The Brief

Silverchair announces a major investment from Thompson Street Capital Partners (TSCP). The central tension in OA publishing comes to the fore with the resignation of four editors of a prominent journal. The new OSTP open science policy continues to dominate the conversation. Firms focusing on Author Experience (AX) are gaining competitive advantage over those that are moving more slowly.

This special single-topic issue of The Brief analyzes the August 2022 public access memorandum issued by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. We review the memorandum itself, its accompanying impact statement, and its likely implications for publishers and societies.

The Lancet’s long-term strategies come to fruition. Clarivate simultaneously expands the impact factor (to more journals) while reducing it (down to a single decimal place). Does success in scholarly communications require disruption?

A year into its Transformative Journals route to compliance, cOAlition S revises its requirements. Does the list price for a journal subscription really mean anything anymore? An open data policy without monitoring and enforcement is not really an open data policy. And have postdocs finally recognized the realities of the academic job market and fled elsewhere?

Meeting presentations are increasingly being recorded, preserved, and made publicly available in perpetuity. But do some things work better when they’re ephemeral? CCC’s purchase of Ringgold offers a contrast between the benefits of open, community-owned infrastructure and the speed and robustness of private efforts. And almost ten years after its release, just what does it mean to become a DORA signatory?

Publishers navigate Russian sanctions and make hard decisions in an increasingly fragmented market for scholarly content. BOAI at 20: new recommendations and a continued anti-commercialism. cOAlition S releases a new toolkit. Elsevier buys Interfolio. Wiley has a new ticker. Annual Reviews embraces S2O. James Daunt is succeeding.

Should SPARC eat its own (transparency and openness) dog food? Robert-Jan Smits returns! Plus upheaval at OSTP, NIH’s new open data policy is not that open, and a verdict for the ResearchGate lawsuit.

Is Elsevier creating a new “supercontinent”? Why is Wiley investing so heavily in “services”? What do transformative agreements actually transform? Plus Maryland’s ebook law, a new “Journal Comparison Service” from cOAlition S, Inside Higher Ed acquired by THE, Plus NEJM launches a new title and other Briefly Noted stories.

Facebook has a new company name that will be familiar to readers of The Brief. Wiley continues to fill out its services portfolio, with acquisitions of Knowledge Unlatched and eJournalPress. Meanwhile, ResearchGate strikes new deals for OA content and Martin Eve and Anthony Cond provide a look at the state of play for OA monographs. The flurry of M&A activity in 2021 continues.

The secret behind MDPI’s extraordinary growth, Plan S’s unusual theory of pricing, Sci-Hub reboots (and seeks donations), preprints become a more accepted part of the scientific and scholarly workflow, supply chains for books hit snarls, M&A accelerates, and more.