Christian Gutknecht published an exciting posting on the Swiss EUR 57 million Elsevier deal in which he outlines the transformative Open Access agreement between Elsevier and swissuniversities. Since Germany has been trying for years to reach such a contract with Elsevier, it is worth comparing it with the two transformative contracts with Wiley and Springer Nature in Germany, which were reached and coordinated by Project DEAL.

While preparing a workshop I was looking for journal ratings & rankings in the Social Sciences & Humanities and would like to share my information here. At the same time, I would like to encourage readers to make additions to the comments. Social Sciences: Journal ratings & rankings GESIS List (Mostly German):

Heute erschien mein Interview mit Leonid Schneider über Paper Mills, die gegen Geld scheinwissenschaftliche Publikationen inklusive gefälschter Forschungsdaten erstellen und so das Publikationssystem korrumpieren. Diese Publikationen schaffen es in schöner Regelmäßigkeit in Peer-Review-geprüfte Journale. Betroffen sind aber nicht vorrangig die bekannten Predatory Publishers, sondern anerkannte Journale arrivierter Verlage.

Just as 2016, 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap 2020. It shows how many Open Access journals are published per country using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The heatmap can be found here or embedded some lines below.

The Forschungszentrum Jülich and Frontiers signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a German Consortium with the Open Access publisher Frontiers.

A contract study on the qualitative perception of Open Access was completed at the end of last year.

As the Open Access publication service F1000Research announced on January 10th it was acquired by one of the largest publishers of scientific content: Taylor &

Elsevier acquires the profiling service Parity. It is thus further expanding its existing portfolio of science management services. Elsevier acquires the profiling service Parity According to Elsevier’s press release Parity provides “high-accuracy entity resolution, profiling and recommendations for STM content and applications in the world of research.

At the beginning of June, Clarivate Analytics, vendor of the Impact database Web of Science, among others, informed about the launch of the Publisher Analytics Report. The press release mentions the following features prominently: “The ready-to-use reports provide a snapshot of journals’ performance and inform competitor analysis. They will help publishers to easily plan robust, evidence-based strategies, based on the publisher-independent”.

The Library Journal two days ago informed about an interesting patent granted to the Social Network ResearchGate: “ResearchGate Granted U.S. Patent 10,282,424: ‘Linking Documents Using Citations’”. The abstract describes the patent as follows…“Aspects of the present disclosure relate to linking documents using citations. A server accesses a stored document in a data repository.

According to a press release by Springer Nature there is a new contract of the group with Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The deal is based on the principle of  “read and publish” and shall fulfill the requirements of Plan S. As noted by Springer Nature the “agreement limits the costs of publishing all UK articles open access (OA) while maintaining access to all of Springer’s subscription articles.