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.
This post announces a call for journals that are Open Access and also charge no APCs (article-processing charges) to apply for our next-generation abstracting and indexing services on ScienceOpen for free!
Free to publish Open Access journals offer an incredible service to the research community and broader public, with editors often working long hours with no compensation. We want to recognise this effort and reward it with free indexing on our platform!
More visibility for your journal
Journals indexed on ScienceOpen:
Reach new audiences and maximize your readership
Drive more usage to your journals
Upload your content to a unique search/discovery and communication platform
Open up the context of your content
What do we need from you?
An application form can be found here. Fill it out, and submit to our team. Simple!
On the last day of every month, we will select and announce the winners via social media, and begin the next cycle! Out of the applicants, we will select up to 10 journals per month for free indexing, and the best application will get a free featuredjournal collection too! All others will roll over into the next month.
At ScienceOpen, you can peer review any of 13 million research articles (and climbing every day!). That’s right! Any one you want. Even if an article has been published and ‘passed’ peer review, you can still comment on it. The only reason there would ever be no value in doing this would be if all published work were completely infallible, which is clearly not the case.
To review an article, you must create a LOGIN ID for ScienceOpen and ORCID by following the instructions here.
The ScienceOpen community has agreed to only allow formal peer reviews from ScienceOpen members that have published at least 5 articles in peer reviewed journals. For this reason, please do not forget to add your publication history on ORCID. Only if you do not have an ORCID account can a peer review manager at ScienceOpen set up an account for you. If you would like for someone to do this, please send an email to dan.cook@scienceopen.com before proceeding. Put the phrase “Create accounts” in the subject line, and put your name and email address in the body of the email.
Context is something we’ve been thinking a lot about at ScienceOpen recently. It comes from the Latin ‘con’ and ‘texere’ (to form ‘contextus’), which means ‘weave together’. The implications for science are fairly obvious: modern research is about weaving together different strands of information, thought, and data to place your results into the context of existing research. This is the reason why we have introductory and discussion sections at the intra-article level.
But what about context at a higher level?
Context can defined as: “The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.” Simple follow on questions might be then, what is the context of a research article? How do we define that context? How do we build on that to do science more efficiently? The whole point for the existence of research articles is that they can be understood by as broad an audience as possible so that their re-use is maximised.
There are many things that impinge upon the context of research. Paywalls, secretive and exclusive peer review, lack of discovery, lack of inter-operability, lack of accessibility. The list is practically endless, and a general by-product of a failure for traditional scholarly publishing models to embrace a Web-based era.
ScienceOpen Collections are thematic groups of research articles that transcend journals and publishers to transform how we collate and build upon scientific knowledge.
What are Collections
The modern research environment is a hyper-dimensional space with a vast quantity of outputs that are impossible to manually manage. You can think of research like a giant Rubik’s cube: you have different ‘colours’ of research that you have to mix and match and play around with to discover how the different sections fit together to become something useful.
CC BY-SA 3.0, Booyabazooka (Wikipedia)
We view Collections as the individual faces of a Rubik’s cube. They draw from the vast, and often messy, pool of published research to provide an additional layer of context and clarity. They represent a new way for researchers to filter the published record to discover and curate content that is directly relevant to them, irrespective of who published it or what journal it appears in.
Advantages of Collections
Perhaps the main advantage of Collections to researchers is that they are independent of journals or publishers and their branding criteria. Researchers are undoubtedly the best-placed to assess what research is relevant to themselves and their communities. As such, we see Collections as the natural continuing transformation of the concept of the modern journal, acting in almost full cycle to return them to their basic principles.
The advantage of using Collections is that they provide researchers with the power to filter and select from the published record and create what is in essence a highly-specialised virtual journal. This means that Collections are not pre-selective, but instead comprise papers discriminated only by a single criterion: research that is relevant to your peers, and also deemed relevant by them.
Filtering for Collections occurs at different levels depending on scope or complexity of research. For example, Collections can be designed to focus on different research topics, lab groups or research groups, communities, or even departments or institutions. Collections can also be created for specific conferences and include posters from these, published on ScienceOpen. Youdefine the scope and the selection criteria.
Two days ago, the World Health Organisation declared that the threat of the Zika virus disease in Latin America and the Caribbean constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The decision was based on the outbreak of clusters of microcephaly and Guillian-Barré syndrome, which are devastating cases of congenital malformation and neurological complications. While a direct causal relationship has yet to be formally stated, the correlation between Zika infection during pregnancy and microcephaly is strongly correlated.
At ScienceOpen, we believe that rapid publication serves the communication of research, and aim to have submitted papers published online within 24-48 hours. For articles relating to the Zika outbreak, we are waiving the usual submission charge, and any published articles will be integrated into our pre-existing research collection on the Zika virus. Articles will receive top priority, and therefore be almost immediately available to the research community, medical professionals, and the wider public. We encourage submission of all articles relating to the virus. Please directly contact Stephanie Dawson for submissions and related enquiries.
Aedis aegypti, one of the culprit mosquitoes. Image: James Gathany, CC BY
There is clearly a need to co-ordinate international efforts, including those of the research community, to investigate and understand the Zika virus better. At ScienceOpen, we want to play our part in facilitating the communication of any such research, and the speedy protection of those at risk. We are happy to join other open access publishers such as F1000 Research and PLOS Current Outbreaks (both of which which publish very rapidly) who have similarly declared that all research published with them on the Zika virus can be published free of charge.
