ScienceOpen has a myriad of features and filters to help you navigate through the 47 million records published on our platform. How many of them are you familiar with? Our customized search engine enables users to quickly find articles they are looking for. Familiarizing yourself with our easily accessible features can save you time on the technicalities. For example, did you know that you can save and export any search results or filter articles for preprints?
Filters
Open Access If are interested in Open Access (OA) publications on ScienceOpen, you can easily filter your search to return only those results. Simply click on ‘Add Filter’ below the search(box), then click on ‘Open Access’ and hit the ‘Search’ button. Your results now include exclusively OA records.
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”
ScienceOpen and the Microbiology Society are pleased to announce a collaboration on new ways to showcase cross-disciplinary research. The ScienceOpen discovery environment provides state-of-the-art technological infrastructure to promote exciting new initiatives from the Society’s journals.
Interdisciplinarity is key for the Microbiology Society in reaching a wide range of researchers, from microbiologists, clinicians, epidemiologists, social scientists and policymakers to physicists, chemists and engineers. In line with their mission to advance the understanding and impact of microbiology by connecting communities worldwide, the Society is exploring new ways to package digital information, from pop-up journals to mini-review formats, to bring diverse researchers together to solve global problems.
ScienceOpen has created a flexible “Collection” product to highlight publisher content within the larger context of academic research – with over 43 million articles and records on the site. The Microbiology Society is taking advantage of the full scope of interactive features available to researchers on ScienceOpen. As well as promoting the Open Access journal Microbial Genomics, the Society is using ScienceOpen to promote cross-disciplinary products that draw on articles from multiple journals, such as the new pop-up journal on antimicrobial resistance X-AMR, the Microbiome collection created in conjunction with the British Society for Immunology, and the Microbe and Virus Profiles created in conjunction with top microbiologists and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, both of which offer concise reviews for experts and beyond. Continue reading “Beyond the Journal: ScienceOpen and the Microbiology Society Launch Collaboration on New Cross-Disciplinary Collections”
ScienceOpen provides researchers with a wide range of tools to support their research – all for free. Here is a short checklist to make sure you are getting the most of the technological infrastructure and content that we have to offer. What can a researcher do on ScienceOpen?
Discover
Multi-dimensional search in millions of article records for quick orientation: Filter your search by 18 filters including open access, preprint, author, affiliation, keyword, content type, source, and more. Sort your results by Altmetric score, citations, date, usage, and rating. Use the article Collections by other researchers to help narrow your search.
Export search results in EndNote, BibTex, and Reference Manager (RIS) formats for easy integration with other reference management systems. Up to 200 citations exported at a time.
Save your search to find the newest articles in your field with one click. ScienceOpen is adding thousands of articles to the database daily.
Bookmark the articles you are interested to explore later.
Rolf Dietrich Brecher, Speeding up, Flickr, CC-BY SA
The “Preprint” allows researchers to openly share their results with peers at an early stage and still publish the final version in the peer-reviewed journal of their choice. From the start, ScienceOpen has supported preprints and their essential role in speeding up science by integrating arXiv preprints in the physical sciences on the platform. We now include over 1.4 million arXiv records on ScienceOpen. In our new release we have added even more preprints to the mix, with a focus on the biomedical sciences.
Preprints in the biological and medical sciences were kickstarted by the founding of bioRxiv in 2013, and by the advocacy organization ASAPBio in 2015 and have taken off rapidly since then. Now on ScienceOpen we have added records for over 20,000 bioRxiv preprints to our discovery environment, together with the capacity to include records from other preprint servers such as PeerJ Preprints, Preprints.org and ChemRxiv. Up next are all the great preprint servers on OSF Preprints. We are working hard!
Preprints have the advantage of being rapidly and freely accessible. However, they have not undergone a peer review process and must be read with a more critical eye. Preprints are, therefore, clearly flagged on ScienceOpen. During his physics PhD, ScienceOpen co-founder Alexander Grossmann and his colleagues went first to the arXiv for the newest results to build upon and shape their thinking. They knew it was unfiltered and not peer reviewed, but they were often already at the next step in their research by the time the final version was published. Many features on ScienceOpen were created with this kind of speed in mind. Continue reading “Speeding up Research with Preprints”
This Spring, we are organising a little competition for all you researchers! Review an article on ScienceOpen before the end of April, and we will enter you into a prize drawing for an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.
