ScienceOpen membership – the how, the what, and the why!

ScienceOpen is a free network for rewarding and encouraging Open Science practices.

But what exactly can you do on our platform..?

• Search and discover relevant research in over 60 million Open Access articles and article records!
• Share your expertise and get credit by commenting on or publicly peer reviewing any article! (examples)
• Apply to be a Collection Editor and advance your research field in the open! (example collections)

But isn’t ScienceOpen just another social networking site?

With 101 platforms for researchers available these days, and each one vying for the proud title of ‘Facebook for science’, why should you bother with ScienceOpen?

Well, we’re not the same as other platforms. We don’t ever charge you a penny for any of our services, and don’t have premium or freemium features – everything you see, you get for free!

Also, all of our metrics are completely open, and you can see exactly where data on Altmetrics and citations are coming from! You can see who is citing you in which papers for all of your articles.

By working with platforms like CrossRef and ORCID to refine and validate our records, we rely on a strong and pre-existing infrastructure to provide the best possible information for researchers. It is openly available to anyone, no premium memberships and no restraints.

Information is already on our platform based on publicly available data associated with Open Access publications. We work with directly with publishers, and use content available via PubMed Central, ORCID, and other platforms, to create a huge enhanced metadata network of research and researchers.

Why bother?

Recently we made our author pages much more useful for researchers. Profiles now contain a whole cadre of useful information, such as who is publishing similar work to yours, as well as filtering your work by citation counts, Altmetric scores, journals, and publishers. You also open up your work to be commented on and publicly peer reviewed by any member of the research community. Now that is dedication!

What we really like though is when a researcher integrates their ORCID with us. That way we pull in all that metadata and can use to put you as an author into better context on our platform. We can:

• Recommend similar articles for you
• Arrange your articles so you can see which ones are getting the most social attention
• Provide an estimate of how many people are reading your articles on our platform.

You can put your whole lab group on ScienceOpen, By integrating all of your research via ORCID, why not create a Collection and showcase your lab’s research? Invite your peers to publicly comment and peer review your work, progress scientific discourse in the open, and get credit for it the whole time!

We don’t create any restrictive metrics, but we do tell you straightaway things like how many people are reading your research on our platform, as well as who is recommending and sharing your articles. This is important for defining your identity as a researcher, and putting you into context within an enormous and ever growing body of research.

Make yourself visible. And then track your impact. That’s the key. Sign up today!