing digital collection of non-audiovisual materials by working with The Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance to collect expert-sourced metadata.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was created as an independent federal agency in 1965 to “preserve America’s rich history and cultural heritage, and encourage and support scholarship and innovation in history, archaeology, philosophy, literature and other humanities disciplines.”
Libraries, Collections, & Archives
Digitization Project to Preserve Senate Recordings from the 1950s and ’60s
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, April 20, 2022
The University of Tennessee Libraries was awarded a $49,200 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources* to digitize fragile audiovisual recordings related to the US Congress of the 1950s and ’60s, including film and audio from investigations, interviews, and campaigns of US Senator Estes Kefauver, and recordings of the 1953–1954 Army–McCarthy hearings.
The project, titled “A More Comprehensive Picture: Saving the Audiovisual Records of Congressional Anti-Corruption Efforts in the Papers of US Senator Estes Kefauver and Ray Jenkins,” will digitize materials from UT’s Modern Political Archives. Modern Political Archivist and Associate Professor Kris Bronstad is principal investigator for the grant project. Bronstad prepared the grant proposal with help from Mark Baggett, Emily Gore, Jennifer Beals, Holly Mercer, and UT’s Office of Research.