Researchers often pay substantial sums to make the results of their research freely accessible to all. But how to let potential readers know that it’s FREE? If no one reads your open access paper, it’s like buying someone a gift certificate that they never use. So, the community has agreed on this solution:
The open access symbol signals to readers that they can expect direct and unrestricted access to published scholarly works. Originally created by PLOS, it quickly gained broad usage on publisher webpages and other sites to identify open access articles. ScienceOpen displays this open access symbol on over 4 million articles.
So how does the open access symbol get there? When a publisher publishes an article, they deposit the article “metadata” – title, authors, abstract, journal, date, URL, etc. with the central DOI service Crossref. Part of the information that they can deposit is a machine-readable Creative Commons open access license. When ScienceOpen imports the metadata information about your publication, it will get an open access symbol if our computers find an open access license associated with it. If a publisher does not deposit license information, we assume that it is not open access. It’s that simple. Continue reading “I paid $$$ – Where is my open access symbol?”
Chinese researchers face tremendous hurdles in communicating their research results to the rest of the world – from language barriers to internet restrictions and the traditional western bias of the scientific literature.
Confronted with the danger of being left out of the global scholarly communications, Chinese editors often publish in partnerships with publishers outside of China. This often leaves them having to give up control over the content to their global partners. However, to increase the discoverability of Chinese research in wider scientific circles, journals based in China now have new options to reach out to international audiences.
Over their 15-year history in China, CompuScript/International Science Editing—a leading European provider of publishing services to the scientific community headquartered in Ireland—have built a strong local network to help overcome these challenges, providing editorial and technical support to Chinese researchers, editors, and institutions. To support Chinese researchers and publishers and contribute to the mission of global open science, CompuScript/International Science Editing in China and ScienceOpen have partnered up to develop new products tailored specifically for the Chinese market and to utilize the full set of tools ScienceOpen offers for greater discoverability of Chinese research. Continue reading “ScienceOpen Supports Chinese Journals for Globally Inclusive Open Science”
In recognition of World’s Oceans Day, ScienceOpen hosted a special article collection published by nonprofit Annual Reviews that address the topics of marine pollution, human impact and environmental stewardship, and marine species’ adaptation. The Oceans collection aims to raise awareness about the grave consequences of plastic debris in our oceans and the overall impact humans have on the marine environment.
Plastics contamination was first reported nearly 50 years ago, following the rise of commercial plastics production. According to ‘Plastics in the Marine Environment’ by Kara Laveder Law, global plastics production surpassed 300 million metric tons per year in 2014. Plastic debris has been detected worldwide in all major marine habitats. In her article, Law presents a framework to evaluate the current “understanding of the sources, distribution, fate, and impacts of marine plastics”. In a similar vein, ‘Plastic as a Persistent Marine Pollutant’ by Boris Worm et al. discusses how marine plastics work their way into the food web in the first place. This article further presents the complex toxicology of plastic particles on marine life and how plastic can transfer up the food chain. Worm et al. offer solutions to the current crisis by suggesting a Global Convention on Plastic Pollution as a collaboration between “governments, producers, scientists, and citizens”.
“Even though plastics are hard materials, at the microscopic level they absorb persistent organic compounds. Persistent organic pollutants like DDT, PCBs, flame retardants and fabric treatments have an affinity for plastic. Plastics act like sponges, soaking them up.” Continue reading “Oceans and Human Impact”
By working with a range of publishers and transcending disciplines, our research network constantly finds new connections for users to explore. This enriched context is based on article-level citation and reference analysis, with each nod, or link, in this network designed to expand the horizons of researchers and help them to discover previously unknown relevant research. Recently, we took the diverse field of Archaeology and integrated it into this mix to see what happens.
Let’s take a look at what all this new research has to offer! They reveal to us the material remains of ancient cultures, historical accounts of past lives, and tell us stories about what is it like doing Archaeology in a modern, digital research environment.