Open Peer Review on ScienceOpen
ScienceOpen counts currently more than 40 million articles including 3.7 million open access articles as well as more than 1.4 million preprint articles. All these articles are open on ScienceOpen to a fully transparent review process: open identities, open reports, and open interaction on the platform (see our precedent blogpost here).
At ScienceOpen, we believe that “Open Science” is not just about sharing research data. For us, “Open Science” aims to make research and underlying data accessible in order toinform andallow researchers communities to take part in discussions regarding their field, increasingoverall participation and relevant inclusion of different perspectives.
Open peer reviews are also crucial in this current context of rapid development of open science and digital scientific communication. If the openness of scientific contents is a first victory for the advancement of research and innovation, open peer review still needs to be embodied in this practice to establish its full credibility and full benefit. (Picture: CC0 1.0)
What does reviewing on ScienceOpen bring concretely to reviewers?
→ Reviews are published under Creative Commons Attribution License CC-BY (4.0) and will receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) from Crossref. This makes them fully equivalent to any Open Access publication, and they can be cited or integrated further into platforms like Publons, Impactstory, or ORCID.
→ As open access publications indexed on ScienceOpen, reviews are public and can be found easily on the platform using the filter “Content type”: “Review”. For a more precise search, this filter can be used for example in combination with the title of an article.
→ Reviewing articles on ScienceOpen is a great way to show the reviewer’s involvement in his/her research field and his/her appreciation for researchers who have dedicated their time to providing a research resource to their community.
Ready, set, go!
The only requirement to write a review on ScienceOpen is to be registered with ORCID (already done with a ScienceOpen profile) and have at least five publications assigned to the ORCID account (with which you reach ScienceOpen–Expert status). If you do not meet these requirements but would still like to review a paper, contact us.
The International Women’s day was created in 1910 and it is still celebrated today to remind us that women and men still don’t have the same rights: lower salary with equal skills, lower access to education… and the recent events regarding sexual harassment remind us more than ever that violence against women is one of the most widespread violation of human rights on the planet.
Regarding women in Science, the day for International Women and Girls in Science was only created three years ago and was celebrated on the 11th of February. According to the United Nations, women are still underrepresented in the various fields of science: “A significant gender gap has persisted throughout the years at all levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines all over the world.”
Let us remember that between 1901 and 2017 only 49 women got a Nobel Prize, of which 4 are in physics (<2%), 2 are in chemistry (<4%), and 12 are in medicine (~11%).
“In fact, according to a study conducted in 14 countries, the probability for female students of graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and Doctor’s degree in science-related field are 18%, 8% and 2% respectively, while the percentages of male students are 37%, 18% and 6%.”UN
As a woman and an ex-researcher myself, my feeling regarding this day is divided between the strong need to highlight and recognise globally the unacceptable inequalities and unfairness between men and women—and the fear to be reduced only to my gender.
For me “being a woman” and particularly “being a woman in science” can’t be used as a criterion of competence in the same way that “being a man” or “being a man in science” can’t be used as one either. I would even say that I find it as contemptuous to be excluded because I am a woman as to get privileges only for this reason, too.
I think it is important that this day stays a way to discover and recognise the ability of women in different fields in regard to their creativity, intellectuality and their others various qualities in the same way as for men.
Women’s collections on ScienceOpen
For ScienceOpen, this day can be used as another day to promote collections and make research known. So, let’s introduce scientific women who are involved in various research fields—not only since today but for years!—and who created 25 researcher collections on ScienceOpen to share with you these years of research:
You can also consult the new collection: Women in Science, created recently on ScienceOpen by Annual Reviews as a tribute for scientific women: This collection was created to “recognize some of the experts that have contributed to Annual Reviews’ journals.”
Women working at ScienceOpen
I cannot finish this post without introducing myself and some of my colleagues at ScienceOpen. I am Sarah Rioton and I am French. I started to work as Research Communities Manager at ScienceOpen in January. Before, I did chemical engineering studies at CPELyon and then a PhD in Organic Chemistry at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After my studies, I decided to leave France to settle down in Germany. My experience in research made me conscious of the value of communicating scientific knowledge, and I found a good opportunity to do that with ScienceOpen! I think that the respect of rights equality is a daily duty and I don’t want to be defined as a “woman in science” but as a researcher as I was, or as a manager in research communication as I am.
