Hi Ashley, and thanks for joining us here! Could you start off by letting us know a little bit about your background?
Certainly! I began college aiming for a Zoology degree while working at the University’s library. My love for information grew in proportion to my struggle for mastering Physics and Organic Chemistry. My senior year I transferred disciplines and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) focused on Library and Information Science. For the next decade, I worked in both public and academic libraries and began pursuing my Masters in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Washington (to be completed this summer. Yay!) Now I have found myself submersed in the realm of scientific knowledge and research dissemination. I find this to be a perfect way to combine all my passions – science, knowledge, and service to others.
Credit: Ashley Farley
When did you first hear about open access and open science? What were your initial thoughts?
The first time I heard about these topics was while interning at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the Knowledge and Research Services department. My initial thought was “How have I not heard of this before?!”. Having worked in libraries for many years I was familiar with the serials crisis and the importance of research, but I had not been introduced to the Open Access movement. Then I thought, “Of course Open Access should be the norm!”. Knowledge should be a public good.
“Of course Open Access should be the norm!”. Knowledge should be a public good.
What’s it like working for the Gates Foundation? How much of your time do you spend working on ‘open’ related things?
I really love working for the Gates Foundation – it’s providing me with the opportunity, each day, to work towards a greater good. A message that is posted throughout the foundation is “All Lives Have Equal Value” and I take this to heart. This is the first institution where I have been employed to embrace innovation and move initiatives forward fairly quickly. One of our tenets is that we will take risks that others can’t or won’t and I’m proud of this. Currently, I spend about 90% of my time on Open Access. This encompasses internal and external communications, advocacy of our policy, and working with our grantees to make their research open access. We’ve recently joined the newly launched Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) to work with other research funders worldwide to adopt mandates like ours. Together we can create a funding environment where Open Access or even Open Science is the norm. I am beginning to see the impact that my work has on the scientific community and it’s very exciting. We have other partnerships in the works that will be announced soon to continue to support the Open Access movement.
Hi Gautam! Thanks for joining us here. Could you start off by letting us know a little bit about your background?
Hi Jon, thanks for having me here!
Credit: Gautam Dey
I’m a postdoc in Buzz Baum’s lab at UCL working on the evolution of cell division- all the way from Archaea to unicellular eukaryotes. I found myself in London in mid-2015 after a bit of continent-hopping that included a stint as a cell-biologist-in-training at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and a PhD in Systems Biology at Stanford University.
When did you first hear about open access and open science? What were your initial thoughts?
Back in 2005, when I was an undergraduate in India without proper library access. PLOS and PMC came to the rescue! At the time paywalls were a very real and practical hindrance, but I must confess I didn’t think much about the actual ethics of publishing until well into my PhD.
As a postdoc in the UK, how do you feel about recent policy changes around Open Access?
I think the UK is making some positive moves, such as requiring Open Access for compliance with the Research Evaluation Framework. Funding agencies like the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust defray the costs of “gold” Open Access for published research supported by their grants. However, in the absence of accompanying reforms in the publishing industry or revised evaluation criteria for scientists, many of these policy changes will simply funnel more taxpayer money towards established scientific journals, providing more of a stopgap than a long-term solution.
I must confess I didn’t think much about the actual ethics of publishing until well into my PhD
After several highly successful rounds of our free indexing competition (see here and here), we are pleased to announce a further 6 new journals will be added in the New Year, along with the 12 new publishing clients we recently added!
Health in Emergencies & Disasters Quarterly (HDQ) (with a promotional free collection) (link)
Journal of the ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies (link)
Journal of Applied Computing and Information Technology (JACIT) (link)
Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale (Fracture and Structural Integrity) (link)
Journal of Applied and Computational Mechanics (link)
Individual journals now come with their own highly-appealing set of re-use metrics.
Publishers working with ScienceOpen benefit from increased visibility, usage and branding for their indexed content. By getting indexed on ScienceOpen, you:
Reach new audiences and maximize your readership
Drive more usage to your journals
Upload your content to a unique search/discovery and communication platform
Today at ScienceOpen we’re pleased to welcome Hogrefe, a major publisher in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and mental health, among our new partners in 2017. Their open access collection, Hogrefe OpenMind is now available on our platform and waiting for you to read, share, comment on or review.
The collection makes a significant contribution to keeping society’s mind open about relevant social psychological issues surrounding us. The collection consists of a diverse portfolio of highly-regarded, peer-reviewed articles in English and German covering many subject areas of psychology and psychiatry. As well as studies addressing highly-professional audience, such as psychometric tests, assessment reports, or experiment design updates, articles of the collection are centred around issues in psychology touching upon the functioning of any given society but are considered to be taboo topics by convention. These form the center-pieces of the OpenMind collection, and have the potential to facilitate a better understanding of these taboos and thus to raise awareness of them. So what are these issues?
1. The evolution and functioning of stereotypes Stereotypes are something we all live by. Being part and parcel of our very basic cognitive mechanism and categorization, they unconsciously shape our worldview. This group of studies give us a chance to develop a reflexive, deliberate view of them as well as to gain a better understanding on how they work and how they influence us and structure our thinking.
2 other stereotype-related studies survey how stereotype awareness affects our behavioural patterns. More precisely, how awareness of stereotypes could affect a person’s behaviour and performance when they complete a stereotype-relevant task. They also point out which kind of stereotypes are stronger in this respect: race or gender.
2. How well do you know your biases? Priming factors underlying our moral decisions These set of studies take us closer to the unconscious physical biases that might influence our moral judgements or self-evaluation.
