In the last few months at ScienceOpen, we have rolled out an incredible number of new features for our users. Now, we feel it is time to take stock, and reflect on how you are all using them to help enhance your research. We want to recognise some of the valuable work from the global research community in helping to make science more open!
There are now 177 excellent research collections published on ScienceOpen, each with our pretty slick new collection statistics. With this, we want to highlight just a few of the latest collections that have really caught our eye. Here, the collection editors have each done exceptional work in curating and promoting research to create a valuable resource for their communities.
Take a dive into one of the latest collections all about the world of sponges!
For researchers, scientific integrity and communication have never been more important. This collection contains some excellent articles on statistics and data visualisation and data and code sharing.
Part of the new SAXS collection series, this automatically updates with the most recent publications in the field. A fantastic educational resource for Chemistry students.
In the current ecosystem of scholarly communication, effective infrastructures for the responsible and open dissemination of intellectual output are an inevitability, especially for research institutions.
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is one of the biggest research institutes in Europe with about 5,900 employees and publishes its own open access journals.
At ScienceOpen, we are always looking for ways to help maximize the visibility of institutional research output. Today, we are happy to announce that the two Forschungszentrum Jülich open access journals, Journal of large-scale research facilities and Collective Dynamics, are now indexed on ScienceOpen. Here we have compiled a brief description of both journals.
Instruments with DOIs: Journal of large-scale research facilities
The Journal of large-scale research facilities allows large-scale equipment to be cited properly by assigning DOIs to the articles describing them. It covers large-scale equipment from all scientific disciplines and is also mostly intended for use by scientists not affiliated to the institution operating the facilities (dedicated user operation). Furthermore, it provides operators of large-scale research facilities with the opportunity to describe their equipment. In order to keep the focus on the facilities themselves, all articles are published in the name of the operating institution (corporate author). There are now descriptions of more than 120 large-scale facilities from the Helmholtz Association, the large scientific organization of which Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is a member.
Among the facilities covered by the journal are:
MARIA, the magnetic reflectometer with high incident angle
MEPHISTO, a facility for particle physics with cold neutrons
TOFTOF, the cold neutron time-of-flight spectrometer
GALAXI, the gallium anode low-angle x-ray instrument
BALU, the largest autoclave research facility in the world
Dr. Wolfgang Häußler shows RESEDA on a lab course at Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (source).
Make them citable
Assigning DOIs (digital object identifiers) to research facilities and integrating them into the common system of linking scholarly references makes them:
Easier to find, cite, link, and identify.
Easier to track their usage and trace research networks to the facility it is used by.
Easier to track their evaluations and assess their impact.
Additional benefits include:
Users of the facilities can cite the equipment unambiguously in their publications with the aid of the article.
An additional benefit for users is that they do not need to repeat the description of the instrument in each of their papers.
Research on the crossroads and beyond: Collective Dynamics
The peer-reviewed open access journal Collective Dynamics publishes the latest innovations in the fields of pedestrian dynamics, crowds, vehicular traffic, and other systems of self-driven particles, such as molecular motors, animal groups, or agents. Articles are written in a way that makes them accessible to a wide range of scientific disciplines.
How energy consumption of both conventional and electrical vehicles can decrease considerably in oversaturated city traffic implementing synchronized flow patterns rather than moving queues at traffic signals.
We are in the midst of a global information and knowledge crisis. Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, and renewable energies.
At ScienceOpen, we want to play our part here. We have built an automatically updating research collection on climate change for anyone and everyone. It has almost 7,500 research articles, each of which are Open Access. This means they are freely available for anyone to read, re-use, and share without restriction!
Collection statistics – growing every day!
The collection already has 80,000 views, demonstrating the power of our collections features, and joins more than 150 others so far on ScienceOpen!
Research on emerging green technologies such as renewable energies, low-impact development strategies, advanced materials, smart water, and waste water management and remanufacturing is indispensable in tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues through continuous technological advancement.
Improving scientific literacy in these evolving fields is crucial, and at ScienceOpen we are helping to provide basic access to the latest important research.
Our recent additions of 2 publisher-led and 2 researcher-led collections bring together a selection of the latest innovations in the fields of energy engineering and management and ecology. They help us rethinking the relationship between our built and natural environment in the context of grand global challenges and offer life greening solutions for a sustainable social civilization.
This year in our Open Science Stars series, we’ve heard from researchers in Europe and Asia and their experiences of the publishing world, as well as from funders like the Gates Foundation. Today, we’ve interviewed Jonathan Peelle, a cognitive psychologist working in the Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University in Saint Louis. Jonathan recently built a collection on Neuroimaging Methods (ways to look inside your brain..), at ScienceOpen, so we decided it would be nice to turn the tables and pick his brain instead to learn about his research background and interests in open science!
Hi Jonathan! Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
My research is focused on the neuroscience of language processing, and how sensory and cognitive systems interact to enable communication. We are interested in questions like:
How can we understand people we’ve never heard before?
