The OASPA Board is pleased to welcome Brill as a member for 2014. Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher spanning 20 subject disciplines. With offices in Leiden and Boston, Brill today publishes 200 journals and around 700 new books and reference works each year. Brill open access publications are made available through Brill Open on the Brill Online Books and Journals platform in all areas Brill publishes in: Humanities, Social Sciences, International and Human Rights Law and Biology.
In August 2013, Brill Open expanded to include books as well as book chapters. To date, Brill has published around 80 books in open access, several of which as part of ‘OAPEN-NL,’ a project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands. All titles published through Brill Open are available as part of the Brill Open E-Book Collection.
Authors can also publish their articles as open access in any of Brill’s 195 hybrid journals. Additionally, Brill’s six fully open access journals are searchable through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and its open access books through the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) of which Brill is one of the main sponsors.
Also joining OASPA in January 2014 is ProQuest, a company renowned for innovative content and technology solutions that increase the productivity of students, scholars, professionals and the libraries that serve them. ProQuest enables researchers to more precisely find and access relevant content which includes thousands of open access titles through a range of aggregated databases and notable research tools such as the Summon® Discovery Service.
In addition to integrating and aggregating open access content in many of its information products, ProQuest publishes Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy, an open access journal advancing and supporting environmental research since 2005.
“Open access plays an important role in academic publication and I am delighted that SSPP has received the commendation of OASPA,” Maurie Cohen, Director, Program in Science, Technology, & Society, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Editor, Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. “The journal aspires to consistently meet a rigorous standard of quality control while simultaneously bringing to light the pioneering work undertaken by scholars and policy practitioners seeking to address the sustainability challenges of the 21st century.”
The OASPA Board is delighted to also welcome BioOne as a member. BioOne launched its nonprofit open access journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene in 2013. A new, peer-reviewed scientific journal, Elementa was founded by BioOne in partnership with Dartmouth, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. As a multidisciplinary publication, Elementa features original research reporting on new knowledge of the Earth’s physical, chemical, and biological systems; interactions between human and natural systems; and steps that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to global change.
“Elementa fully supports BioOne’s mission to explore economic models and strategic partnerships that balance the needs of all stakeholders,” says President/CEO Susan Skomal. “Moreover, such a dynamic partnership with libraries ensures that we keep our focus on the publication of timely, high quality research to advance the intellectual agenda of science.”
OASPA is pleased to also now have Journal of Terrorism Research join as a Scholar Publisher member. This journal was launched in 2010 by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, based at St. Andrew’s University. Founded in 1994, the Centre is Europe’s oldest for the study of terrorism. The aim of this Journal is to provide a space for academics and counter-terrorism professionals to publish work focused on the study of terrorism, drawing together the different fields of research.
The 3 new professional in particular reflect the steady growth in support that OASPA has received from the publishing industry since the organization was founded in 2008. In a blog post in December 2013 it was shown that a large number of organizations had joined the association in recent months. Figure 1 below shows that there is now a higher proportion of professional publisher members within OASPA.
Figure 1. Composition of OASPA Membership yearly since its foundation in 2008
Membership numbers appeared to plateau in 2013, despite many new organizations joining, and this was largely due to work carried out to review OASPA’s existing membership and to ensure that members meet the current membership criteria. The losses and gains per year are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Gains and losses per year of publisher member organisations
For the OASPA Board,
Claire Redhead, Membership and Communications Manager
