Month: October 2020

Introducing the international, open-access journal Telehealth and Medicine Today

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a huge focus on improving telehealth and telemedicine. Electronic systems are used at an increasing rate—patients are asked to fill out forms on their smartphones in their cars rather than on a paper copy in a waiting room, and when possible, clinical sessions are switched to online to prevent any chance of virus transmission. ScienceOpen is thus pleased to announce the addition of a leading forum for the growing health technology sector to the ScienceOpen platform: Telehealth and Medicine Today (TMT) by Partners in Digital Health (PDH). TMT is the second PDH journal to be integrated into the platform, joining Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY). Both journals are now discoverable in the context of 65+ million scholarly records and are supported by the advanced search engine, collection infrastructure, andnumerous user engagement features of ScienceOpen.  

Increasing visibility for Open Access publications  

The open access (OA) movement continues to make great strides in reshaping the established parameters for scientific communication and access to scholarly information. Even traditional publishers have begun to seek out ways of adapting to this rapidly shifting landscape. At the heart of the OA movement is the aim of removing barriers to information, so that research can be freely accessible by everyone. Openly available research helps accelerate the pace at which advances in research may be made, both within and across the boundaries of specific fields, and sparks public dialogue rooted in the latest findings on a given issue. But how visible is open access really? Establishing the infrastructure to make scholarly information freely accessible has been critical to getting open access on its feet, but where does it go from here? Is research that is neither easily discovered nor readily understood by most people actually “open”? 

The Initial ‘Open Science Stars’ Project

Four years ago, the late Jon Tennant, who was a significant contributor to the Open Science movement and a friend and colleague to the ScienceOpen team, interviewed people on ScienceOpen’s behalf from around the world who were active supporters of making science more open. This year, we got back in touch with several of the interviewees to get their opinion on the current status of Open Science in 2020. We heard from Dr. Joanne Kamens, Executive Director of Addgene, Professor Dr. Samir Hachani at Algiers II University, and Dr. Chris Hartgerink, Executive Director of Liberate Science GmbH. We also received an interesting update on the state of Open Science in Indoensia from Dr. Dasapta Erwin Irawan. Where do you think Open Science is heading in 2020? Share your thoughts with us! Here are our Open Science Stars’ responses: 

A Collaboration for #OAWeek2020

In the announcement of the theme for Open Access Week 2020, Nick Schockey wrote, “International Open Access Week is a time for the wider community to coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work.“ ScienceOpen strongly agrees with this statement and has been collaborating extensively with our partner Compuscript to work towards this goal. Our efforts also coincide with the general theme of the 2020 International Open Access Week: to be open with purpose – taking action to build structural equity and inclusion. In this article, we describe how ScienceOpen and Compuscript are taking steps to make science more open and the research community more inclusive to people from all over the world. We hope that by raising awareness around our efforts, we can reach out to more journals and smaller publishers who may be searching for additional support in scholarly publishing.

The New Education Journals published by UCL Press

In the last several months, ScienceOpen has welcomed four education and social science journals based at the UCL Institute of Education and published by UCL Press: the Film Education Journal, London Research of Education, International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, and Research for All. The History Education Research Journal (HERJ) is the fifth and final journal of this series to be presented alongside its new issue 17(2), which is out today! All of these education journals are now hosted on ScienceOpen where they are freely accessible and supported by our expert metadata and technology services.  

Explore 7 Journals and Hundreds of Books

Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) Press has strategically partnered with ScienceOpen to enrich its metadata and feature its publications on ScienceOpen’s interactive search and discovery platform. This is a special announcement because not only do we have a lot of new content to share with you, but we also get to highlight the success of our technical team, who worked diligently to help UUM Press streamline and enrich their publications’ metadata. Now, the addition of seven UUM Press open access journals (plus one forthcoming) and approximately 400 other titles with rich metadata are available for discovery in eight different featured collections and an encompassing Super Collection on ScienceOpen.   

Metadata Services at ScienceOpen 

For many publishers the requirements of modern digital publishing can be dizzying – XML DTDs, PIDs, DOIs, metatags. At ScienceOpen we have been consulting publishers on their metadata for years to help get the most visibility possible for academic publications. We have increasingly built systems with our technical partner, Ovitas, to support publishers with metadata creation and distribution and made each new tool available to the next customer.  As a metadata technical hub, we can automate time-consuming tasks and let publishers concentrate on the content. Here are a few of the services that we can provide to help take the pain out of publishing: 

A New Open Access Partner

ScienceOpen is proud to announce our partnership with Spotlight on Research (SOR) to bring awareness to SOR’s open access, peer-reviewed health journals. Spotlight on Research’s mission is to be a leader in online, scholarly publishing in terms of access, quality, transparency, and fairness and to be the preferred peer-reviewed source for all who conduct and read health-related research. Its journals aim to improve the lives and health of populations by making high-quality, evidence-based health information freely available online. Content from the SOR journals is now featured on ScienceOpen in a featured Spotlight on Research Collection to promote the dissemination of its content to a wider base of readers and to place it in the context of 65 million other records of scholarly works.  

A common goal of authors and publishers has long been more readership for their publications. Traditionally, the abstract was a teaser to encourage the potential reader to buy or subscribe to read the full text. Even in an open access economy, a good abstract can trigger a coveted “download” and even more coveted citation. Why then do many publishers not make their abstracts and other metadata such as references or license information freely accessible in a machine-readable format?