Why is having a conversation in noise harder for some people than for others?
How similar is brain activity across a group of people?
My lab spends a lot of time studying people with hearing loss and cochlear implants because of the profound effects these have on sensory processing. We rely on converging evidence from behavioral studies, structural MRI, and functional neuroimaging.
MRI scan of human head in a patient with benign familial macrocephaly (Source)
Today we are pleased to announce the winners of the April round of our free Open Access indexing competition.
These journals come from around the world, and by offering free-to-publish Open Access options for researchers, we in turn offer them free integration into our platform to help build their status and visibility.
The following journals will all become part of our next-generation indexing and discovery platform:
Published by the Russian New University, this journal is devoted to cardiological issues with special focus on cardiovascular system performance and diagnostics. The title of the journal, Cardiometry, is a new field in cardiology providing application of the most up-to-date technologies of measurements of heart and cardiovascular system performance parameters and considered as an interdisciplinary scientific field joining cardiology, biophysics, biomechanics, IT and metrology.
Published by European Publishing, this journal encompasses all aspects of tobacco use, prevention and cessation that can promote a tobacco free society. Their aim is to foster, promote and disseminate research involving tobacco use, prevention, policy implementation, disease development- progression related to tobacco use, tobacco use impact from the cellular to the international level and the treatment of tobacco attributable disease through smoking cessation.
Published by the University of Tehran, Desert covers all aspects of environmental management of arid, semi-arid and desert environments and addresses issues ranging from basic to socio-ecological systems of arid, semi-arid and desert ecosystems.
Published by the Instituto Florestal (Institute of Forestry) of São Paulo, this journal is dedicated to works in Forestry Sciences and related sciences written in Portuguese, English or Spanish. It publishes articles in the following thematic areas: urban tree planting, protected areas and nature conservation, wildlife conservation, ecology, forestry policy and economy, genetics and forest improvement, geography and environmental planning, hydrology, plant taxonomy and phytogeography and forest products technology.
All of these journals fulfil the double challenge of publishing high-quality Open Access research while charging no APCs to their authors. As such, they provide significant contributions to open scholarship as well as democracy in science from month to month.
To support these great efforts, we recently partnered with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to help make these valuable sources of the published scholarly record more visible and easily accessible in a competitive global research environment.
Bringing together results from different fields of research and geographical regions, successful applicants will add new colours to our research network of over 31 million articles and growing.
Thank you to everyone who applied for the latest round of ScienceOpen’s free indexing competition! We are also grateful to DOAJ for their valuable contributions.
To apply for the next round, an application form can be found here. As a little help, you can find our guidelines here. Good luck!
This collection is focused on the wide field of research on ticks and tick-transmitted pathogens. It aims to include papers on a wide variety of disciplines related to ticks and the pathogens they transmit, focused (but not limited) to morphology and systematics of ticks, ecology, reports of pathogens in both ticks and their hosts. A secondary aim is to provide global view of the effects of climate and land use changes on the pattern of distribution of these arthropods.
We spoke with the collection Editor, Professor Agustín Estrada-Peña, about why he decided to build this collection for his research community.
Can you tell us why you tell us about your research interests in ticks and tick-borne diseases?
I am Agustín Estrada-Peña. I have several titles behind my name, but they do not have importance in this context. Let’s just say that I am Professor of Zoonoses and Parasitology in the University of Zaragoza (Spain). My work is focused on ticks and tick-transmitted organisms. I did work on systematics, physiology, life cycles, and the probable impact of environmental change on the pathogens they can transmit. I have been enrolled with FAO, WHO, and recently with the European Center for Disease Control in different aspects regarding human and animal health and ticks. My current interest is on the way the ecological relationships between ticks, microorganisms and vertebrates emerged and evolved. I am working on new ways to explore these relationships and on the molecular aspects behind them.
Expanding the limits of the materials available and thereby satisfying everyday needs was always a key challenge and the cornerstone of human cultural development. The constant discovery and development of new materials and the improvement of their performance to meet the challenges of the current day world grew out to be a faster and faster evolving discipline called Materials Science in the competitive global economy.
From nanotechnology, metallurgy, medical technology, aviation or computer science, materials science is used to advance understanding in a variety of research areas in order to develop smart oil refinery components, bioactive hip implants, the safest cars, the lightest notebooks and countless other new products and technologies that will make our lives safer, more sustainable and more convenient.
We at ScienceOpen want to be a part of this story. Our new partnerships with Carl Hanser Verlag, AIMS Press and Italian Group of Fracture (Gruppo Italiano Frattura) allow us to bring together the latest result of this diverse field.
Below you can find the journals now indexed on our site, and a teaser from their selected articles. Take a peek!
