This Spring, we are organising a little competition for all you researchers! Review an article on ScienceOpen before the end of April, and we will enter you into a prize drawing for an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.
Open Peer Review on ScienceOpen
ScienceOpen counts currently more than 40 million articles including 3.7 million open access articles as well as more than 1.4 million preprint articles. All these articles are open on ScienceOpen to a fully transparent review process: open identities, open reports, and open interaction on the platform (see our precedent blogpost here).
At ScienceOpen, we believe that “Open Science” is not just about sharing research data. For us, “Open Science” aims to make research and underlying data accessible in order toinform andallow researchers communities to take part in discussions regarding their field, increasingoverall participation and relevant inclusion of different perspectives.
Open peer reviews are also crucial in this current context of rapid development of open science and digital scientific communication. If the openness of scientific contents is a first victory for the advancement of research and innovation, open peer review still needs to be embodied in this practice to establish its full credibility and full benefit. (Picture: CC0 1.0)
What does reviewing on ScienceOpen bring concretely to reviewers?
→ Reviews are published under Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY (4.0) and will receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) from Crossref. This makes them fully equivalent to any Open Access publication, and they can be cited or integrated further into platforms like Publons, Impactstory, or ORCID.
→ As open access publications indexed on ScienceOpen, reviews are public and can be found easily on the platform using the filter “Content type”: “Review”. For a more precise search, this filter can be used for example in combination with the title of an article.
→ Reviewing articles on ScienceOpen is a great way to show the reviewer’s involvement in his/her research field and his/her appreciation for researchers who have dedicated their time to providing a research resource to their community.
Ready, set, go!
The only requirement to write a review on ScienceOpen is to be registered with ORCID (already done with a ScienceOpen profile) and have at least five publications assigned to the ORCID account (with which you reach ScienceOpen–Expert status). If you do not meet these requirements but would still like to review a paper, contact us.
The International Women’s day was created in 1910 and it is still celebrated today to remind us that women and men still don’t have the same rights: lower salary with equal skills, lower access to education… and the recent events regarding sexual harassment remind us more than ever that violence against women is one of the most widespread violation of human rights on the planet.
Regarding women in Science, the day for International Women and Girls in Science was only created three years ago and was celebrated on the 11th of February. According to the United Nations, women are still underrepresented in the various fields of science: “A significant gender gap has persisted throughout the years at all levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines all over the world.”
Let us remember that between 1901 and 2017 only 49 women got a Nobel Prize, of which 4 are in physics (<2%), 2 are in chemistry (<4%), and 12 are in medicine (~11%).
“In fact, according to a study conducted in 14 countries, the probability for female students of graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and Doctor’s degree in science-related field are 18%, 8% and 2% respectively, while the percentages of male students are 37%, 18% and 6%.”UN
As a woman and an ex-researcher myself, my feeling regarding this day is divided between the strong need to highlight and recognise globally the unacceptable inequalities and unfairness between men and women—and the fear to be reduced only to my gender.
For me “being a woman” and particularly “being a woman in science” can’t be used as a criterion of competence in the same way that “being a man” or “being a man in science” can’t be used as one either. I would even say that I find it as contemptuous to be excluded because I am a woman as to get privileges only for this reason, too.
I think it is important that this day stays a way to discover and recognise the ability of women in different fields in regard to their creativity, intellectuality and their others various qualities in the same way as for men.
Women’s collections on ScienceOpen
For ScienceOpen, this day can be used as another day to promote collections and make research known. So, let’s introduce scientific women who are involved in various research fields—not only since today but for years!—and who created 25 researcher collections on ScienceOpen to share with you these years of research:
You can also consult the new collection: Women in Science, created recently on ScienceOpen by Annual Reviews as a tribute for scientific women: This collection was created to “recognize some of the experts that have contributed to Annual Reviews’ journals.”
Women working at ScienceOpen
I cannot finish this post without introducing myself and some of my colleagues at ScienceOpen. I am Sarah Rioton and I am French. I started to work as Research Communities Manager at ScienceOpen in January. Before, I did chemical engineering studies at CPELyon and then a PhD in Organic Chemistry at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After my studies, I decided to leave France to settle down in Germany. My experience in research made me conscious of the value of communicating scientific knowledge, and I found a good opportunity to do that with ScienceOpen! I think that the respect of rights equality is a daily duty and I don’t want to be defined as a “woman in science” but as a researcher as I was, or as a manager in research communication as I am.
