Category: Other

Increasing visibility for Open Access publications  

The open access (OA) movement continues to make great strides in reshaping the established parameters for scientific communication and access to scholarly information. Even traditional publishers have begun to seek out ways of adapting to this rapidly shifting landscape. At the heart of the OA movement is the aim of removing barriers to information, so that research can be freely accessible by everyone. Openly available research helps accelerate the pace at which advances in research may be made, both within and across the boundaries of specific fields, and sparks public dialogue rooted in the latest findings on a given issue. But how visible is open access really? Establishing the infrastructure to make scholarly information freely accessible has been critical to getting open access on its feet, but where does it go from here? Is research that is neither easily discovered nor readily understood by most people actually “open”? 

The Initial ‘Open Science Stars’ Project

Four years ago, the late Jon Tennant, who was a significant contributor to the Open Science movement and a friend and colleague to the ScienceOpen team, interviewed people on ScienceOpen’s behalf from around the world who were active supporters of making science more open. This year, we got back in touch with several of the interviewees to get their opinion on the current status of Open Science in 2020. We heard from Dr. Joanne Kamens, Executive Director of Addgene, Professor Dr. Samir Hachani at Algiers II University, and Dr. Chris Hartgerink, Executive Director of Liberate Science GmbH. We also received an interesting update on the state of Open Science in Indoensia from Dr. Dasapta Erwin Irawan. Where do you think Open Science is heading in 2020? Share your thoughts with us! Here are our Open Science Stars’ responses: 

A Collaboration for #OAWeek2020

In the announcement of the theme for Open Access Week 2020, Nick Schockey wrote, “International Open Access Week is a time for the wider community to coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work.“ ScienceOpen strongly agrees with this statement and has been collaborating extensively with our partner Compuscript to work towards this goal. Our efforts also coincide with the general theme of the 2020 International Open Access Week: to be open with purpose – taking action to build structural equity and inclusion. In this article, we describe how ScienceOpen and Compuscript are taking steps to make science more open and the research community more inclusive to people from all over the world. We hope that by raising awareness around our efforts, we can reach out to more journals and smaller publishers who may be searching for additional support in scholarly publishing.

The New Education Journals published by UCL Press

In the last several months, ScienceOpen has welcomed four education and social science journals based at the UCL Institute of Education and published by UCL Press: the Film Education Journal, London Research of Education, International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, and Research for All. The History Education Research Journal (HERJ) is the fifth and final journal of this series to be presented alongside its new issue 17(2), which is out today! All of these education journals are now hosted on ScienceOpen where they are freely accessible and supported by our expert metadata and technology services.  

Explore 7 Journals and Hundreds of Books

Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) Press has strategically partnered with ScienceOpen to enrich its metadata and feature its publications on ScienceOpen’s interactive search and discovery platform. This is a special announcement because not only do we have a lot of new content to share with you, but we also get to highlight the success of our technical team, who worked diligently to help UUM Press streamline and enrich their publications’ metadata. Now, the addition of seven UUM Press open access journals (plus one forthcoming) and approximately 400 other titles with rich metadata are available for discovery in eight different featured collections and an encompassing Super Collection on ScienceOpen.   

Metadata Services at ScienceOpen 

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: 

A common goal of authors and publishers has long been more readership for their publications. Traditionally, the abstract was a teaser to encourage the potential reader to buy or subscribe to read the full text. Even in an open access economy, a good abstract can trigger a coveted “download” and even more coveted citation. Why then do many publishers not make their abstracts and other metadata such as references or license information freely accessible in a machine-readable format?  

Get to know Research for All 

We are happy to present to you a new open access journal hosted on ScienceOpen: Research for All by UCL Press. This journal is the fourth journal that was based at the UCL Institute of Education to join our interactive discovery environment of nearly 65 million academic and scientific records. 

Explore new tools for next-generation, open peer review 

In concurrence with Peer Review Week 2020, Stephanie Dawson and Ian Caswell of UCL Press will host a virtual event this Thursday, September 24^th, describing the Open Peer Review tools behind UCL Open: Environment. The event will have the form of a case study, and Ian and Stephanie will explain the editorial workflow of UCL Open in addition to sharing their experience in implementing open publishing models on ScienceOpen. Come and tune in if you are a publisher, an editor, or simply an open science enthusiast, and get unique insight into the practical aspects of open publishing! This event will take place over Zoom at 4 pm CEST (UTC+2) on this coming Thursday. Go to the event page here to register so you can take part in this discussion! 

Welcoming Blockchain in Healthcare Today 

With the current global pandemic, the importance of Open Science in scientific medical research has been recognized by many as critical in developing effective treatment strategies to overcome this health crisis. We are pleased to announce a new cooperation with Partners in Digital Health (PDH) to showcase the Gold open access journal, Blockchain in Healthcare Today (BHTY). BHTY is the world’s first peer-reviewed journal that amplifies and disseminates distributed ledger technology (DLT) research and innovations in the healthcare sector. BHTY content is now integrated into our ever-growing database, which currently contains nearly 65 million records, in a unique Featured Collection.