To mark Peer Review Week coming up at the end of September, we invite you to a month-long celebration of open peer review and to begin exploring preprints on ScienceOpen, submit a substantial review, and compete for one of three prizes in our open peer review competition.
Fast, free and easy! ScienceOpen has been publishing open access conference posters for years with over 500 posters currently accesible on the platform.
We recently added a new editor to the poster collection. Nur Atmaca, ScienceOpen’s newest Editorial Assistant, will review your work before publication, and in no time, you will have access to a variety of tools that will boost your digital profile. After the poster is published with a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license and a Crossref Digital Object Identifier (DOI), researchers can easily share the published poster on social media and track usage on the article page.
Organizing a conference this year? Publishing posters and proceedings on ScienceOpen is a low-cost alternative that puts your conference output in the context of over 50 million article records, with smart search and filtering tools and interactive features for the research community.
Posters are an effective way to communicate the essence of a research project in a compact space. They provide an opportunity to present preliminary results and get feedback from the scientific community before publishing. ScienceOpen has been publishing posters open access for years with over 170 posters on the platform. Now with an easy upload function, integration with ORCID and Crossref, and a full spectrum of usage metrics from citations to Altmetric Score, ScienceOpen offers a state-of-the-art platform for your conference. Users can bookmark their favourite posters, review, add comments, share to social media, recommend them to their peers, and cite.
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.
Fast, free and easy! ScienceOpen has been publishing posters open access for years with over 200 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”
Hi Gautam! Thanks for joining us here. Could you start off by letting us know a little bit about your background?
Hi Jon, thanks for having me here!
I’m a postdoc in Buzz Baum’s lab at UCL working on the evolution of cell division- all the way from Archaea to unicellular eukaryotes. I found myself in London in mid-2015 after a bit of continent-hopping that included a stint as a cell-biologist-in-training at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and a PhD in Systems Biology at Stanford University.
When did you first hear about open access and open science? What were your initial thoughts?
Back in 2005, when I was an undergraduate in India without proper library access. PLOS and PMC came to the rescue! At the time paywalls were a very real and practical hindrance, but I must confess I didn’t think much about the actual ethics of publishing until well into my PhD.
As a postdoc in the UK, how do you feel about recent policy changes around Open Access?
I think the UK is making some positive moves, such as requiring Open Access for compliance with the Research Evaluation Framework. Funding agencies like the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust defray the costs of “gold” Open Access for published research supported by their grants. However, in the absence of accompanying reforms in the publishing industry or revised evaluation criteria for scientists, many of these policy changes will simply funnel more taxpayer money towards established scientific journals, providing more of a stopgap than a long-term solution.
I must confess I didn’t think much about the actual ethics of publishing until well into my PhD
Continue reading “Gautam Dey, UCL’s Cell Biology rockstar: Publish your cake, and eat it.”
ScienceOpen has teamed up with OpenAIRE and Digital-Science, alongside two of their portfolio companies – Figshare and Overleaf, to organise an OpenCon ‘satellite’ event to be held in Berlin on the 24-26th November.
This event will form one of the many international satellite events of the bigger OpenCon 2016 conference that will take place two weeks earlier in Washington, DC.
OpenCon is the student and early career academic professional conference that focuses on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. It seeks to empower the next generation to advance openness in research and education.
OpenCon satellite events are organised by those who are passionate about communicating the important messages of Open Information with the world, and are welcome to anyone interested in joining the conversation and connecting with a community of like-minded individuals.
When: 24th to 26th of November 2016.
Where: Humboldt University Berlin.
What: The event:will focus on putting Open Science into action through open collaboration. On Thursday evening (24th) we will be hosting a hackathon to get people in the mood and have a chance to get settled before the main event!
Hashtag: #OpenConBerlin
Our keynote speaker (Friday 25th, 10am), will be Julia Reda MEP – a woman on a mission to reform copyright legislation.
Alongside presentations and interesting talks made by those who have benefited and gained from open information, we’ll run focused workshops on themes you’ll choose via crowdsourcing.
During the event, we will run a few short and themed focus group sessions; in each session we hope to start a conversation where people share advice and success stories about the industry. Discussions and resources willbe collated via open documents like etherpads and collected as outputs of the event.
We’re all in the business of collaboration and we hope the event will inspire those who attend to do just that!
Registration: OpenCon Berlin 2016 is free to attend, but you must RSVP via the OpenCon Berlin 2016 website: http://www.opencon2016.org/opencon_2016_berlin
Useful links:
OpenCon: http://www.opencon2016.org/
ScienceOpen: https://www.scienceopen.com/
Digital Science: https://www.digital-science.com/
OpenAIRE: https://www.openaire.eu/
Etherpad: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/OpenConBerlin2016 – updates, the agenda, and notes will all be posted here.
Become a ScienceOpen Activist and change the world of scientific publishing! Apply to become part of our think-tank and our voice in the community.
Scholarly Publishing and science are frustratingly slow when it comes to change. Newton’s lab-books from 300 years ago probably look similar to what PhD-students still scribble in today!
Old habits die hard in research. Other than social media, scholarly communication is still largely focused on publication in journals where anonymous peer review delays the liberation of newly gained knowledge by months, if not even years.
We are still using systems that have operated for decades and centuries. But do they really still work? Research studies can be irreproducible; billions of public funding lock up knowledge behind pay walls and embargos became a bargaining chip between authors and their publishers.
