At the border between chemistry and physics, between basic and industrial research, materials science draws inspiration from interdisciplinarity. It embraces a myriad of scientific disciplines—from established fields such as metallurgy and medicine, to ongoing research in nanotechnology and computer science—to develop countless products and technologies for a more comfortable and sustainable future. How ever we categorize it, discovering and engineering new materials to meet our modern challenges is crucial to our competitive technological global society.
Chinese researchers face tremendous hurdles in communicating their research results to the rest of the world – from language barriers to internet restrictions and the traditional western bias of the scientific literature.
Confronted with the danger of being left out of the global scholarly communications, Chinese editors often publish in partnerships with publishers outside of China. This often leaves them having to give up control over the content to their global partners. However, to increase the discoverability of Chinese research in wider scientific circles, journals based in China now have new options to reach out to international audiences.
Over their 15-year history in China, CompuScript/International Science Editing—a leading European provider of publishing services to the scientific community headquartered in Ireland—have built a strong local network to help overcome these challenges, providing editorial and technical support to Chinese researchers, editors, and institutions. To support Chinese researchers and publishers and contribute to the mission of global open science, CompuScript/International Science Editing in China and ScienceOpen have partnered up to develop new products tailored specifically for the Chinese market and to utilize the full set of tools ScienceOpen offers for greater discoverability of Chinese research. Continue reading “ScienceOpen Supports Chinese Journals for Globally Inclusive Open Science”
You can now publish your preprint directly to ScienceOpen. The discovery platform ScienceOpen will put your work in context and open it up to review with a wide range of author-mediated peer review tools.
Preprints, first draft research manuscripts, have existed almost as long as the Internet. Scientists have been taking advantage of online communication to speed up research for almost 3 decades. ScienceOpen understands the importance of allowing researchers to openly share their results with the scientific community at an early stage in their research. The advantage for researchers is that they get early feedback from peers but can still publish the final version in most peer-reviewed journals of their choosing. To support researchers in fully utilizing the benefits of preprint publishing, ScienceOpen is pleased to launch open and free preprint publishing on our platform! With this beta service, anyone can now upload, publish, and promote their preprint using a free and simple interface with access to a full suite of tools for peer review, constructive discussion through comments, and usage and impact tracking.
We have supported the essential role of preprints in speeding up science from the beginning by integrating arXiv preprints on the platform. Records for over 27,000 bioRxiv preprints in our discovery environment followed suit, along with the capacity to add records from other preprint serves such as Preprints.org, PeerJ Preprints, ChemRxiv, and Open Science Framework repositories. Given our belief in the benefits of preprints in advancing science, it seemed only logical to develop a new feature that will enable all researchers to take advantage of preprints in scholarly research and communications. Continue reading “Publish your Preprint at ScienceOpen”
Image Credit: Adrian Scottow, Pharmacy, Flickr, CC BY-SA
ScienceOpen is pleased to announce a partnership with the University of Huddersfield Press, a primarily open access publisher of high quality research, to promote the British Journal of Pharmacy – a new featured collection of scientific articles in pharmaceutical sciences.
British Journal of Pharmacy is an online, peer-reviewed, open access journal with no article processing charges (APCs). This publication is a product of University of Huddersfield Press’ mission to improve access to scholarly work for the benefit of all by publishing innovative research as open access. The journal publishes research on the latest developments in pharmacy in the form of scholarly papers and critical reviews. Submissions can be accepted from a wide range of pharmaceutical sciences including, among others: pharmacy, molecular pharmacy, drug delivery and targeting, pharmacoeconomics, pharmacokinetics and therapeutics, pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry, pharmacovigilance, and innovations in teaching pharmacy.
University Press & Marketing Manager, Megan Taylor, said “The University of Huddersfield Press aims to improve access to scholarly research for all – we are looking forward to working with ScienceOpen to make our innovative research available to even wider audiences.” Continue reading “The British Journal of Pharmacy joins ScienceOpen”
Fast, free and easy! ScienceOpen has been publishing posters open access for years with over 160 posters on the platform. We have now updated our publication module to offer researchers a free and simple interface to upload, publish and promote their posters – all with a CC BY license and access to a full suite of tools to promote and track usage and impact.
Early career researchers often have their first experience of presenting their work in the form of a conference poster. Posters are an effective way to communicate the essence of a research project in a compact space and provide an opportunity to present preliminary results and get feedback from the scientific community before publishing.
