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.
One of the greatest features we have at ScienceOpen are collections. These are thematic groupings of published articles and pre-prints, managed by a collection editor. Core features include:
This week, on Saturday, April 22nd (Earth Day) the global science-interested community is uniting to march for science across the world. Many of our members will be joining the March for Science in Washington DC and other cities around the world.
The March for Science is about the role that science plays in our everyday lives, but also about political activism for researchers, celebrating the diversity of research cultures, and making sure that policy developments are grounded in strong evidence.
ScienceOpen will be part of the global march, and in five different locations! A more informed dialogue between scientists and citizens requires openness, transparency, and access to information – one of the key mission statements of ScienceOpen, and the reason we will be out marching in force.
CEO Stephanie Dawson will be marching in Berlin, Germany, with other members of our team there. Find her on Twitter and join them here!
Prof. Alexander Grossman, co-founder of ScienceOpen, will be taking to the streets in Leipzig, Germany. Get in touch here.
Tibor Tscheke, the other co-founder of ScienceOpen, will also be marching in Boston, USA! Contact him here.
Jon Tennant will be in Seattle, USA, joining the Science March as part of the Sage Bionetworks Assembly. Contact him here.
Erzsébet Toth-Czifra will be marching in Budapest, Hungary, too, and you can reach her here.
We welcome anyone and everyone to stand by our sides with the rest of the march, and together celebrate science as a global community!
ScienceOpen has launched a suite of powerful new features on its platform, including filters for Open Access articles and author affiliations. Using state-of-the-art technology, ScienceOpen enriches and exposes the context of research articles for a dynamic, multi-level search and discovery experience.
ScienceOpen currently indexes more than 28 million article records, 3 million of which are Open Access, and is rapidly accruing new content from a range of publishers across the STEM and HSS fields.
These new filtering functions will assist researchers in identifying relevant Open Access content more easily, and in exploring the output of particular institutes and universities. Publishers will also be able to easily document the impact of their Open Access content.
CEO of ScienceOpen, Dr. Stephanie Dawson, said “Our pace of innovation makes ScienceOpen one of the most interesting and fast-moving players in the market. We are delighted to continue to add new features to the search and discovery interface. We work very closely with the research community and publishers to provide the services that they need.”
Additional new features being released also include being able to sort content by the affiliation of an author at the time of publication, as well as the date articles were indexed at ScienceOpen. This means that ScienceOpen is rapidly becoming the smartest and most precise way to discover relevant research.
A filter for Open Access articles on ScienceOpen has been in constant demand from researchers. Co-founder of ScienceOpen, Prof. Alexander Grossmann, said “In a scholarly publishing environment where Open Access is becoming more common, we have to find ways to maximize its potential. Being able to more easily discover Open Access content will greatly enhance the research process for users across the globe.”
Publishers with the most Open Access content on ScienceOpen
Authors are undoubtedly the best positioned to promote their own research. They know it inside out, they know people who might be most interested in it, and they know the places to maximise the potential audience. But still, with an increasing number of publications every year, it is important that researchers know how to promote their research to maximum effect, whether it is Open Access or not.
Here are our top ten suggestions to help increase your reach and impact! Most of these fall under two categories: Networking and maintaining your digital identity, and sharing your research to enhance its impact. Both are important in a modern scholarly environment, and can help to give you that competitive edge while making sure your’re maximising the potential of your research.
Publishing can be a big, expensive business, or it can be done on a small scale by research communities themselves – by researchers for researchers. For very narrow topics and small research communities it can make sense to just do it yourself and there are wide range of journals that offer a formal peer review process, editorial oversight, publishing services and a Creative Commons open access license to authors but still charge no APCs.
To support these great efforts, ScienceOpen offers free indexing for up to 10 APC-free OA journals per month, and the best candidate receives a free journal collection page for 1 year. We are pleased to announce a partnership with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in making these valuable contributions to the scholarly record more visible.
In order to qualify for our free indexing offer your journal must meet the following requirements, all of which contribute to enhancing the visibility and discoverability of your content.
Be indexed in DOAJ and without publication charges
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists over 9000 open access scholarly journals meeting certain quality standards. Listing in DOAJ is a requirement for the ScienceOpen free indexing program to assure good quality articles from an editorial standpoint. Furthermore, having DOAJ IDs also ease the indexing procedure significantly. With your articles registered in DOAJ, the only thing you have to do is to check there are no APC or other publication charges and to send ScienceOpen a list of the DOAJ ID-s for each article record and your content will be indexed in no time.
