UKSG eNews 495

Will student, faculty and researcher preferences continue to be with ebooks if and when campuses fully open? Will we see print return? From the results of the Proquest surveys, it’s unlikely that print books will return to pre-pandemic levels. However, uncertainty about ebook costs and their availability for some disciplines may make print an ongoing necessity in some cases. One thing is clear: the pandemic, whilst being very challenging, rapidly advanced plans for providing more content electronically and having more engagement from faculty over resource list provision from the library. The surveys illustrate the ability of academic libraries to rapidly pivot their acquisitions strategies to meet fast-changing user needs and ensure that the library remains at the heart of teaching and learning.

A round up of the latest goings on at UKSG.

With over 15,000 respondents, this is the latest in a series of reports spanning 16 years identifying the trends in user discovery behaviour. The research has been carried out every three years since 2005 and maps the changing nature of how readers find academic content.

Substantial progress has been made in the three years since this policy was introduced. The percentage of open access scientific publications in France has risen from 41% to 56%. This second National Plan extends the scope to include source code from research, structures actions promoting data sharing and openness through the creation of the Recherche Data Gouv (Gov Data Research) platform, increases the number of transformative levers available to generalise the practice of open science.

The move is part of society publisher’s commitment to increase global equity and inclusion in publishing.

The MIT Press and the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) announced a three-year collective action agreement that provides Direct to Open (D2O) access for all fifteen member libraries.

DataSalon announced that both of their cloud-based systems, PaperStack and MasterVision, can now offer support for the reporting requirements created by Read & Publish deals – helping publishers in the move towards Open Access.

ISSN Centre and Springer have completed constructing a new, centralized process for the assignment of International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) to periodicals and books series published by Springer Nature and its brands.

Research4Life content portal is a hub for more than 132,000 books and journals related to teaching, research, and policymaking in health, agriculture, and environment and other life, physical, and social sciences, and legal information.

The new Web of Science simplifies how the index’s world-class data and analytics are presented, accessed and used, allowing for a smooth and intuitive user experience.