The ScienceOpen discovery and collaboration environment offers state-of-the-art technological infrastructure allowing publishers to create an entirely new kind of showcase for their journals. Our Featured Collections help users to drill down and explore content with over 20 filters and sorting options, combining depth and precision to make discovery more efficient.
Featured Collections deliver great benefits to publishers in terms of content visibility and discoverability. We are therefore happy to announce that we have now hit the 100 Featured Collections milestone!
Top partners
Some of our top publishing partners helping to reach this goal include:
Ever wanted to know what the temperature in the depths of the ocean is? Why and how has our climate changed through time? What are the thermal boundaries of life? To what extent earthquakes are predictable?
These are some of the intriguing and fundamental questions helping to shape our knowledge and depict the future of our planet. These are the questions that the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) is finding answers for. Recently, the IODP integrated all of its published research into the ScienceOpen network, increasing its availability and accessibility. All published content is Open Access for all ScienceOpen users to enjoy!
IODP is an international marine research collaboration that explores Earth’s history and dynamics. They use ocean-going research platforms to recover data recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks and to explore sub-seafloor environments. Scientists from 24 countries embark on IODP research expeditions conducted throughout the world’s oceans.
Here are some of the top features of the IODP research program:
Open data for global research
In addition to informing decision makers about some of the most challenging environmental issues our society is facing today, IODP also places special emphasis on keeping the wider public informed about their latest scientific discoveries. All IODP publications are therefore openly accessible for everyone, not just the global scientific community. Samples and data collected during drilling expeditions are available to scientists and teachers in 5 core repositories around the world, while scientific and technical accomplishments are reported in the Open Access publication series Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program.
Research from the IODP is centred around 4 main topics.
1.Climate & ocean change
Samples from the core of the ocean floor give insight into what the climate was like in deep time. The ocean floor is therefore especially invaluable for the study of Earth’s climate history. Some selected research articles in this field include:
Studying the process of serpentinisation (chemical modification of basaltic lavas through interaction with seawater) yields insights on the origins as well as thermal limits of life on Earth, and the boundaries of life in the most extreme circumstances: at the bottom of the deep oceanic biosphere.
Diving into this line of ocean research, we can learn more about whether and how life thrives in lower-energy environments like off the Shimokita Peninsula, Japan, at a water depth of 1180 meters, or inside a rocky crust under the colder North Pond, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
3. Earth system connections
Investigations on the formation of volcanic rift margins and oceanic plateaus can teach us about the often explosive dynamics of Earth’s outer crust, and the evolution of Earth’s surface. Expeditions shed light on:
The effects of tectonic activity on evolution of the Gibraltar Gateway and margin sedimentation and its influence on global circulation and climate.
4. Earth in motion
Recognising the causes and modelling circumstances of earthquakes and landslides is critical in assessing potential future hazards, and in saving human lives in risk-prone areas. Research here aims to identify subduction zones and the geological properties of the surrounding sediments, and how these influence the occurrence of earthquakes and what we can do to mitigate their effects. The Costa Rica Seismogenesis Project, the Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project or Lesser Antilles Volcanism and Landslides project are among the multidisciplinary mega-endeavours aiming to accomplish this mission and to find clues for the causes of large earthquakes.
Whether you are interested in an expedition, site, region or scientific goal, our numerous semantic search filters and multiple sorting options allow you to drill deep down into the IODP collection and find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go!
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:
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