During the last decade, China has made rapid progress towards making more of its research publications publicly accessible. Recognizing the contribution of Open Access (OA) to the advancement of global knowledge production, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has been helping to develop government-funded models of OA publication and open research policies to make knowledge produced by public investment in China public to the maximum benefit of all.
Today, we are happy to announce that one of CAS’ flagship Open Access journals, Journal of Radars, is now indexed on ScienceOpen. We’re very excited by this new partnership, as it meets our commitment to bring together the latest results from different fields, and cultural and geographical regions.
Shouxin Jia, Managing Editor of Journal of Radars said:
ScienceOpen is a high-end academic exchange platform, promoting and leading the science and technology and our co-operation will bring better visibility to developments in the radar field.
The journal is jointly run by the Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS) and China Radar Industry Association (CRIA). Being a high-level academic exchange platform in China’s radar research, the journal covers the most important developments in radar technology in recent years and gives us a picture on the highly diverse modern uses of radars. These include:
All articles are Open Access and published under a Creative Commons 4.0 license which allows for the free re-distribution and re-use.
If you want to learn more about Open Access in China, or explore the range of Open Access content from China indexed on ScienceOpen, the selection of blog posts below will give you some insights.
These journals fulfil the double challenge of publishing high-quality Open Access research while charging no fees (APCs) to their authors. As such, they provide significant contributions to advancing open scholarship as well as a more democratic science from month to month.
To help these valuable contributions to the scholarly record to become more visible, we offer our winners a Featured Collection for one year for free. Collections are a specialized and customized promotional service to increase the visibility of selected journals within our discovery platform, also used to track and measure usage of research articles.
We are pleased to announce three new journals from across Europe that will be integrated into, and promoted on, ScienceOpen. These are:
Publisher: Hungarian Communication Studies Association
Country of publisher: Hungary
KOME is a theory and pure research-oriented journal of communication studies and related fields. It consists of useful supplements and reasonable alternatives to current models and theories and features theoretical researches that help to understand better, or deconceptualize the understanding of communication and the media.
As an important area in communication, current issues from the field of scholarly communication are also covered.
We asked Dr. János Tóth, Editor-in-Chief of KOME, about why they chose to enter the competition. He said:
We noticed the call when we were uploading the content of our most recent issue to DOAJ. To be completely honest, at first glance we were not sure about how our journal would find its place among your content -most of the indexed journals are from hard science fields-, but the interface looked very appealing, user-friendly, and there were a lot of additional options not seen on competitors’ services. We are constantly looking for new opportunities to reach toward international audiences, and, as someone who can already speak from experience, ScienceOpen seems to be in every respect an intelligent tool capable to help us achieve this goal.
SciPost Physics is a premium-quality, Open Access, peer-reviewed refereed Journal for the general field of Physics.
It aims at providing scientists with a publishing platform in which uncompromising scientific quality meets the highest achievable standards of open accessibility, with a resolutely international outlook.
The Irish Journal of Paramedicine is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, international journal dedicated to advancing and promoting the science of prehospital clinical care, research, education, policy, management and operational delivery.
The Irish Journal of Paramedicine is the official journal of the Irish College of Paramedics, the professional body for Irish prehospital emergency care practitioners.
Here is a little teaser from their selected articles:
Publishers and journals working with ScienceOpen benefit from increased visibility, usage and branding for their indexed content. Featured collections open up journal content for:
A range of article, journal, and publisher level usage statistics to help monitoring the impact of the journal and performance assessment
Research context via reference and citation extraction. Embedding articles into our citation and recommendation network through references adds a new dimension to research context and thus grants the journal content the privilege of better visibility and higher citation frequency.
If you run a free to publish Open Access journal, participate in the competition today and get indexed on ScienceOpen for free! You can find the application form here.
Peer review at ScienceOpen is a little different to what you might be used to.