Many people know this. The Open Access movement has provided a practical way forwards and has moved way beyond simply portraying an idealist view of the world to demonstrating it. But why isn’t Open Science our reality right now?
The ScienceOpen answer: we need more activists!
We need your help: Apply now to become a ScienceOpen Activist:
Regardless of whether you are an early career researcher or a senior scientist, have a background in natural sciences or study languages, work as a librarian or for a funding agency, you can apply here. Please also share why you are enthusiastic about Open Science.
Let’s take it to the next level. And make change happen.
Viva La Revolucion!
What’s not to love about this quintessentially San Francisco photo? As some of you know, ScienceOpen has offices in Berlin, Boston and San Francisco.
It has a “rainbow” feel, appropriate for the recent US legal ruling on marriage equality. Ben and Jerry’s carries a brand of ice-cream named Cherry Garcia after the late Jerry, lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, founded in 1965 in California. And of course, the corner of Haight and Ashbury is the epicenter of the Summer of Love, a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on this neighborhood in San Francisco. All these facts I have learned since living here and becoming a citizen (required knowledge to pass the test!).
For all you Earlier Career Researchers (and those who mentor them) who are currently on Summer Break but are almost certainly still working and have published a poster with us, here’s an opportunity to activate your social media networks and win yourself a $150 Amazon Gift Card!
Here’s how this competition works:
This competition will remain open from 11am PST July 6th until 11am PST August 31st and the winner will be announced on September 1st 2015.
For those of you who are new to the concept of digital posters, you can find out more here. At ScienceOpen we publish them for FREE – your entry receives a DOI so that it can be found and cited plus it lives on long after the conference is over.
Sounds like a sweet summer offer to us!
It’s March and so naturally the upcoming whirlwind of large scholarly conferences is on my mind. If I was still in the USA, I might also be participating in a friendly Basketball bet!
I recently attended the 5th International Conference of the Flow Chemistry Society in Berlin. It was expertly organized by SelectBio and featured everything that we expect from a scholarly conference – top scientists as keynote speakers, a poster session for Earlier Career Researchers to present preliminary data and, most importantly, coffee breaks to raise our energy so that we can exchange ideas with other participants.
But one innovation struck me: each participating poster exhibitor had been offered the opportunity to publish their poster via e-Posters. Because ScienceOpen also offers poster publishing (now free of charge), I was interested to exchange experiences with them. I had a great talk with Sara Spencer about how poster publishing can support researchers by encouraging discussion of their work after the conference or with colleagues who were not able to attend. Publishing them on a platform that provides each one with a DOI, as we do here at ScienceOpen, also means that the author can be credited if the poster is, for example, photographed and shared on Facebook.
However, both Sara and I have also observed that scientists are sometimes hesitant to “publish” their posters at all which surprised us since the benefits seem clear. The two most frequent questions about poster publishing that we encounter are:
Some posters get hung in the department hallway but most end their lives rolled up under a desk somewhere. By making your poster digitally available beyond its physical presence at a conference, you can extend the discussion of your research and possibly even find new collaborators. Of course, you can also do this by posting it on your website or in a repository. But by publishing it under a CC BY license and with a CrossRef registered DOI, you also make it possible to track the impact it has by recording altmetrics such as downloads, social shares etc – making it a much more valuable asset for your CV.
Most publishers recognize that science cannot move forward in a communication vacuum and rules around sharing are changing with the rise of online discussion forums. No one is quite sure where the new lines on such issues will be drawn. Scientists regularly share their preliminary research at conferences in the form of talks and posters or on pre-print servers such as arXiv or BiorXiv. Early feedback can save a researcher time and funding dollars.
The scientific community understands that there is a big difference between preliminary results presented in a pre-print or a poster and a full research paper. Most journal editors also have no problem making this distinction. A list of the pre-print policies of major academic journals can be found on Wikipedia. A list of how different journals view F1000Posters (and most do not regard them as pre-publication) can be found here.
However, it’s important to know that some journals do still regard posters as prior-publication and these include some big names such as the journals of the American Chemical Society; Royal Society of Chemistry; American Physiological Society; American Microbiology Society and the NEJM. When we contacted some poster session organizers at a large society conference about the possibility of publishing this content with DOI on ScienceOpen, one of them checked back in with the Society for their view and received this ominous warning:
We would caution you, and we would ask you to caution your presenters, that intellectual property rights issues, such as patent or other proprietary concerns, may be implicated by agreeing to the publication of posters.
Our answer to the above statement is to ask “how so?” Whether the author retains copyright and grants a CC license to publish or gives copyright to the publisher, then how is the IP of a poster different from that of an article? If they mean, as stated on the F1000Poster list, that they consider the limited and often preliminary content displayed on posters from Earlier Career Researchers to be prior publication then we say “good luck with that view in the digital age”!
What seems more likely to us is that large traditional publishers are using the same IP “scare tactics” that we last saw in the early days of Open Access. What they are trying to do is discourage poster or pre-print publishing (per their restrictive policies on live tweeting at conferences) with DOI because they don’t want these citations to lower the Impact Factors of their journals.
The scientific community is beginning to experiment with the new tools for sharing and networking online and this is putting pressure on established structures and rules. To them we say:
Be sure to publish your posters or pre-prints with a DOI so they can be found and cited. Then publish your subsequent full article with organizations that have progressive policies on prior-sharing, preferably Open Access!
