In the current scholarly ecosystem, communicating your research results doesn’t stop at the point of publication. Increasing the accessibility of your research and engaging audiences beyond your own institution and peer groups became inevitable steps in reaching out from the massively increasing global research output to create real impact.
At ScienceOpen, we are seeking the best ways of serving open communities by amalgamating their needs and turning them into new research management and discovery features. Our post-publication services are designed to offer all scientists transparent and effective ways to communicate their knowledge and enhance the visibility and discoverability of their publications. Recently, we announced new features enabling authors to add non-specialist summaries to their articles indexed on ScienceOpen.
Storify your research and open it up for the public
Although we see many great non-specialist summaries added so far to articles on ScienceOpen (you can see nice examples here, here or here), we are also aware of the fact that it’s not always easy to write an effective, non-specialist summary of specialized work. In many cases researchers simply don’t have the time or the expertise to make their science accessible to the broader public.
To help our researcher community in opening up their research and reaching and engaging a wider stakeholder audience, ScienceOpen has teamed up with ScienceImpact, an award-winning team of leading science communication staff with decades of combined experience publishing academic books, papers, and broad science publications. This partnership gives our users direct access to ScienceImpact’s non-specialist summary services and provides them with the means to have complex scientific concepts translated into accessible language for a broader audience. Their editorial and design staff works closely with all featured researchers to craft summaries that disseminate the aims, objectives, and impact of your research.
If you have already begun to think about how you can communicate your research to wider audiences but don’t feel confident about it, you are in the right place! You can thrust this into the hands of professional science communicators and get your non-specialist summary in 3 easy steps:
Go to your profile page
Click on the Impact banner
Fill in the form on ScienceImpact’s website.
Here you can find out more about how this process works or discuss the production of a lay summary for your research paper.
Expand your audience and amplify your message
Adding non-specialist summaries to your articles enables the communication of your research and its impact in a format and language that all stakeholders will understand.
For funders
Being able to clearly articulate the economic, scientific, and societal impact of your project is crucial from the very first steps of your research lifecycle. When it comes to funding decisions, reviewers of your grant application, who are rarely representing your specific field, need to understand clearly how your research can make the world a better place.
For researchers from other areas
Communicating your research and making it connectible for audiences beyond your own institution, peer group, and field of research carries the potential of opening it up for interdisciplinary cooperation. In fact, using simple everyday language might be refreshing even for your own research community as well. Do them a favor and make your papers look nice, concise, and easy to see through.
For the public
We are in the midst of a global information and knowledge crisis. Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, and renewable energies.
By translating your research results into benefits for society, you can play your part in making science more understandable to everyone without restriction. Just because a research paper is freely available, that does not mean that it’s also accessible and everyone will be able to read it and understand the content. What we all need is to make sure that the maximum number of people possible can enjoy and re-use what we have discovered without having to work their way through dense technical language. Don’t alienate your work from taxpayers who fund it.
Maintaining fair and inclusive scientific communication attitudes and investing in the proper explanation of your findings is like gathering a good research karma: it works for you, works for science, and works for the society at large. We give you tools and access to outputs—but it’s you who can make them truly accessible.
Diamond Open Access journals shining bright on the colorful Open Access landscape. These independent scholarly forums provide immediate Open Access completely free of charge to both authors and readers. Their mission of making academic knowledge a public good is achieved with support from academic institutions and donations but more importantly it is achieved by the passionate volunteer work of editors, editorial board members, and reviewers.
To help these valuable contributions to become more visible, we run a free indexing competition for APC-free OA journals and offer our winners a Featured Collection for one year for free. Collections are a specialized and customized promotional service to increase visibility and findability of selected journals or selected research topics within our discovery platform and can easily be used to also track and measure usage of research articles.
In the last round of 2017, focus was on the field of medicine and health, since Open Access to research might nowhere be of more immediate importance. Our winners connect research from Europe, India, and Asia and give you an insight of the latest medical innovations as well as research on physical and mental wellbeing.
Season’s greetings from ScienceOpen! We hope you all have an excellent festive period, and wish you all warmth, love, and laughter going into the New Year.
We would like to extend our special thanks to all of our users who have continued to help support ScienceOpen this last year, and continue to use our services to help make science that little bit more open.
An advent collection adventure
In December, we are running a special advent calendar to highlight some of our favourite researcher-led collections over the last couple of years. Each day, we’ll reveal a new one to you here, each one a chance for you to learn about a new topic, or interact with the expertly-curated papers in each.
