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 5.17. There are also signs that initiatives from both established and newer organisations are beginning to make a significant impact on how researchers in the UK and beyond discover, gain access to and manage the published resources that are relevant to their work. We have already noted that the major publishers—subscription-based and open access—are transforming the ways in which articles are presented online, with ever more sophisticated links and interactive features. Many publishers, libraries, and other intermediaries are developing systems to enable them to analyse patterns of usage and impact more deeply; and to present those to their users.

5.18. Established players are working together with new ones—such as Mendeley and Zotero—who are developing new services to help researchers to gather, organise and analyse published and unpublished resources more effectively, manage their workflows, and collaborate and share their work with others. There is continued experimentation with user ratings and comments, and the development of ‘altmetrics’ that measure impact based on readership and re-use indicators gathered from social media and collaborative annotation tools. The sharing of such metrics then acts as a filter in alerting readers to material that may be relevant and important to their work.

5.19. New journals open access journals have been launched recently both by established publishers—such as Nature Publishing Group, SAGE, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer—and also by new entrants such as PeerJ and eLife, a new journal to be published as a joint initiative between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. And the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions across the world engaged in high energy physics has recently announced the launch of a tendering process for open access publishing in its subject domain.

5.20. It is important that in the UK and elsewhere we sustain an environment that supports and encourages innovation of this kind from both new entrants and established players; and that innovation serves the interests not just of the research community, but all the other organisations and individuals who are interested in access to publications reporting the results of research.