Let’s introduce now Stephanie Dawson who is the chief executive officer at ScienceOpen, and my colleague Nina Tscheke who handles customer integration and sales support. We work every day to make the research more visible and accessible to everyone with ScienceOpen:
CEO Stephanie Dawson grew up in northern California and studied Biology at Yale University. She then worked at the labs of Susan Parkhurst at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle WA and Ralph Rupp, at the MPG Friedrich Miescher Laboratory, Tübingen, Germany before changing fields and getting a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington under Jane Brown. From 2001-2012 she worked in various positions at the academic Publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. In 2013 she joined the ScienceOpen management team.
Nina Tscheke provides Customer Integration and Sales Support. After having dwelt in the sphere of literary and cultural studies, with special attention to critical race theory, gender, and minority studies and having helped introduce several generations of students at the JLU into the very field it was now time for her to move on and beyond the academical field. She was delighted to have found a new place/opportunity with ScienceOpen where she can further help in accumulating and disseminating the global knowledge while at the same time providing access and a networking platform for all.
Choosing a journal to publish your research is not easy. Among thousands of journals you must decide which one will get the best visibility for your work. ScienceOpen can’t answer that question for you, but we can make it easier with a “Submit a manuscript” button.
Growth in scholarly journals. Source: University of Pittsburgh Library
It requires time and real investigative work to understand the character of a journal and its editors, its selection and validation process, reputation, audience/specialization, distribution modality, rights management, publication costs… and this knowledge is never definitive because journals’ rules regularly change.
With a whole suite of filters and sorting possibilities, the ScienceOpen discovery platform can help you to drill down into a journal’s content and gain insight about how connected a journal is – Do they share references? More links back to your paper means more potential readers. Do they deposit rich metadata with affiliations, abstract, license information and more with Crossref? If your paper is open access, you want computers to know! Do they use social media and other tools to promote individual articles? Altmetrics are becoming increasingly important. ScienceOpen can give you a different perspective on how publishers will treat your article. Now, found one you like? Submit with one click.
Submit a Manuscript: new on ScienceOpen
Featured journals on ScienceOpen, here Future Science OA, open up their content for effective search and discovery within a “Collection” framework on our platform. The Featured collection also highlights the way journal content is being used by interactive features on the site – added to researcher-led Collections, peer reviewed, recommended, shared and more. Our goal is to help the researcher asses the content and the context of a journal to see how their work might fit it. You would like to see your manuscript in this same context? Then click “Submit”! The new “Submit a manuscript” will take you straight to the journal’s submission page. Editorial decisions are all carried out by the journal.
Journal overview at your fingertips on ScienceOpen
Further information about a journal is available directly on ScienceOpen through the Featured collections, for example the UCLPress journal Architecture MPS. The Collection details page provides space for the owner to describe the journal: its identity, webpage, editors, editorial board, aims and scope, submission guidelines, publication costs and audience. This quick overview can be helpful in making an informed decision about your next publication.
The Statistics of a journal on ScienceOpen can also be checked (number of articles added over time, number of views over time, number of shares…). It’s a great tool to get an overview of the activity of a journal, and it also allows comparison with the activity of journals in the same field on ScienceOpen. Moreover, Following a Featured collection will provide you with an update whenever new content is added.
ScienceOpen uses the context of a body of scholarly articles to make information more accessible and interactive. This new “Submit a manuscript” feature paired with the intuitive interface of ScienceOpen and insights provided by our data can save time for researchers in making an informed decision about where to publish their next paper.
As a publisher or journal editor contact Stephanie Dawson or Stuart Cooper to start your Featured journal collection today.
One of the biggest challenges for researchers is time. So when you find an abstract of interest and have just a moment to actually read, you need the full text right now. With our newest release, the ScienceOpen discovery environment incorporates open access data from Impactstory to provide researchers with more ways to read the paper.
Institutional repositories, open access aggregators, self-archiving, preprint servers – the last years have seen a proliferation of access options. The new ScienceOpen article page, therefore, aims for transparency and choice on nearly 40 million article records.
ScienceOpen is excited to work with the Unpaywall data from Impactstory to provide more information about open access licenses and access options for our users. This powerful dataset is being used by several discovery engines to enrich the search experience. Jason Priem of Impactstory says, “we’re thrilled to welcome ScienceOpen as our latest partner to integrate Unpaywall data, and excited about how this new integration furthers our goal to make Open Access content truly ubiquitous for researchers and readers.”
