28 June 2010: OASPA welcomes two new members to the organization this month- the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) and Springer.
The learned society publisher IUCr publishes a total of eight peer reviewed journals, one of which is the highly popular open access title, Acta Crystallographica Section E. The journal has been open access since the start of 2008 and publishes approximately 4500 articles per year.
In describribing the IUCr’s open access program, Managing Editor Peter Strickland explains “As a small learned society publisher, working on behalf of crystallographers worldwide, our aim is to publish high-quality research articles and ensure that the articles and their associated data sets are widely read and used. We see open-acess publishing as a way of meeting this aim and, as a member of OASPA, look forward to learning from the experiences of other open-access publishers.”
Springer’s 2008 acquisition of BioMed Central marked the company’s entrance into the full open access publishing arena. This action was followed by the introduction of an open access publishing program over the last couple of years under the publisher’s own imprint, and today’s announcement regarding SpringerOpen: a suite of open access journals across disciplines. Forthcoming titles under Springer Open will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Commenting on Springer’s membership, Wim van der Stelt, Executive Vice President of Business Development states, “As the world’s largest open access publisher, it is only logical that Springer has joined OASPA. We will also continue to remain a committed member of the International
Association of STM Publishers, as we see that both organizations can contribute to best practices.”
“The growing OASPA membership represents an increasingly diverse set of publishers”, according to OASPA President, Caroline Sutton, “This is important for forming standards and best practices that are viable across different types of publishing organizations, in different subject areas and in different geographic areas. The OASPA board is pleased to welcome these two new publishers and looks forward to working with them to develop open access publishing in their respective areas.”
Tags: learned society, members, OASPA, Springer