News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Academic publishing lawsuit, Pledge to Open enters its second year, and the National Book Awards nonfiction longlist.

Posted on September 20, 2024 in News

Why Are Academic Publishers Facing a Lawsuit?

Many academics have raised concerns over equity in publishing and peer review, and now several publishers are being taken to court. As reported by Reuters, University of California Los Angeles professor Lucina Uddin has sued Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer for violating “antitrust law by barring simultaneous submissions to multiple journals and denying pay for ‘peer review’ services.” The lawsuit also claims that publishers prevent researchers from sharing their work during the peer review process. Several academic publishing stakeholders and Scholarly Kitchen chefs weighed in on the news, noting the voluntary nature of peer review and the role of preprints. David Crotty of Clarke & Esposito remarked that the lawsuit “is filled with contradictory arguments,” stressing that submitting to journals simultaneously would increase the strain on peer reviewers. That said, Alison Mudditt, CEO of PLOS, wrote that her “plea to us as an industry is that we hear, rather than dismiss, a set of genuine grievances about a broken system.”

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Taylor & Francis Launches Second Year of Pledge to Open and a New “How Equitable Is It” Tool

Taylor & Francis’s OA initiative Pledge to Open is entering its second year. T&F will release seven additional collections under the program and noted that Pledge to Open received support from 24 institutions during its pilot year. The collections cover timely topics including AI, sustainability, migration, and activism. T&F also announced that libraries can pledge to “choose perpetual access to 50 backlist titles per collection from a selection of 1,000 books related to the collection themes.” In other news, a working group of “librarians, library consortia representatives, funders and publishers” released a beta version of a “How Equitable Is It” tool to evaluate scholarly communication models. The tool considers seven factors including pricing, open research practices, and reading access, and is open for feedback until October 28th. Robert Kiley, Head of Strategy at cOAlition S and one of the co-Chairs of the Working Group, underscored that, “The Equity Tool launched today helps users consider a range of criteria to move away from inequitable article-based models and arrangements to facilitate more equitable participation in knowledge sharing.”

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UP News: OUP Layoffs, Leadership Changes at Princeton, and the University of Toronto Press Acquires Linguistics Titles

The Oxford University Press (OUP) USA Guild has issued a grievance following several layoffs including the North American Design and US Content Transformation and Standards teams. The Guild is requesting OUP to reinstate the workers, citing a violation of “the Collective Bargaining agreement that management and the union signed just three weeks ago.” The news comes after The Guild reached a bargaining agreement with the Press following a strike earlier this year. Next, the University of Toronto Press (UTP) announced that it acquired “over twenty journals and several hundred book titles” from the academic publisher Equinox Publishing’s linguistics catalogue. Antonia Pop, UTP’s Vice President of the Publishing Division, commented, “With this acquisition, we look forward to extending our commitment to excellence in the field of linguistics, and to welcoming such an esteemed group of international authors to our program.” Lastly, Tony Lutkus has been named the chief of North American sales at Princeton University Press (PUP). The first to step into this new position at PUP, Lutkus has previously served as president of Diamond Book Distributors and chair of the American Association of Publishers’ International Sales Committee.

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Clarivate Announces Primo Research Assistant and Kriyadocs and DataSeer Partner to Leverage AI

Clarivate has released Primo Research Assistant under its Primo Discovery solution. As explained by Clarivate, the assistant “provides immediate answers to natural language queries and offers expansive visibility into sources and references.” Yariv Kursh, Senior Vice President at Ex Libris, part of Clarivate, further stressed that the tool “harnesses responsible academic AI to ensure that students and researchers have access to reliable and trustworthy sources, helping to nurture their curiosity and confidence to push the boundaries of knowledge.” Next up, Open Science solution provider DataSeer is partnering with Kriyadocs, a tech platform for scholarly publishers, to leverage AI to improve data sharing. The collaboration will aid publishing workflows, “[integrating] DataSeer’s AI technology into the Kriyadocs Unified Publishing Ecosystem (UPE), offering seamless and powerful data sharing capabilities and integrity checks.”

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US National Book Awards Nonfiction Longlist and ALPSP Awards Recipients

The National Book Foundation has released a 10-title longlist for its nonfiction prize. Several critically acclaimed writers grace the list, with Publishing Perspectives’ Porter Anderson commenting that “the Nonfiction group may comprise the most accomplished writers’ corps of all five categories [of the US National Book Awards].” The ten books were narrowed down from an initial 671 and the winner will be announced on November 20th. Next up, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) announced the recipients of its 2024 awards. David Worlock, coined “the grand seigneur of strategic consulting in academic publishing,” took home the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing for his work on digitization. The PaperMill Alarm won the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. JSTOR Access in Prison was given the ALPSP Impact Award and The Company of Biologists’ publishing initiative, The Forest of Biologists, also received recognition.  

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