Potsdamer Platz Berlin, Andreas Levers, Traffic Light, Flickr, CC BY-NC
A green light for reading
The publisher’s version of record is a reader’s most reliable source. With our latest release we highlight this version on the article page with a green “Publisher” button for better orientation. Editors and publishers work hard to make the most accurate version of research results available to the community and changes to the version of record are often tracked on the publisher website via Crossref’s Crossmark service. With so little time in the day, reading the original is your best bet.
However, if further freely-accessible versions are available according to data from Unpaywall, these links are also provided and clearly labelled. Repository versions can be helpful outside of academic settings. And sometimes we have not identified an Open Access license, but Unpaywall has – so we, of course, want to give the reader this information as well!
If ScienceOpen indexing is based on the full text XML available on our platform (Open Access Hosting customers or PubMed Central Open Access articles), then the ScienceOpen access button is highlighted green. The same is true if we are getting our indexing information from SciELO. Our goal is always to help users find the best version for their needs.
“By offering more access choices, ScienceOpen has become so much more useful for researchers,” said Nina Tscheke, who has been involved in research community outreach over the past year. “This is an important step towards meeting researchers needs.”
ScienceOpen continues to develop tools and features for researchers and publishers to provide a superior discovery environment for scholarly research. If you are a publisher, editor, society or institute, talk to us today about our platform technology. Contact Stephanie Dawson for more information.
In the current scholarly ecosystem, communicating your research results doesn’t stop at the point of publication. Increasing the accessibility of your research and engaging audiences beyond your own institution and peer groups became inevitable steps in reaching out from the massively increasing global research output to create real impact.
At ScienceOpen, we are seeking the best ways of serving open communities by amalgamating their needs and turning them into new research management and discovery features. Our post-publication services are designed to offer all scientists transparent and effective ways to communicate their knowledge and enhance the visibility and discoverability of their publications. Recently, we announced new features enabling authors to add non-specialist summaries to their articles indexed on ScienceOpen.
Storify your research and open it up for the public
Although we see many great non-specialist summaries added so far to articles on ScienceOpen (you can see nice examples here, here or here), we are also aware of the fact that it’s not always easy to write an effective, non-specialist summary of specialized work. In many cases researchers simply don’t have the time or the expertise to make their science accessible to the broader public.
To help our researcher community in opening up their research and reaching and engaging a wider stakeholder audience, ScienceOpen has teamed up with ScienceImpact, an award-winning team of leading science communication staff with decades of combined experience publishing academic books, papers, and broad science publications. This partnership gives our users direct access to ScienceImpact’s non-specialist summary services and provides them with the means to have complex scientific concepts translated into accessible language for a broader audience. Their editorial and design staff works closely with all featured researchers to craft summaries that disseminate the aims, objectives, and impact of your research.
If you have already begun to think about how you can communicate your research to wider audiences but don’t feel confident about it, you are in the right place! You can thrust this into the hands of professional science communicators and get your non-specialist summary in 3 easy steps:
Go to your profile page
Click on the Impact banner
Fill in the form on ScienceImpact’s website.
Here you can find out more about how this process works or discuss the production of a lay summary for your research paper.
Expand your audience and amplify your message
Adding non-specialist summaries to your articles enables the communication of your research and its impact in a format and language that all stakeholders will understand.
For funders
Being able to clearly articulate the economic, scientific, and societal impact of your project is crucial from the very first steps of your research lifecycle. When it comes to funding decisions, reviewers of your grant application, who are rarely representing your specific field, need to understand clearly how your research can make the world a better place.
For researchers from other areas
Communicating your research and making it connectible for audiences beyond your own institution, peer group, and field of research carries the potential of opening it up for interdisciplinary cooperation. In fact, using simple everyday language might be refreshing even for your own research community as well. Do them a favor and make your papers look nice, concise, and easy to see through.
For the public
We are in the midst of a global information and knowledge crisis. Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, and renewable energies.
By translating your research results into benefits for society, you can play your part in making science more understandable to everyone without restriction. Just because a research paper is freely available, that does not mean that it’s also accessible and everyone will be able to read it and understand the content. What we all need is to make sure that the maximum number of people possible can enjoy and re-use what we have discovered without having to work their way through dense technical language. Don’t alienate your work from taxpayers who fund it.
Maintaining fair and inclusive scientific communication attitudes and investing in the proper explanation of your findings is like gathering a good research karma: it works for you, works for science, and works for the society at large. We give you tools and access to outputs—but it’s you who can make them truly accessible.
