Doing peer review is tough. Building a Collection is tough. Both are also time consuming, and academics are like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland: never enough time!
So while the benefits of open peer review and building Collection need to be considered in the ‘temporal trade off’ world of research, what are some other things researchers can do to help advance open science with us?
Here’s a simple list of 10 things that take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes!
You can find this on every single article record (11 million!) and interact in a multitude of ways.
Rate an article. You don’t have to do a full peer review, but can simply provide a rating. Come back later and provide a full review!
Recommend an article. Click, done. Interested researchers can see which articles are more highly recommended by the community.
Share an article. Use social media? Share on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email, or further on ScienceOpen.
Comment on an article. Members with one item in their ORCID accounts can comment on any article.
Follow a Collection. See a Collection you like (like this?) Click, ‘Follow’, done.
Comment on a Collection. Like with all our articles, all Collection articles can be commented on, shared, recommended and peer reviewed.
Become a ScienceOpen member. It’s not needed for many of the functions on our platform, but does mean you can engage with the existing community and content more. Register here!
Have you replicated someone’s results? Let them know that in a comment!
Think someone’s methods are really great? Let them know in a comment!
Did someone not cite your work when they should have? Let them know in a comment!
All articles can be commented on. All you need to have is a membership, and an ORCID account with just one item. Easy! Commenting can be as short and sweet or long as you like. But sometimes a comment can be worth a lot of researchers and communities, just in terms of offering new thoughts, perspectives, or validation. Also, comments are great ways for junior researchers to engage with existing research communities.
We have new Collections coming out of our ears here at ScienceOpen! Last week, we saw two published on the bacterium Shewanella, and another on the Communication Through Coherence theory. Both should represent great platforms and resources for further research in those fields.
The latest is on the diverse field of Atomic Force Microscopy. We asked the Editor, Prof. Yang Gan, to give us a few details about why he created this Collection.
Background
This collection is to celebrate the 30th anniversary of atomic force microscopy (AFM). March 3, 1986 saw publication of the land-marking paper “Atomic force microscope” by G. Binnig, C. G. Quate and C. Gerber (Phys Rev Lett, 56 (1986) 930-933, citations >8,800) with the motivation to invent “a new type of microscope capable of investigating surfaces of insulators on an atomic scale” with high force and dimension resolution. This can be used to measure local properties, such as height, friction, and magnetism, so has massive implications for science.
Since then, AFM has given birth to a large family of scanning probe microscopy (SPM) or SXM where X stands for near-field optical, Kelvin, magnetic, acoustic, thermal, etc. More than 100,000 journal papers, ~6,000 papers/yr since 2008, have been published if one searches the Scopus database with “atomic force microscopy” or “force microscope”. On ScienceOpen, there are over 6,000 article records if one searches using the keywords “atomic force microscopy” too. Nowadays, many disciplines — physics, chemistry, biology, materials, minerals, medicine, geology, nanotechnology, etc — all benefit greatly from using AFM as an important and even key tool for characterization, fabrication and processing.
At ScienceOpen, there’s nothing more we like than good news for open science! That’s why we’re happy this week to see ORCID announcing a new partnership with the DFG, the German Research Foundation and major government funding body here, to support increased ORCID adoption in Germany.
The aim of this partnership is to standardise and integrated information that is currently distributed throughout more than 230 systems and databases in Germany. By adopting ORCID, this will support German universities and research institutes in implementing ORCID in a co-ordinated and sustainable approach.
“Thanks to the financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft we have now the opportunity to promote the use of ORCID in Germany. This is a strong signal for ORCID in Germany,” says Roland Bertelmann, head of the Library and Information Services at the German Research Centre for Geoscience (GFZ).
ORCID is a critical part of research infrastructure, acting as a unique identifier for researchers, and a sort of LinkedIn style profile with your published research, and educational and professional histories embedded, and partnered with tools such as CrossRef/Scopus to make content integration easy and automated.
The Zika virus is an international public health emergency, as declared early on in February by the World Health Organisation. As such, it is critical that the global research community help combat this threat as rapidly and efficiently as possible. This is a case when science can quite literally save lives.
Recently, an article on the host-vector ratio in the Zika virus was published on the arXiv, a platform for articles often called ‘preprints’. This means that the work has not yet been peer reviewed, and is also not available to comment on the arXiv itself due to functional constraints. The paper is stuck in the hidden, timeless limbo of peer review until its eventual emergence as a paper or ultimate rejection.
ScienceOpen Collections are thematic groups of research articles that transcend journals and publishers to transform how we collate and build upon scientific knowledge.
What are Collections
The modern research environment is a hyper-dimensional space with a vast quantity of outputs that are impossible to manually manage. You can think of research like a giant Rubik’s cube: you have different ‘colours’ of research that you have to mix and match and play around with to discover how the different sections fit together to become something useful.
CC BY-SA 3.0, Booyabazooka (Wikipedia)
We view Collections as the individual faces of a Rubik’s cube. They draw from the vast, and often messy, pool of published research to provide an additional layer of context and clarity. They represent a new way for researchers to filter the published record to discover and curate content that is directly relevant to them, irrespective of who published it or what journal it appears in.
Advantages of Collections
Perhaps the main advantage of Collections to researchers is that they are independent of journals or publishers and their branding criteria. Researchers are undoubtedly the best-placed to assess what research is relevant to themselves and their communities. As such, we see Collections as the natural continuing transformation of the concept of the modern journal, acting in almost full cycle to return them to their basic principles.
The advantage of using Collections is that they provide researchers with the power to filter and select from the published record and create what is in essence a highly-specialised virtual journal. This means that Collections are not pre-selective, but instead comprise papers discriminated only by a single criterion: research that is relevant to your peers, and also deemed relevant by them.
Filtering for Collections occurs at different levels depending on scope or complexity of research. For example, Collections can be designed to focus on different research topics, lab groups or research groups, communities, or even departments or institutions. Collections can also be created for specific conferences and include posters from these, published on ScienceOpen. Youdefine the scope and the selection criteria.