A whole new year means a chance to start or continue building your profile as an Open Scientist! There are so many ways you can do this, from publishing Open Access and sharing your research data, to helping to teach students how to code or use GitHub. Every little bit helps.
Here are ten recommendations from us to kick-start the New Year with an Open Science bang!
Kick off the new year with the new unified search on ScienceOpen! We have accomplished a lot over the last year and are looking forward to supporting the academic community in 2017.
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more context: Now your search comes with a new analytics bar that breaks down your search results by collections, journals, publishers, disciplines, and keywords for quicker filtering. Try a search for the pressing topics of 2016 like Zika or CRISPR and take the new features for a spin.
Researcher output, journal content, reference lists, citing articles can all be dynamically sorted and explored via Altmetric score, citations, date, activity. Statistics for journals, publishers and authors give overview of the content that we are indexing on ScienceOpen. Check out the most relevant journals on ScienceOpen, for example BMC Infectious Diseases or PloS Genetics for a new perspective. Or add your publications to your ORCID and get a dynamic view of your own output.
Image by Epic Fireworks, Flickr, CC BY
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more content: We welcomed publisher customers across the entire spectrum of disciplines to ScienceOpen and expect many more for the upcoming year. We added multiple journals from Brill, River Publishers, Open Library of Humanities, Higher Education Press and featured collections for PeerJ Computer Science, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Molecular Case Studies and the Italian Society for Victimology. We had the pleasure to work with a very diverse group, from STM to HSS, from open access to subscription-based journals, creating interdisciplinary bridges and new connections for their content. We further integrated all of SciELO on ScienceOpen this year for a more global perspective and have had a great time working with them. We are at over 27 million article records and adding content every day.
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more open: The ScienceOpen team participated in and helped organize numerous community events promoting Open Science. From Peer Review Week to OpenCon, talks at SSP in Vancouver and SpotOn in London, our team was on the road, debating hot issues in scholarly communication.
In order to bring more visibility to smaller community open access journals, very often with close to non-existent funding and run on a voluntary basis, we launched our platinum indexing competition. It was geared towards open access journals charging no APCs to their authors. Four successful rounds in, we have selected 18 journals to be indexed and awarded some of them with special featured collections on the ScienceOpen platform. This activity was particularly rewarding as we heard back from journals’ editors expressing their enthusiasm about the ScienceOpen project and enjoying bigger usage numbers on their content.
The ScienceOpen 2.017 version will continue to focus on context, content and open science. We are your starting point for academic discovery and networking. Together let’s explore new ways to support visibility for your publications, promote peer review, improve search and discovery and facilitate collection building. Here is to putting research in context! The year 2016 had some great moments – may 2017 bring many, many more!
Open Access Week is the annual event to show our global support for all things open access! The theme this year is all about committing to putting open into action in order to take real steps towards open scholarship and supporting a stronger research framework.
SPARC have created an action portal of various activities you can undertake this week to help yourself and your colleagues support open access. These are:
Make a list of open access journals in my discipline I would consider publishing in and share it with colleagues.
Start a conversation about Open Access during a research group meeting, journal club, or staff meeting.
Send at least one manuscript to an open-access journal within the next year.
Deposit at least one of my articles into an open-access repository during Open Access Week and encourage colleagues to do the same.
Use the SPARC author addendum on my next publication to reserve rights to make a copy of my work publicly accessible.
Contribute to a conversation on campus about institutional support for Open Access.
Open Access is not a research issue. It’s not a European issue. It’s not a publisher or policy issue. Open Access is a global issue.
Knowledge is a public good, and forms the basis of an environment in which everyone can develop and build inclusively. It can help to inspire publication innovation and entrepreneurship. Open Access to research sits at the core of this on a global level.
As part of our ‘Open Science Stars’ series, we’ve been trying to expose some of the views and experiences of people from the world of open around the world. This global perspective is important, because researchers have a responsibility to contribute to the open sharing of results around the world, and not take a free ride based on elite privilege.
Open Access and China
Today, we wanted to delve a bit into the status of OA in China. Recently, we partnered with Higher Education Press, one of the top publishers in China, to index one of their flagship journals, and to demonstrate China’s continued support for more open research practices. China has committed to rapid growth in scientific research and development recently, and this is reflected in the solid evidence for a strongly developing open access research base.