Collection editors are some of the most impactful users of ScienceOpen, and we want to use this opportunity to send our deepest thanks to them for their continued engagement.
Give yourself a little extra discovery time!
Can you recall the last time that you read an article purely for fun, without the pressure of deadlines, for the sake of discovery or out of curiosity? Each day, a new window of our advent calendar will open up a unique field of research innovations, solutions and perspectives. Each one is designed to help us to develop a better understanding of the world around us.
It’s time to slow down, and give a little extra discovery time for yourself. You give the time, we bring the joy of discovery! So wrap yourself into a cozy blanket and enjoy satisfying your curiosity. Luxury? Of course, it is! But it’s all yours.
By working with a range of publishers and transcending disciplines, our research network constantly finds new connections for users to explore. This enriched context is based on article-level citation and reference analysis, with each nod, or link, in this network designed to expand the horizons of researchers and help them to discover previously unknown relevant research. Recently, we took the diverse field of Archaeology and integrated it into this mix to see what happens.
Let’s take a look at what all this new research has to offer! They reveal to us the material remains of ancient cultures, historical accounts of past lives, and tell us stories about what is it like doing Archaeology in a modern, digital research environment.
During the last decade, China has made rapid progress towards making more of its research publications publicly accessible. Recognizing the contribution of Open Access (OA) to the advancement of global knowledge production, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has been helping to develop government-funded models of OA publication and open research policies to make knowledge produced by public investment in China public to the maximum benefit of all.
Today, we are happy to announce that one of CAS’ flagship Open Access journals, Journal of Radars, is now indexed on ScienceOpen. We’re very excited by this new partnership, as it meets our commitment to bring together the latest results from different fields, and cultural and geographical regions.
Shouxin Jia, Managing Editor of Journal of Radars said:
ScienceOpen is a high-end academic exchange platform, promoting and leading the science and technology and our co-operation will bring better visibility to developments in the radar field.
The journal is jointly run by the Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS) and China Radar Industry Association (CRIA). Being a high-level academic exchange platform in China’s radar research, the journal covers the most important developments in radar technology in recent years and gives us a picture on the highly diverse modern uses of radars. These include:
All articles are Open Access and published under a Creative Commons 4.0 license which allows for the free re-distribution and re-use.
If you want to learn more about Open Access in China, or explore the range of Open Access content from China indexed on ScienceOpen, the selection of blog posts below will give you some insights.
These journals fulfil the double challenge of publishing high-quality Open Access research while charging no fees (APCs) to their authors. As such, they provide significant contributions to advancing open scholarship as well as a more democratic science from month to month.
To help these valuable contributions to the scholarly record to become more visible, we offer our winners a Featured Collection for one year for free. Collections are a specialized and customized promotional service to increase the visibility of selected journals within our discovery platform, also used to track and measure usage of research articles.
We are pleased to announce three new journals from across Europe that will be integrated into, and promoted on, ScienceOpen. These are:
Publisher: Hungarian Communication Studies Association
Country of publisher: Hungary
KOME is a theory and pure research-oriented journal of communication studies and related fields. It consists of useful supplements and reasonable alternatives to current models and theories and features theoretical researches that help to understand better, or deconceptualize the understanding of communication and the media.
As an important area in communication, current issues from the field of scholarly communication are also covered.
We asked Dr. János Tóth, Editor-in-Chief of KOME, about why they chose to enter the competition. He said:
We noticed the call when we were uploading the content of our most recent issue to DOAJ. To be completely honest, at first glance we were not sure about how our journal would find its place among your content -most of the indexed journals are from hard science fields-, but the interface looked very appealing, user-friendly, and there were a lot of additional options not seen on competitors’ services. We are constantly looking for new opportunities to reach toward international audiences, and, as someone who can already speak from experience, ScienceOpen seems to be in every respect an intelligent tool capable to help us achieve this goal.
SciPost Physics is a premium-quality, Open Access, peer-reviewed refereed Journal for the general field of Physics.
It aims at providing scientists with a publishing platform in which uncompromising scientific quality meets the highest achievable standards of open accessibility, with a resolutely international outlook.
The Irish Journal of Paramedicine is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, international journal dedicated to advancing and promoting the science of prehospital clinical care, research, education, policy, management and operational delivery.
The Irish Journal of Paramedicine is the official journal of the Irish College of Paramedics, the professional body for Irish prehospital emergency care practitioners.