To help researchers share their results beyond the conference, ScienceOpen is launching in beta a new feature allowing any scholar to publish a poster on our platform in just a few minutes. Simply register on ScienceOpen with your ORCID and then click on the ‘Submit manuscript’ button in the ScienceOpen Posters Collection header. Upload your poster pdf file and add metadata such as title, abstract and keywords plus a catchy image and you are ready to go! An editor will review your submission before publication. ScienceOpen offers a range of tools to increase your digital profile. You can share your published poster on social media with just a click and then track usage on the article page. Continue reading “Publish your conference poster at ScienceOpen”
Rolf Dietrich Brecher, Speeding up, Flickr, CC-BY SA
The “Preprint” allows researchers to openly share their results with peers at an early stage and still publish the final version in the peer-reviewed journal of their choice. From the start, ScienceOpen has supported preprints and their essential role in speeding up science by integrating arXiv preprints in the physical sciences on the platform. We now include over 1.4 million arXiv records on ScienceOpen. In our new release we have added even more preprints to the mix, with a focus on the biomedical sciences.
Preprints in the biological and medical sciences were kickstarted by the founding of bioRxiv in 2013, and by the advocacy organization ASAPBio in 2015 and have taken off rapidly since then. Now on ScienceOpen we have added records for over 20,000 bioRxiv preprints to our discovery environment, together with the capacity to include records from other preprint servers such as PeerJ Preprints, Preprints.org and ChemRxiv. Up next are all the great preprint servers on OSF Preprints. We are working hard!
Preprints have the advantage of being rapidly and freely accessible. However, they have not undergone a peer review process and must be read with a more critical eye. Preprints are, therefore, clearly flagged on ScienceOpen. During his physics PhD, ScienceOpen co-founder Alexander Grossmann and his colleagues went first to the arXiv for the newest results to build upon and shape their thinking. They knew it was unfiltered and not peer reviewed, but they were often already at the next step in their research by the time the final version was published. Many features on ScienceOpen were created with this kind of speed in mind. Continue reading “Speeding up Research with Preprints”
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.
One of the biggest challenges for researchers is time. So when you find an abstract of interest and have just a moment to actually read, you need the full text right now. With our newest release, the ScienceOpen discovery environment incorporates open access data from Impactstory to provide researchers with more ways to read the paper.
Institutional repositories, open access aggregators, self-archiving, preprint servers – the last years have seen a proliferation of access options. The new ScienceOpen article page, therefore, aims for transparency and choice on nearly 40 million article records.
ScienceOpen is excited to work with the Unpaywall data from Impactstory to provide more information about open access licenses and access options for our users. This powerful dataset is being used by several discovery engines to enrich the search experience. Jason Priem of Impactstory says, “we’re thrilled to welcome ScienceOpen as our latest partner to integrate Unpaywall data, and excited about how this new integration furthers our goal to make Open Access content truly ubiquitous for researchers and readers.”
Potsdamer Platz Berlin, Andreas Levers, Traffic Light, Flickr, CC BY-NC
A green light for reading
The publisher’s version of record is a reader’s most reliable source. With our latest release we highlight this version on the article page with a green “Publisher” button for better orientation. Editors and publishers work hard to make the most accurate version of research results available to the community and changes to the version of record are often tracked on the publisher website via Crossref’s Crossmark service. With so little time in the day, reading the original is your best bet.
However, if further freely-accessible versions are available according to data from Unpaywall, these links are also provided and clearly labelled. Repository versions can be helpful outside of academic settings. And sometimes we have not identified an Open Access license, but Unpaywall has – so we, of course, want to give the reader this information as well!
If ScienceOpen indexing is based on the full text XML available on our platform (Open Access Hosting customers or PubMed Central Open Access articles), then the ScienceOpen access button is highlighted green. The same is true if we are getting our indexing information from SciELO. Our goal is always to help users find the best version for their needs.
“By offering more access choices, ScienceOpen has become so much more useful for researchers,” said Nina Tscheke, who has been involved in research community outreach over the past year. “This is an important step towards meeting researchers needs.”
ScienceOpen continues to develop tools and features for researchers and publishers to provide a superior discovery environment for scholarly research. If you are a publisher, editor, society or institute, talk to us today about our platform technology. Contact Stephanie Dawson for more information.
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.
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