Scholastic Trade announced a number of promotions and new hires. Dan Moser has been promoted to director of field sales & special markets; Jarad Waxman to director of library sales, direct & wholesale; Rachel Matson to assistant editor, Cartwheel & Orchard Books; and Jeremy West to coordinator, global licensing, media & brands.
In new hires, Hannah Frank has joined Scholastic as assistant manager, social media. She was previously at Penguin Children’s. Meghan Templehof has joined as designer for Klutz. She was previously a freelance designer at Big Duck and Mudpuppy. Abha Dasgupta has joined as designer for Klutz. Previously, she was a designer and crafter for Kiwi Crate and Mattel. Anna Membrino has joined as editor, Cartwheel and Orchard. She was most recently at Random House Children’s. Katy Coyle has rejoined as marketing operations specialist. She was previously a freelance copywriter for the publishing industry.
University Presses
Northern Illinois University Press will become an imprint of Cornell University Press on July 1. NIUP will “retain an acquisitions editor and a faculty press board,” with Cornell handling editing, production, design, marketing, distribution, and sales. NIUP will continue to publish approximately 20 titles per year in its Slavic, Orthodox Christian, and Southeast Asian series, along with other subject areas. Cornell University Librarian Gerald Beasley says in the announcement, “This collaboration provides a sustainable model for university press scholarship going forward.”
Initiatives
James Patterson will continue his Patterson Partnership with Scholastic Book Clubs, now in its fifth year, pledging another $1.25 million to classroom libraries. The program will award 4,000 teachers across the country individual grants of $250, matched by bonus points from Scholastic Book Clubs to help them buy books and other materials. In a new initiative this year, $250,000 will be allocated to 500 “new” teachers with three years of experience or less, who will each receive $500 and 500 bonus points.
Scams
The Federal Trade Commission has won a summary judgement in US District Court against an India-based publisher of online academic journals, hitting the company with a $50 million fine and a permanent injunction. The OMICS Group claimed its journals were peer-reviewed, yet sometimes published articles the day after submission. Journalists submitted nonsense papers that were granted review, and scientists who were listed as editors in OMICS publications reported that they had never received published papers for review. Thomson Reuters, which evaluates the quality of academic journals and assigns them an impact factor, didn’t include OMICS—so the company created its own rating system and then advertised its self-calculated high impact factor, among many other fraudulent business practices resulting in the FTC slap down.