Beyond the Journal: ScienceOpen and the Microbiology Society Launch Collaboration on New Cross-Disciplinary Collections

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ScienceOpen and the Microbiology Society are pleased to announce a collaboration on new ways to showcase cross-disciplinary research. The ScienceOpen discovery environment provides state-of-the-art technological infrastructure to promote exciting new initiatives from the Society’s journals.

Interdisciplinarity is key for the Microbiology Society in reaching a wide range of researchers, from microbiologists, clinicians, epidemiologists, social scientists and policymakers to physicists, chemists and engineers. In line with their mission to advance the understanding and impact of microbiology by connecting communities worldwide, the Society is exploring new ways to package digital information, from pop-up journals to mini-review formats, to bring diverse researchers together to solve global problems.

ScienceOpen has created a flexible “Collection” product to highlight publisher content within the larger context of academic research – with over 43 million articles and records on the site. The Microbiology Society is taking advantage of the full scope of interactive features available to researchers on ScienceOpen. As well as promoting the Open Access journal Microbial Genomics, the Society is using ScienceOpen to promote cross-disciplinary products that draw on articles from multiple journals, such as the new pop-up journal on antimicrobial resistance X-AMR, the Microbiome collection created in conjunction with the British Society for Immunology, and the Microbe and Virus Profiles created in conjunction with top microbiologists and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, both of which offer concise reviews for experts and beyond.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Director of Publishing at the Microbiology Society, believes “As publishers, we have to reach out to researchers on the platforms they use, rather than expecting them to come to us. ScienceOpen offers us an opportunity to do that. The new Collections offering is a great supplement to the journal promotion tools on the platform, and we’ve particularly appreciated being able to curate collections that draw on content from multiple journals and even multiple publishers”.

CEO of ScienceOpen, Stephanie Dawson, said “We are excited about these new collections that go beyond the journal. As a discovery platform ScienceOpen is uniquely situated to help advance cross-disciplinary research. We aim to support publishers in reaching new audiences and authors in this space with our Collection product.”

A range of aggregated collection- and article-level metrics will provide enriched usage statistics to track the success of these experiments in ScienceOpen’s continuously expanding research database.

About ScienceOpen: ScienceOpen, founded in 2013 in Berlin and Boston by Alexander Grossmann and Tibor Tscheke, is a freely-accessible, interactive discovery platform for scholarly research. From smart, multidimensional search to research collections and open peer review, it offers a full spectrum of options to effectively find and share research results.

About the Microbiology Society: The Microbiology Society is a membership charity for scientists interested in microbes, their effects and their practical uses. It is one of the largest microbiology societies in Europe, with a worldwide membership based in universities, hospitals, research institutes and schools.