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:
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.
Image credit: Frustration, by Eric (e-magic), CC BY-ND. https://www.flickr.com/photos/emagic/
On August 7th, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) responded to a call from the Global Coalition of Access to Research, Science and Education Organizations (signed by more than 80 entities and counting, including ScienceOpen) to withdraw their new model licenses.
So what exactly is all the fuss about? Our headline pretty much sums it up and comes courtesy of OA advocate Graham Steel who rightly observed that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The Open Access (OA) community happily relies on a license suite from Creative Commons (CC) to provide an interoperable and simple standard for our industry. ScienceOpen uses the most flexible CC “attribution license”, known to its many friends as CC-BY. We like it because it allows maximum scope for the creative re-use of research, including commercially, no permission from us required. The only caveat is “credit where credit is due” which only seems fair and means that the original authors and source must be cited, together with the license type and ideally a link to the work. We believe that research works better and faster without any limitations and that CC-BY facilitates this.
So why does the STM Association, the “voice of academic and professional publishing” (but not ours, we’re not members), think that we need new licenses? One reason they give in their response is that “Creative Commons (CC) licenses are designed to be used across the entire creative sector, and are not specifically designed for academic and scholarly publishing”. Sadly, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of the true power of the licenses which comes precisely because they were developed for use across different creative industries.
This is very important for those who work in scientific communication whose job it is to explain science to a broader audience. Research is frequently complex and mashing it up with CC-BY images (of which there are over 58 million at the photo sharing site Flickr), Wikipedia links (over 4 million CC articles) even music can really bring a story to life. Making this content freely available under a CC license is important because advances in science and medicine should ideally be available to and understood by everyone.
For those who have a role in this field, the reality is that navigating and selecting the best content from the overwhelming volume on the internet and then complying with the current dizzying array of more and less restrictive copyright licenses is already quite tricky enough, thank you kindly! We simply don’t need any more complexity.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has revealed some new “model” licenses which are ironically entitled “making OA licensing work”. We’re sorry, did we miss something? Continue reading “ScienceOpen joins the Coalition against STM Licenses”
