OASPA has been busier than ever recently, with staff experiencing increasing numbers of membership applications every month. With 2018 now in full swing, we’re pleased to announce that a number of new members have joined our organisation since the autumn of last year.
In the Small Professional Publisher category, we’re delighted to welcome four new members. The Journal of Health and Pollution is a World Bank and European Union funded quarterly journal of peer reviewed research and news published by Pure Earth, a global non-profit working to solve pollution problems in low and middle-income countries. The Internet Policy Review, a peer-reviewed online journal on internet regulation in Europe, specialises in clear, independent analysis of inter-European and pan-European digital policy changes. Growing quickly as a university press in recent years, the University of Huddersfield Press publishes an expanding collection of innovative open access research. The scholarly open access publishing arm of the University of Technology Sydney, UTS ePRESS, has particular strengths in the humanities, arts and social sciences.
Open access means more than offering access to current and quality research free-of-charge to all parties in the publication process. It means continuously improving access for the non-academic community via short publication formats, accessible language, a mix of papers undergoing robust peer review, and short comments and news articles. We are looking forward to working with others to turn common innovative open access ideas into practice.
Frédéric Dubois, Managing Editor, Internet Policy Review
New to the Medium Professional Publisher category is the Baishideng Publishing Group Inc, which currently publishes 43 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering a broad range of topics in clinical medicine, biochemistry and molecular biology. Our two new Large Professional Publisher members are Scandinavian University Press, who host Idunn, a digital publishing platform featuring 24 open access journals and 13 open access books, and Emerald Publishing, a UK-based global publisher founded in 1967 that champions new ideas to advance the research and practice of business and management.
The University of Huddersfield Press is proud to be joining OASPA. By publishing innovative research as open access we aim to improve access to scholarly work for the benefit of all, and look forward to working within the OASPA community.
Megan Taylor, University Press and Marketing Manager, University of Huddersfield Press
To our Other Organisation categories we welcome the Non-Commercial Stichting Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), a group of scholars and librarians – including OASPA member the Open Library of Humanities – aiming to help transform the conventions of scholarly publishing by following the principles of ‘Fair Open Access’ (read more about these here). We are also pleased to welcome Commercial Other Organisation Digirati, a digital consultancy based in Scotland that take a progressive ‘open innovation’ approach to building digital products and services.
Stichting Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA) is proud to be a member of OASPA as of this year. By joining, we also align our sister organisations to OASPA: Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), Mathematics in Open Access (MathOA) and Psychology in Open Access (PsyOA). We look forward to working together with other OASPA members.
Saskia de Vries, Project Manager, Stichting Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA)
Finally, we are delighted to have ten new Scholar Publisher members join OASPA. Publishing within Europe, Anafora is a non-profit scholarly journal published by a group of scholars affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek, Croatia. Both based within France, ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, and Mutual Images hosts analysis and discussion of the everchanging, multidimensional relations between Europe and Asia. In Belgium, Biotechnology, Agronomy, Society and Environment (BASE) publishes original articles in the fields of agronomic sciences, forests, nature and landscapes, environmental sciences and technologies, and chemistry and bio-industries.
Scholar joining us from Asia are the Bangladesh Journal of Pharmacology, the open access official publication of the Bangladesh Pharmacological Society which publishes articles, reviews, meta-analysis, clinical trials, and visual experiments, and the Journal of Mountain Area Research, which publishes original research from Pakistan on mountainous areas (especially the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas). From the Americas, the Brazil-based Scientia Medica is the peer-reviewed journal of the School of Medicine and the Hospital São Lucas of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul; Pathogens and Immunity is publishing original research and reviews that focus on microbial pathogens and host defenses with the support of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and the Richard J. Fasenmyer Foundation; and the Journal of Education and Teaching in Emergency Medicine is an open access, peer-reviewed journal-repository for emergency medicine educators based in the University of California’s Irvine Department of Emergency Medicine. Publishing within Potchefstroom, South Africa, Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal publishes contributions relevant to development in the South African constitutional state.
A warm welcome to all our new members!