Let’s introduce now Stephanie Dawson who is the chief executive officer at ScienceOpen, and my colleague Nina Tscheke who handles customer integration and sales support. We work every day to make the research more visible and accessible to everyone with ScienceOpen:
CEO Stephanie Dawson grew up in northern California and studied Biology at Yale University. She then worked at the labs of Susan Parkhurst at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle WA and Ralph Rupp, at the MPG Friedrich Miescher Laboratory, Tübingen, Germany before changing fields and getting a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington under Jane Brown. From 2001-2012 she worked in various positions at the academic Publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. In 2013 she joined the ScienceOpen management team.
Nina Tscheke provides Customer Integration and Sales Support. After having dwelt in the sphere of literary and cultural studies, with special attention to critical race theory, gender, and minority studies and having helped introduce several generations of students at the JLU into the very field it was now time for her to move on and beyond the academical field. She was delighted to have found a new place/opportunity with ScienceOpen where she can further help in accumulating and disseminating the global knowledge while at the same time providing access and a networking platform for all.
Choosing a journal to publish your research is not easy. Among thousands of journals you must decide which one will get the best visibility for your work. ScienceOpen can’t answer that question for you, but we can make it easier with a “Submit a manuscript” button.
Growth in scholarly journals. Source: University of Pittsburgh Library
It requires time and real investigative work to understand the character of a journal and its editors, its selection and validation process, reputation, audience/specialization, distribution modality, rights management, publication costs… and this knowledge is never definitive because journals’ rules regularly change.
With a whole suite of filters and sorting possibilities, the ScienceOpen discovery platform can help you to drill down into a journal’s content and gain insight about how connected a journal is – Do they share references? More links back to your paper means more potential readers. Do they deposit rich metadata with affiliations, abstract, license information and more with Crossref? If your paper is open access, you want computers to know! Do they use social media and other tools to promote individual articles? Altmetrics are becoming increasingly important. ScienceOpen can give you a different perspective on how publishers will treat your article. Now, found one you like? Submit with one click.
Submit a Manuscript: new on ScienceOpen
Featured journals on ScienceOpen, here Future Science OA, open up their content for effective search and discovery within a “Collection” framework on our platform. The Featured collection also highlights the way journal content is being used by interactive features on the site – added to researcher-led Collections, peer reviewed, recommended, shared and more. Our goal is to help the researcher asses the content and the context of a journal to see how their work might fit it. You would like to see your manuscript in this same context? Then click “Submit”! The new “Submit a manuscript” will take you straight to the journal’s submission page. Editorial decisions are all carried out by the journal.
Journal overview at your fingertips on ScienceOpen
Further information about a journal is available directly on ScienceOpen through the Featured collections, for example the UCLPress journal Architecture MPS. The Collection details page provides space for the owner to describe the journal: its identity, webpage, editors, editorial board, aims and scope, submission guidelines, publication costs and audience. This quick overview can be helpful in making an informed decision about your next publication.
The Statistics of a journal on ScienceOpen can also be checked (number of articles added over time, number of views over time, number of shares…). It’s a great tool to get an overview of the activity of a journal, and it also allows comparison with the activity of journals in the same field on ScienceOpen. Moreover, Following a Featured collection will provide you with an update whenever new content is added.
ScienceOpen uses the context of a body of scholarly articles to make information more accessible and interactive. This new “Submit a manuscript” feature paired with the intuitive interface of ScienceOpen and insights provided by our data can save time for researchers in making an informed decision about where to publish their next paper.
As a publisher or journal editor contact Stephanie Dawson or Stuart Cooper to start your Featured journal collection today.
At ScienceOpen, we believe that “Open Science” is not just about sharing research data. For us, “Open Science” aims to make research and underlying data accessible in order to inform and allow researchers communities to take part in discussions regarding their field, increasing overall participation and relevant inclusion of different perspectives.