Here is a little teaser from their selected articles:
Publishers and journals working with ScienceOpen benefit from increased visibility, usage and branding for their indexed content. Featured collections open up journal content for:
A range of article, journal, and publisher level usage statistics to help monitoring the impact of the journal and performance assessment
Research context via reference and citation extraction. Embedding articles into our citation and recommendation network through references adds a new dimension to research context and thus grants the journal content the privilege of better visibility and higher citation frequency.
If you run a free to publish Open Access journal, participate in the competition today and get indexed on ScienceOpen for free! You can find the application form here.
At ScienceOpen, we are constantly evolving to meet the needs of the ever-changing scholarly communication ecosystem.
To keep you all up-to-date about the latest research advancements in the field, we’ve built an easily accessible and searchable scholarly communications knowledge base, which we call a super collection! This knowledge base covers different aspects of the field, such as:
A simple search for “scholarly communication” on our platform also reveals 150 Open Access papers on the topic!
Our recent partnership with IOS Press allows us to greatly expand this knowledge base. Their flagship Open Access journal, Information Services and Use, is now indexed on ScienceOpen. The journal covers a wide range of topics around scholarly publishing and open research, and facilitates discussion on the key aspects of the field. Articles cover a whole new set of issues about how to maximize the accessibility and potential of research data.
Below you can find a selection of some of the most exciting topics and articles.
Key infrastructure for a modern scholarly communication environment
The importance of being aware of these newly emerging directions and sustainable practices in scholarly communication is unquestionable. It gives you powerful tools for communicating your research more effectively and thus to boost your academic career and even your well-being in academia.
If you don’t want to miss a single article that might be of interest for you from this gigacorpus, we keep you up to date by constantly integrating newly published content. Follow the collection, or create saved searches to ma make this even easier!
Ever wanted to know what the temperature in the depths of the ocean is? Why and how has our climate changed through time? What are the thermal boundaries of life? To what extent earthquakes are predictable?
These are some of the intriguing and fundamental questions helping to shape our knowledge and depict the future of our planet. These are the questions that the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) is finding answers for. Recently, the IODP integrated all of its published research into the ScienceOpen network, increasing its availability and accessibility. All published content is Open Access for all ScienceOpen users to enjoy!
IODP is an international marine research collaboration that explores Earth’s history and dynamics. They use ocean-going research platforms to recover data recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks and to explore sub-seafloor environments. Scientists from 24 countries embark on IODP research expeditions conducted throughout the world’s oceans.
Here are some of the top features of the IODP research program:
Open data for global research
In addition to informing decision makers about some of the most challenging environmental issues our society is facing today, IODP also places special emphasis on keeping the wider public informed about their latest scientific discoveries. All IODP publications are therefore openly accessible for everyone, not just the global scientific community. Samples and data collected during drilling expeditions are available to scientists and teachers in 5 core repositories around the world, while scientific and technical accomplishments are reported in the Open Access publication series Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program.
Research from the IODP is centred around 4 main topics.
1.Climate & ocean change
Samples from the core of the ocean floor give insight into what the climate was like in deep time. The ocean floor is therefore especially invaluable for the study of Earth’s climate history. Some selected research articles in this field include:
Studying the process of serpentinisation (chemical modification of basaltic lavas through interaction with seawater) yields insights on the origins as well as thermal limits of life on Earth, and the boundaries of life in the most extreme circumstances: at the bottom of the deep oceanic biosphere.
Diving into this line of ocean research, we can learn more about whether and how life thrives in lower-energy environments like off the Shimokita Peninsula, Japan, at a water depth of 1180 meters, or inside a rocky crust under the colder North Pond, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
3. Earth system connections
Investigations on the formation of volcanic rift margins and oceanic plateaus can teach us about the often explosive dynamics of Earth’s outer crust, and the evolution of Earth’s surface. Expeditions shed light on:
The effects of tectonic activity on evolution of the Gibraltar Gateway and margin sedimentation and its influence on global circulation and climate.
4. Earth in motion
Recognising the causes and modelling circumstances of earthquakes and landslides is critical in assessing potential future hazards, and in saving human lives in risk-prone areas. Research here aims to identify subduction zones and the geological properties of the surrounding sediments, and how these influence the occurrence of earthquakes and what we can do to mitigate their effects. The Costa Rica Seismogenesis Project, the Japan Trench Fast Drilling Project or Lesser Antilles Volcanism and Landslides project are among the multidisciplinary mega-endeavours aiming to accomplish this mission and to find clues for the causes of large earthquakes.
Whether you are interested in an expedition, site, region or scientific goal, our numerous semantic search filters and multiple sorting options allow you to drill deep down into the IODP collection and find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go!
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.
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.
