Creating Collections now even easier!

In a recent post, we made a bit of a fuss about ScienceOpen Collections, even suggesting that they could be one possible future for academic-led journals! We then went on to show how you can use Collections to create your own quasi-journals based on the arXiv, similar to the concept of ‘overlay journals’.

Recently, Figshare also launched their pretty cool Collections feature, which is awesome in embracing the additional dimension of non-traditional research outputs with this concept. Figshare now joins ScienceOpen and Mendeley, among others, in recognising the value of thematic groups of digital objects, where the scope and content is defined by the research community, independent of journals and publishers.

ScienceOpen now has 175 Collections, each one representing a place to openly engage with research through peer review, discussion, sharing, and recommending. Each one is managed by a group of Editors or a single Editor, whose role is to assemble the Collection, curate it, and foster community engagement.

The value of this is twofold. Firstly, Editors create and manage a valuable resource for their communities, which anyone can openly contribute to. Secondly, this provides a platform to develop new skills for researchers: public peer review, community management, editorial control. Each of these is part of an essential and core skill-set for researchers.

If you would like to become a Collection Editor, simply shoot us an email at: Jon.Tennant@scienceopen.com, or tweet us at @science_open if that’s your preferred method (or just leave a comment here)! All it takes to become an Editor is your interest. We don’t exclude anyone, we just want to know who is building one so we can provide the best support possible!

We look forward to working with you and making science more open 🙂