Last but not least, IJzerman et al. bring the issue of infidelity to the table. Their study Sex Differences in Distress From Infidelity in Early Adulthood and in Later Life investigates men’s and women’s different emotional attitudes toward infidelity. In order to identify possible cultural changes in this respect, the authors add an age dimension to the original survey.
3. Suicide intervention A significant part of the collection comes from the journal Crisis and contains potentially life-saving information for all those involved in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. These studies show the more general, social dimensions and implications of these, for the first sight isolated, individual-level crises. As such, the collection helps to strengthen social awareness and the perception of responsibility towards suicide phenomena, and complements our existing collection on stigmatisation of mental health issues and suicide prevention.
2 of these studies sketch primary and multilevel suicide prevention strategies and show evidence-based best-practices for these efforts.
Not surprisingly, one of the biggest “suicide-magnets” of the world, the Golden Gate Bridge also has its rightful place in the collection. One study examines whether the suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge is effective enough. Its results hold special relevance considering the recently growing number of committed suicides (second most-used suicide site in the world) despite the existence of the countermeasures.
Finally, Coveney et al. surveys another means of practical aid and shows how callers’ feedback on Samaritans National Suicide Prevention Helpline can help in providing a better service and therefore save more lives.
+1 Gender bias in academia Gender bias is definitely a highly-debated issue in current academic discourse, and even the most read article on our platform is on the subject! Mutz, Bornmann, and Hans-Dieter contribute to a clearer picture by examining whether gender matters in grant peer review in an Austrian context. Here you can see their results. Peer review option is just 3 clicks away! The importance of the free availability of these studies for everyone is beyond question. With the help of our new discovery tools and multiple filtering options you can easily find the most relevant pieces of the collection for you. Furthermore, you can also share them with your research community by adding them to your own collection. Take a look and get engaged!
One of our favourite upgrades is how each of more than 24,000 journals are featured and displayed. Now it is possible for anyone to see what journals exist on our platform and how many articles are tracked for each one of them. That’s the first step. Try searching for your favourite journal, or even a journal you work for, and seeing what we have for it.
24,000 journals, arranged by how much content we have indexed from each on our platform.
A whole new year means a chance to start or continue building your profile as an Open Scientist! There are so many ways you can do this, from publishing Open Access and sharing your research data, to helping to teach students how to code or use GitHub. Every little bit helps.
Here are ten recommendations from us to kick-start the New Year with an Open Science bang!
At ScienceOpen, we are constantly upgrading and adapting our platform to meet the needs of the different stakeholders in scholarly publishing. We work with a huge range of publishers (e.g., Brill, Open Library of Humanities, Higher Education PressPeerJ, Cold Spring Harbor) and listen to the needs of researchers, together building solutions to help enhance the global research process.
With the re-launch of ScienceOpen, we really are pushing forward to create a multi-purpose, solution-oriented platform that aligns with ongoing trends in scholarly publishing.
ScienceOpen for publishers and editors
Our new platform provides an invaluable service for publishers and editors. We provide aggregate metrics for re-use, including the number of readers on our platform and the summed Altmetric score. As you can see in the example below for BioMed Central, these numbers can be used to look at how well you’re competing with other publishers, as well as how your content is being read and re-used by researchers. Content on the site is aggregated through PubMed Central, SciELO, ORCID and arXiv or added via reference analysis with a DOI metadata check with Crossref. Or publishers can work directly with us to add their content to the site for a fee. We now offer extra features like a “read” button link back to the publisher version of record. We are happy to index content of all license types.
The more of your content we have on our platform, the better the level of service we can provide for you.
More than 200,000 articles from BioMed Central with a whole cadre of useful metrics and filtering tools
Only by listening to and understanding truly diverse voices can we gain a deeper appreciation of the issues surrounding Open Science. By taking on board what others have to say and learning from them, we strengthen ourselves and the community, and understand how to put things into practice more easily.
A new year means a new chance for us all to do the best that we can for ourselves, for research, and for broader aspects of society. So we’re not stopping, and continuing to showcase some of the best researchers from around the world and how they’re working to make a difference. We’re starting the 2017 series with Mr. Wang Dapeng, an Assistant Researcher at the China Research Institute for Science Popularization.
When did you first realise you wanted to get into academia and the world of scholarly publishing? What was it that turned you? 8 years ago, I came to my present organisation, which is an institute dedicated to science communication research, and that was my first time to deal with science research. However, I worked at the administrative office, which is where I began to read some academic papers about science communication. However, according to the evaluation system, we need to write and publish papers, so I realized that I need not only be familiar with academia, but enter the field by doing research and publishing papers. Furthermore, publishing research papers was another way of being noticed by the peers in your field.
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.
The journal was established by the International Scientific Group of Applied Preventive Medicine I-GAP Vienna, Austria in 2010. Their three-pronged commitment was to find solutions to the current demands in social work practice, to help clinical social work students to fully develop their knowledge, skills and qualification, and to foster dialogue between social workers, doctors and teachers. This resulted in an open, independent exchange forum covering topics from Social Work, Psychology and other Social Sciences. Although theoretical concepts and suggestions are also part of the professional discussion, the journal is strongly practice-oriented and shares case-studies, reports and problem-solving strategies for issues such as healthcare ethics, family policies, unemployment or infectious diseases such as hepatitis or AIDS. The aim of supporting new generations is also represented in that students are encouraged to share their experiences and as such to add a fresh spirit to the value of the journal.
