Getting started at ScienceOpen

We recognise that sometimes it’s not clear exactly what you’re supposed to do when joining a new research platform. What are the important features, what’s everybody else doing, how do I make my profile as strong as possible? Well, hopefully this will make it easier for you. If you’re still wondering ‘What’s that ScienceOpen thing all about?’, hopefully this will add a bit of clarity too!

Here are the main things you need to know about ScienceOpen after you’ve registered for free:

• Get an ORCID account

More than 8 million researchers already have an ORCID account, which acts as both a unique identifier and an integrated profile for them. Registration for it takes 30 seconds, and is now a core part of scholarly infrastructure, with many journals requiring an ORCID profile prior to article submission. Make sure it’s well-populated with all of your published papers, (drawn automatically from Web of Science, Scopus, or CrossRef). Easy!

• Refresh your profile from ORCID

This pulls in all of that data from ORCID, integrates it into our platform, and automatically fills out your profile for you. Nifty eh.

• Share your profile and check out your author-level metrics

Our profile pages come with a huge array of details including:

1. Your full list of publications
2. All peer review activities on ScienceOpen
3. How many additional reads your publications have had on ScienceOpen
4. All collections you have built or are following
5. How many researchers you follow and follow you back
6. Your biography and work and education histories

In your ‘My ScienceOpen’ page, you also have all of your author-level metrics. These put you as a researcher in context of all of your co-authors, all the articles you’ve cited and which cite you, and within the broader context of the ScienceOpen database. Also, it looks cool.

• Check out the advanced search and discover functions

ScienceOpen has the most advanced search engine of any research discovery platform out there. We recently added an Open Access filter, and others for research institutes and date of indexing on ScienceOpen. For an updated tutorial on how to use our search engine, go here. Discovering research has never been easier!

Each search can now be bookmarked as a Saved Search, meaning that you’ll always be up to date as we integrate new content into the platform.

Tools like Unpaywall and the OA Button also work incredibly well across ScienceOpen, making discovering and legally accessing articles from our database of 72 million records and growing even easier for you.

• Build a collection of your favourite articles

ScienceOpen collections are resources built by and for the research community. You can find some basic instructions on building one here, and can get editorial status by dropping us an email/tweet/comment here to let us know that you’re interested. We don’t discriminate who can or can’t build a collection – your interest is enough, and all you need is a basic profile with us to get started. Easy!

Collection editors and readers can:

1. Comment or write an editorial on any article
2. Share them on social media or with your colleagues
3. Invite a colleague to comment or leave a post-publication peer review
4. Add new articles as they are published and integrated to our platform
5. Invite colleagues to follow the collection and get notified when new articles are added
6. Invite colleagues to recommend your collection

What more could you want? (Seriously, let us know in the comments!)

• Comment on any article, or leave a peer review

One of the coolest things about ScienceOpen is that anyone, no matter your academic status, can engage with any of over 72 million article records on our platform. We don’t discriminate again, but we do moderate through ORCID. If you don’t have enough ‘ORCID cred’ yet, but want to leave a peer review, simply drop us an email and we’ll enable this feature for you.

Peer review at ScienceOpen: Surprisingly simple!

• Invite your colleagues to contribute

At ScienceOpen, we are all about community building. What’s the point in building all of these key features if you’re not going to have people use it? You can’t just build things and expect people to use them without showing them the process first. That’s in part what this post is about, to show just how anyone can interact with the platform, and do some pretty cool things to advance their research field and academic profile.

Ultimately, we want to provide a platform where people come together to enhance the research process and scholarly communication, while increasing the digital identity and research impact of those who are active in their community.