Partnerships

Knowable Magazine Celebrates Two Milestones

AR News Company, Magazine, News, Partnerships

Nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews is pleased to announce that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation renewed its support of Knowable Magazine, as the freely available online publication turned two.

Knowable Magazine provides in-depth, intelligent journalism across a broad array of scientific disciplines. It launched in October 2017, with the goal to cultivate public understanding of science by making expert knowledge accessible to all.

“Knowable Magazine is off to a fast start. We are delighted to see this early effort grow into a powerful, lively and authoritative voice for understanding science. It is finding a wide audience that enjoys science; they benefit from the unique depth and breadth of Annual Reviews,” said Robert Kirshner, Chief Program Officer of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Science Program.

Annual Reviews President and Editor-in-Chief Richard Gallagher said: “We are deeply grateful to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their continuing support of $1.6 million over two years”.

Boosting the reach and impact of Annual Reviews articles – KUDOS for authors

Liz Allen Authors, News, Partnerships

Every once in a while, a digital research communication tool that serves a real need and is both well designed and easy-to-use comes along. This doesn’t happen every day!

Kudos-300x108

Recently, Annual Reviews introduced its authors to KUDOS, a tool that makes it simple for them to claim, explain and share their research. The service won a prestigious “Innovation in Publishing Award” in 2015 from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

We chose this service because although a lot of energy is directed towards writing and preparing the review, somewhat less is spent on arguably the most important part of the publishing cycle, namely sharing this knowledge with others thereby increasing its reach and impact.

As one author amusingly describes it: “Invitations to write an Annual Review article typically elicit some mix of thrill, dread, pleasure, indecision, burden, intimidation, and challenge—not unlike commencing one’s PhD or undertaking a skydive.” Durham W. 1999. Preface. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 28

Authors write reviews as a service to those in their discipline and society as a whole. Annual Reviews provides them with a concierge publishing experience. Our skilled editors are hands-on in terms of copyediting, layout and figure editing (see before and after below), resulting in compelling articles that are clearly presented for an expert and broad audience.

beforeandafter

To ensure visibility for these high-quality reviews, we invite our authors to register with KUDOS (which takes about 30 seconds) and share their work with the world. A helpful and short video about this free service can be found here. They can then claim their review/s and are prompted to:

  • Write a pithy headline
  • State what the article is about
  • Explain why it is important
  • Add, any additional perspectives that they wish to share

Within about 15 minutes or so, Authors have created an introduction about their article (which also links to the review itself) and they can then seamlessly share it on social media from the same page. The results (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) can be viewed and there’s even a link to the ISI citation count for that article.

And the best part? Although not everyone is an Annual Reviews author, anyone can sign up for KUDOS, the service is completely free to end-users.

Annual Reviews participates in OA Cooperative Study

AR News Announcements, Open Access, Partnerships

Image credit: Coaker’s Press, By Robert Hiscock, CC-BY-NC-ND.

Annual Reviews, a non-profit research publisher, is partnering with The Public Knowledge Project, Stanford University and SPARC in the OA Cooperative study.

This short update was written by Kamran Naim, Strategic Development Manager here at Annual Reviews and on the study project team with President and Editor-In-Chief, Richard Gallagher. 

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, this 2-year study seeks to examine alternatives to the predominant Article Processing Charge (APC) model in Open Access, which although proven to be effective in the sciences – particularly the biomedical sciences – is not workable for all disciplines, nor for monographs or secondary research publications such as ours. 

The study aims to examine and explore viable financial models for transitioning from subscription to open access models for these literature types. Although many research libraries are as willing to support open access as they are to pay for subscriptions, the best transition path between the two models is in need of further testing and analysis. Global subscription revenues in excess of ten billion dollars annually worldwide suggest that there is more than enough money being spent on scholarly publishing to fund universal Open Access.

Examples are emerging within the research library community that are leveraging a spirit of cooperation towards advancing Open Access. An example includes Knowledge Unlatched, where a few hundred research libraries have banded together to underwrite the cost of open access monographs from major scholarly publishers, again without charge to authors or readers. Other organizations doing interesting work in this regard include Open Library of Humanities and OAPEN. It’s great that a number of leaders of these organizations are also participating in the OA Cooperative study with Annual Reviews. 

This growing sense of cooperation signals that the time is right for systematic data-gathering, analysis, and trials of a cooperative publishing model. Accordingly, the research question of the OA Cooperative study considers whether cooperatives can offer economically responsible and sustainable open access to rigorously reviewed and professionally published research? Working in partnership with the project team, Annual Reviews is providing data to support the project in assessing the feasibility, as well as the structure, organization, and governance of such co-ops. 

Watch this space for further updates on the Study.