Does the fact that a paper has been published, and therefore peer reviewed, mean that it is flawless? Does it mean that the conversation around that research should stop? We do not think so. The only reason there would ever be no value in doing post-publication evaluation would be if all published work were completely infallible. Which is clearly not the case. This is, after all, why we continue to do research and build upon the work of those before us!
Therefore, we enable post-publication peer review across 34 million article records, as a form of final-version commenting. It can also be performed on preprints from the arXiv. These are essentially treated as open, pre-review manuscripts. Users can organise these into collections, and manage peer review entirely themselves as a community process.
Managed
We have now added a new feature that enables any of our users to invite another researcher to perform peer review on our platform. This is in the same way that an Editor does for a journal, as part of a fully transparent process – the theme for Peer Review Week this year! The difference to the traditional process of peer review is that this is more democratic as it is open to anyone.
Step 1 – Find a paper of interest.
All article pages now have an ‘Invite to Review’ button. Click it, and you have 2 options.
Search within the ScienceOpen userbase to see if the person you want to review already has a profile with us.
Add an email, or list of emails, of who you want to invite to review, if they don’t already have a ScienceOpen profile.
Step 2 – Invite your colleagues to review!
That’s it. It’s that easy. This combines the editorial management of peer review with open participation. We enable this to make sure that the process is fair, but efficient. This means that anyone within your research community can contribute to the research process, should they wish to.
Professor George Perry is the Dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He is recognised as a world expert in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. Today, we spoke with Prof. Perry about his research, including his new ScienceOpen collection.
Hi Prof. Perry! You are recognised as one of the 100 top scientists in Neuroscience and Behaviour, and have incredibly amassed more than 1300 research publications to date! What’s the secret to your success?
Persistence and focus on collecting and publishing highly useful data and insights.
Do you ever find it difficult maintaining your public profile with so many publications? How did you find the ORCID integration at ScienceOpen?
Maintaining numerous profiles as up-to-date requires constant monitoring. Linking datasets with ORCID does assist.
Your research focusses on the processes leading to neuronal damage. What have been your key discoveries to date?
Primarily, establishing oxidative stress in Alzheimer’s disease. Second, new insights regarding the cell biology of Alzheimer’s disease.
It is the alternative to the amyloid cascade, which dominates our field. The collection presents a biological view of Alzheimer’s disease.
What do you hope to achieve with your ScienceOpen collection? And how can we help you with this?
The collection provides a group of papers that illuminates an alternative to amyloid as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. I use it when communicating with others about weakness and alternatives, and to demonstrate that the amyloid cascade has been questioned for over two decades.
Thank you for your time, Prof. Perry. It has been great to learn from your insight and experience!
ORCID have recognised the discovery and networking platform ScienceOpen for leadership in integrating their services as part of their Collect and Connect program.
Under ORCID’s mantra of “Enter once, reuse often”, Collect and Connect is designed for member organizations to collect, display, connect and synchronize data between research information systems. This was developed to streamline the integration process across a range of research systems, funders, and publishers.
ORCID has been at the foundation of ScienceOpen since inception, enabling verified users to integrate their published content, build collections, and perform post-publication peer review across publishers and journals for free.
CEO of ScienceOpen, Stephanie Dawson, said “We are delighted to be among the first recognized by ORCID as part of their Collect and Connect Program. ORCID has been essential to our development, and together we will continue to build a robust scholarly infrastructure for all stakeholders.”
ScienceOpen features alongside other leaders, including eLife, Overleaf, and Editorial Manager, all committed to creating valid assertions about scholarly connectivity in a reliable, trustworthy, and transparent way.
Laure Haak, Executive Director of ORCID, said “ScienceOpen has been a huge supporter of ORCID – both by demonstrating in practice how iDs enable profile platforms and also through your incredible researcher engagement activities. Our badges are a small but important official acknowledgement for your actions. Thank you for your leadership in the open research community!”
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.