IPP is dedicated to the study of polymers. As such, the journal offers original research contributions, invited review papers and recent technological developments in processing thermoplastics, thermosets, elastomers and fibers as well as polymer reaction engineering. For more than 25 years IPP, the journal of the Polymer Processing Society, provides strictly peer-reviewed, high-quality articles and rapid communications from the leading experts around the world. Articles cover topics like:
In line with the recent beetle boom on ScienceOpen, a researcher led collection on Coleoptera has been created on ScienceOpen. In the following interview founder and editor of the collection, Rolf Georg Beutel (Professor of Zoology at the Institut für Spezielle Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie, Jena) will share a little background and gives us an insight on how it works in practice, how such thematic collections serve research communities. And of course, he will also reveal why beetles are cool.
Hi Rolf, thank you for joining. Can you first tell us a bit about your research background, and how you originally got interested in Entomology? Why did you choose to study Coleoptera?
I must admit that in contrast to many other entomologists I was not interested in insects at all as a child or later as a student of Zoology at the University of Tübingen. I was clearly inspired by an eccentric but outstanding academic teacher, Dr. G. Mickoleit, who suggested I should investigate the head and mouthparts of a very small and very cryptic beetle larva. Even though I had a hard time with my first objects of study, I obviously got hooked and continued studying beetles and other insects for the rest of my scientific career.
Why did you decide to build a ScienceOpen Collection on Coleoptera?
Dr. Stephanie Dawson, whom I have known for more than 10 years, mainly in the context of the Handbook of Zoology series, suggested to me to establish this ScienceOpen collection on beetles. My positive previous experience with her expertise and also with ScienceOpen was confirmed by the impressively efficient process of building and presenting this collection.
Coleoptera is one of the first automatically synchronized collections on ScienceOpen. What were the main principles of building the collection and how it develops?
Coleoptera is an immensely diverse and popular group. The intention was to go beyond the traditional fields of taxonomy and morphology, even though these have certainly their merits and are still very important in different contexts. The established data base will continuously grow and extend, integrating an ever increasing number of open access studies.
Do you have favourite pieces or lines of research in the collection that you find especially relevant to this field?
Primarily I consider myself as a systematist, and therefore I am interested in articles on phylogeny and classification in the first place. Even though many publications in these fields are older and not available as electronic files (or not covered by open access), the new collection already provides an impressive number of relevant studies and will grow with an accelerated rate in the future.
As an evolutionary biologist dealing with beetles among other groups of insects, I appreciate that the data base covers multiple lines of research, as for instance genetics or physiology. This has the potential for reciprocal stimulation of researchers of Coleoptera, beyond the basic disciplines like systematics and taxonomy. These are indispensable tools in biodiversity research and provide an essential reference system for studies in other fields. Connected with topics like for instance the physiological and genetic backgrounds of feeding habits or reproductive biology, evolutionary biology of Coleoptera is getting really exciting. The very rapidly growing molecular data in the “age on phylogenomics” open fascinating perspectives in the investigation of beetles and other organisms.
In which ways your research community benefits from the collection?
The easy accessibility of open access articles on beetles is an obvious advantage of this collection.
Finally, tell us about what is the coolest thing in studying entomology?
Beetles are often very beautiful insects and have attracted attention very early, for instance as religious symbol (Scarabaeus sacer) or material for jewellery, or also simply as food source. Among amateur collectors, who made valuable contributions over the last centuries, only butterflies enjoy a comparable popularity. Talking about what is cool about Coleoptera, it is hard to avoid a statement made by the geneticist and evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, who allegedly said that God had an “inordinate fondness of beetles”. This mainly refers to the incredible diversity of the group, which presently comprises approximately 380.000 described species, about one-third of all known organisms. The question why Coleoptera was much more successful (in terms of species numbers) than other groups is an intriguing question in itself for evolutionary biologists. Aside from this, beetles are an integrative part of nearly all terrestrial and limnic habitats. Many species are important plant pests but others beneficial as natural enemies of harmful species. What fascinates me most is that after centuries of research crucial phylogenetic issues are still unsolved, like for instance the interrelationships of the 4 extant suborders (“it is the glory of God to conceal things….”). Presently exponentially growing molecular data sets and improved analytical approaches (www.1KITE.org) provide new powerful tools to resolve these issues. This is definitely “cool” and exciting!
Thank you, Rolf, it’s been great getting your insight!
We have unified our search interface and applied it to all of our author/member profiles, collections, journals and publishers. That’s a whole lot more research context, metadata, metrics, and useful functionality. The newly upgraded usage statistics are incredibly useful in seeing who us re-using your work and how. This additional dimension is built on top of our newly enhanced search and discovery platform, and provides a powerful way for researchers to develop research, article context, and also their individual profiles within the research community, and all in the open.
We built a ‘research collider’ to make magic happen
At ScienceOpen, we offer a platform where any researcher can comment on, and post-publication peer review any research article they want to. By creating thematic collections, you can bring this into a community space, putting work and additional commentary in the context of related research. By having collection editors that can invite people to review articles, we retain the moderation aspect that is crucial to developments in open peer review. We give the power to researchers to do what they want, when they want, and to use and share their expertise in the most efficient possible way.
.gif){kind=link}