To speed up the transformation to Open Access (OA), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will be funding20 innovative projects over the next two years. We are proud to announce that ScienceOpen is participating with a project around Open Access book metadata for increased discoverability, and we would like to give a preview here of what we are working on.
Discovery infrastructure to let your best content shine
Image by Jared Tarbell E8 Detail CC BY
ScienceOpen has released its newest feature to support academic publishers – the ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR. Over 50 customers have chosen to showcase their content in 300+ Collections within the interactive ScienceOpen discovery environment. Each Collection allows content to be explored in dynamic ways that highlight top articles. With the ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR, it is now possible to embed ScienceOpen’s state-of-the-art discovery tools directly into any website with just a few lines of code. This feature can be used for journal websites, book selections, and topical collections by institutions, publishers, or societies.
Recently ScienceOpen has made several important additions to our services around books and book chapters on ScienceOpen. We announced new book hosting services for two publishers—African Minds and Carl Grossmann Verlag. Additionally, we have indexed several publishers’ book collections onto the platform, providing extensive technical support which led to the creation of an interface for producing and enhancing book metadata. These customers includeUUM Press, Huddersfield Uuniversity Press,University of Westminster Press, and Trivent among others.
In the last several years, preprint servers have become increasingly attractive to publishers as strides have been made, such as the assigning of digital object identifiers, that make preprints a better, more trackable form of scientific communication. Moreover, with the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, the scientific community has seen preprints play a major role in enabling the swift relaying of research results. Thus, there is a lot of excitement over the future of preprints and how they could transform the scientific publishing landscape. We are therefore excited to announce a new cooperation with the University of South Africa (Unisa) Press, with whom we have created a new preprint server: UnisaRxiv. UnisaRxiv will be a forum to facilitate open peer-review of preprint manuscripts and allow for rapid dissemination of the latest findings in diverse topics.
Best wishes for 2021 from the ScienceOpen team! To kick off the new year, ScienceOpen would like to invite publishers and journal editors to get a free metadata check from our technical experts to ensure that your research is found and read by the widest possible audience. With ScienceOpen’s Metadata Services, we can help you take the first steps towards more impact. In the midst of a global pandemic, the digital transformation in academic publishing has accelerated. With over 2.5 million articlespublished annually, it is essential that scholarly content can be discovered, understood and processed by computers. The need for rich, machine-readable metadata has become more critical than ever.
We are very excited to introduce our new cooperation with the Sudanese Researchers Foundation (SRF). SRF is a Sudanese NGO focusing on advancing scientific research in Sudan and increasing the capacity of Sudanese researchers. ScienceOpen and SRF have collaborated to begin a new journal within the ScienceOpen platform, making it the second journal to be completely powered by ScienceOpen. The support provided by ScienceOpen will include a manuscript submission and peer review management system, production tracking, editorial operation support, open-access hosting, metadata services, and promotional campaigns for SRF’s new journal, the African Journal of Engineering & Technology(AJET).
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.
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.
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:
UCL COVID-19 Collection benefits authors, publishers, and users
The global pandemic has elicited a resounding response from the academic community in terms of research regarding the novel coronavirus disease. From the onset, ScienceOpen has been working with publishers and researchers to create COVID-19 resources that help organize the massive amount of research being published.
Our most recent COVID-19 Collection has been created with the University College London library where we have made a collection indexing all UCL research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is automatically updated by pulling in records from the institutional repository UCL Discovery and affiliation metadata from records aggregated by the ScienceOpen platform. The automated setup easily manages the stream of new COVID-19 material being published and opens it up for exploration and interaction. In just the last week, there were 35 new publications added to the collection. Additional benefits of having all of the UCL published research relating to COVID-19 in one place is that it gives users easy and flexible tools for search and discovery such as changing the sort order from number of citations, AltmetricTM score or date. Users searching the contents of the collection, can narrow the number of articles in the collection by specific journals, publishers, or overlapping collections on the ScienceOpen platform. Thus, a user would be able to see publications that also appear in the Wiley: Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 and or in the UCL Press special issue Special series on COVID-19 interactions with our Environment collections. This encourages users to browse the content and supports easy discovery of related research. Follow the UCL COVID-19 Collection for updates on new content or interactions!
