In the last few months at ScienceOpen, we have rolled out an incredible number of new features for our users. Now, we feel it is time to take stock, and reflect on how you are all using them to help enhance your research. We want to recognise some of the valuable work from the global research community in helping to make science more open!
There are now 177 excellent research collections published on ScienceOpen, each with our pretty slick new collection statistics. With this, we want to highlight just a few of the latest collections that have really caught our eye. Here, the collection editors have each done exceptional work in curating and promoting research to create a valuable resource for their communities.
Take a dive into one of the latest collections all about the world of sponges!
For researchers, scientific integrity and communication have never been more important. This collection contains some excellent articles on statistics and data visualisation and data and code sharing.
Part of the new SAXS collection series, this automatically updates with the most recent publications in the field. A fantastic educational resource for Chemistry students.
Recently, we announced new features enabling authors to add non-specialist summaries to their articles indexed on ScienceOpen. We believe that having authors add these to their articles helps to make them more accessible to a wider audience, increase their reach. It makes a clear statement that they care about the societal impact of their research.
Value added!
Well, clearly you are all seeing the value in these features too! We’ve already had over 170 great authors writing non-specialist summaries since making the announcement. By integrating this into our research engine, we are seeing those articles gaining a huge boost in popularity! These authors have also added extra keywords and thumbnails to their articles to make them more visible and discoverable on ScienceOpen.
Great author summary of important groundwater research in Indonesia (Source)
Making an impact in the open
We are extremely happy to see authors keen to make their work more accessible. The great thing about adding these summaries is that they are valuable whether or not the articles are published Open Access.
In the current ecosystem of scholarly communication, effective infrastructures for the responsible and open dissemination of intellectual output are an inevitability, especially for research institutions.
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is one of the biggest research institutes in Europe with about 5,900 employees and publishes its own open access journals.
At ScienceOpen, we are always looking for ways to help maximize the visibility of institutional research output. Today, we are happy to announce that the two Forschungszentrum Jülich open access journals, Journal of large-scale research facilities and Collective Dynamics, are now indexed on ScienceOpen. Here we have compiled a brief description of both journals.
Instruments with DOIs: Journal of large-scale research facilities
The Journal of large-scale research facilities allows large-scale equipment to be cited properly by assigning DOIs to the articles describing them. It covers large-scale equipment from all scientific disciplines and is also mostly intended for use by scientists not affiliated to the institution operating the facilities (dedicated user operation). Furthermore, it provides operators of large-scale research facilities with the opportunity to describe their equipment. In order to keep the focus on the facilities themselves, all articles are published in the name of the operating institution (corporate author). There are now descriptions of more than 120 large-scale facilities from the Helmholtz Association, the large scientific organization of which Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH is a member.
Among the facilities covered by the journal are:
MARIA, the magnetic reflectometer with high incident angle
MEPHISTO, a facility for particle physics with cold neutrons
TOFTOF, the cold neutron time-of-flight spectrometer
GALAXI, the gallium anode low-angle x-ray instrument
BALU, the largest autoclave research facility in the world
Dr. Wolfgang Häußler shows RESEDA on a lab course at Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (source).
Make them citable
Assigning DOIs (digital object identifiers) to research facilities and integrating them into the common system of linking scholarly references makes them:
Easier to find, cite, link, and identify.
Easier to track their usage and trace research networks to the facility it is used by.
Easier to track their evaluations and assess their impact.
Additional benefits include:
Users of the facilities can cite the equipment unambiguously in their publications with the aid of the article.
An additional benefit for users is that they do not need to repeat the description of the instrument in each of their papers.
Research on the crossroads and beyond: Collective Dynamics
The peer-reviewed open access journal Collective Dynamics publishes the latest innovations in the fields of pedestrian dynamics, crowds, vehicular traffic, and other systems of self-driven particles, such as molecular motors, animal groups, or agents. Articles are written in a way that makes them accessible to a wide range of scientific disciplines.
How energy consumption of both conventional and electrical vehicles can decrease considerably in oversaturated city traffic implementing synchronized flow patterns rather than moving queues at traffic signals.
ORCID have recognised the discovery and networking platform ScienceOpen for leadership in integrating their services as part of their Collect and Connect program.
Under ORCID’s mantra of “Enter once, reuse often”, Collect and Connect is designed for member organizations to collect, display, connect and synchronize data between research information systems. This was developed to streamline the integration process across a range of research systems, funders, and publishers.
ORCID has been at the foundation of ScienceOpen since inception, enabling verified users to integrate their published content, build collections, and perform post-publication peer review across publishers and journals for free.
CEO of ScienceOpen, Stephanie Dawson, said “We are delighted to be among the first recognized by ORCID as part of their Collect and Connect Program. ORCID has been essential to our development, and together we will continue to build a robust scholarly infrastructure for all stakeholders.”
ScienceOpen features alongside other leaders, including eLife, Overleaf, and Editorial Manager, all committed to creating valid assertions about scholarly connectivity in a reliable, trustworthy, and transparent way.
Laure Haak, Executive Director of ORCID, said “ScienceOpen has been a huge supporter of ORCID – both by demonstrating in practice how iDs enable profile platforms and also through your incredible researcher engagement activities. Our badges are a small but important official acknowledgement for your actions. Thank you for your leadership in the open research community!”
Today, the I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) announced new supporting publishers joining to release reference data for more than 16 million articles. This is a major step forward as publishers such as Emerald, the American Physical Society, SciELO and De Gruyter team up with Springer/Nature, Wiley, Sage and many more to unlock the powerful information encoded in citation networks.
ScienceOpen joins the growing list of stakeholders who support the I4OC initiative, alongside OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), Jisc, and the LIBER (the Association of European Research Libraries).
You can find all references contained within any article record on ScienceOpen
What does ScienceOpen have to do with the I4OC?
The analysis of citation data is at the core of what we do at ScienceOpen. Citations trace academic networks, describe research genealogies, and uncover ideas. They enable a great range of functions dependent on the connections and context that they reveal to us.
There are several ways in which we use citation data at ScienceOpen:
To sort publications by citation numbers. There are nearly always too many papers to read through them all. So every search result list on ScienceOpen can be filtered and sorted by citation numbers to find relevant articles. This powerful filter is supplemented by Altmetric score, usage, date, and more.
To sort reference lists by citation numbers. The reference list of a paper is an important discovery tool for researchers, but often with 50-100 references. The sort and search tools at ScienceOpen allow both a quick overview and in depth searching within the reference section – now for many more papers with the I4OC initiative!
To increase visibility of open content. If your article cites 50 papers, there will be 50 more article pages on ScienceOpen that point back to your original paper. The increased linkage helps to define networks of similarity that show the right paper to the user searching for information.
To provide citation information for any author on our platform. Integrate your ORCID and claim your publications today, and you can track your citations through time.
There is an ever-growing number of small-scale Open Access journals and publishers. These are run largely by research communities, who manage to reach out from their local contexts to the global landscape of scholarly communication and became established international forums. At ScienceOpen, these are what we call true Open Access success stories!
Part of our mission is to contribute to these success stories by recognizing the great efforts behind high-quality OA journals with no APCs (article processing charges), and by offering them our next-generation indexing services for free.
The winners of our monthly free indexing competition benefit from increased visibility, usage and branding for their indexed content. By getting indexed on ScienceOpen, these journals:
Reach new audiences and maximize readership
Drive more usage to their journals
Integrate their content to a unique search/discovery and communication platform
The winners of the June round are coming from the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and join a growing corpus of research from this field on ScienceOpen. All 3 journals enjoy the benefits of the ‘by researchers – for researchers’ publishing model which enables them to assess precisely the needs in their fields of research, set clear goals, and to adopt a critical voice without making compromises.
Europe’s Journal of Psychology is a free online quarterly peer-reviewed journal publishing original studies, research, critical contributions, interviews and book reviews written by and intended for psychologists worldwide. Although primarily targeted at a European audience, EJOP gladly hosts contributions from psychologists irrespective of their geographical location. The journal was conceived in such a manner as to be accessible to both young researchers and established professionals and also to a very large area of scientific psychological ‘genres’ and schools.
We asked Prof. Dr. Armin Günther, Managing Editor of PsychOpen, about why they chose to enter the competition. He said:
“At PsychOpen, the European Open Access Platform for Psychology, we are very happy to be among the winners of the monthly ScienceOpen free indexing competition! This will not only help us to increase the visibility of our journal(s) but it’s also a great encouragement for our work, pursuing a community based, non-profit approach in scholarly publishing.”
Publisher: Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Special Education and Rehabilitation, Skopje
Country of publisher: Republic of Macedonia
Journal of Special Education and Rehabilitation (JSER) is a multidisciplinary peer reviewed international journal edited by the Institute of Special Education and Rehabilitation of the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje, Macedonian Scientific Society for Autism and Macedonian Association of Special Educators. Although it began as a local and specialized journal, it managed to develop into an international and scientific one and to attract a large number of authors from over 30 countries around the world.
The aim of the journal is to share and disseminate knowledge between all disciplines that work in the field of special education and rehabilitation. The subject matter is broad and includes findings from biological, educational, genetic, medical, psychiatric, psychological and sociological studies. It publishes ethical, philosophical, and legal contributions that increase knowledge on the prevention and treatment of disability, and/or inform public policy and practice. The articles are bilingual (Macedonian and English).
This journal seeks to disseminate research on modern languages and literatures with special emphasis on anglophone literatures and cultures. Their main aim is to foster critical resistance towards hegemonic and hierarchical models of culture, and positively promote, as viable alternatives, discourse practices of partnership and mutuality. Articles cover topics like “hybridisation” of languages and literatures, migrant writing, intercultural and transcultural identities and subjectivities, post-colonial studies or subaltern studies.
Taking the ‘diamond’ way, all these journals prove that ‘gold’ Open Access is much more than APCs, and that you don’t need high costs to maintain high quality.
If you know free to publish Open Access journals you would like to see indexed on ScienceOpen, let us know. If you run one, participate in our competition today and get indexed on ScienceOpen for free! See our guidelines for indexing here.
At ScienceOpen, we offer a range of next-generation indexing services. This includes a package especially for institutes, to help them gain the maximum visibility and re-use of the articles their researchers publish.
One of the greatest features we have at ScienceOpen are collections. These are thematic groupings of published articles and pre-prints, managed by a collection editor. Core features include:
