Reviewing with ScienceOpen, the new OA research + publishing network, is a bit different from what researchers may have experienced elsewhere! To see for yourself, watch this short video on Post-Publication Peer Review.
Q. For busy researchers & physicians, time is short, so why bother to review for ScienceOpen?
A1. Firstly, because the current Peer Review system doesn’t work
David Black, the Secretary General of the International Council for Science (ICSU) said in a recent ScienceOpen interview “Peer Review as a tool of evaluation for research is flawed.” Many others agree.
Here are our observations and what we are doing to ease the strain.
Anonymous Peer Review encourages disinhibition. Since the balance of power is also skewed, this can fuel unhelpful, even destructive, reviewer comments. At ScienceOpen, we only offer non-anonymous Post-Publication Peer Review.
Authors can suggest up to 10 people to review their article. Reviews of ScienceOpen articles and any of the 1.3mm other OA papers aggregated on our platform, are by named academics with minimally five publications on their ORCID ID which is our way of maintaining the standard of scientific discourse. We believe that those who have experienced Peer Review themselves should be more likely to understand the pitfalls of the process and offer constructive feedback to others.
Martin Suhm, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany and one of our first authors said in a recent ScienceOpen interview “Post-Publication Peer Review will be an intriguing experience, certainly not without pitfalls, but worth trying”.
A2. Second, reviews receive a DOI so your contributions can be cited
We believe that scholarly publishing is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a dialogue to move research forward. In a move sure to please busy researchers tired of participating without recognition, each review receives a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so that others can find and cite the analysis and the contribution becomes a registered part of the scientific debate.
All reviews require a four point assessment (using five stars) of the level of: importance, validity, completeness and comprehensibility and there’s space to introduce and summarize the material.
Should authors wish to make minor or major changes to their work in response to review feedback, then ScienceOpen offers Versioning. Versions are clearly visible online, the latest are presented first with prominent links to previous iterations. We maintain & display information about which version of an article the reviews and comments refer to, this allows readers to follow a link to an earlier version of the content to see the article history.
A3. Finally, because problems are more visible
When Peer Review is done in the open by named individuals, we believe it should be more constructive and issues will surface more quickly. The resolution of matters arising isn’t simpler or quicker because they are more obvious, but at least they can be seen and addressed.
Here’s a quick overview of ScienceOpen services:
Publishes ALL article types: Research, Reviews, Opinions, Posters etc
From ALL disciplines: science, medicine, the humanities and social science
Aggregates over 1.3 million OA articles from leading publishers
Publication within about a week from submission with DOI
Publishing with ScienceOpen, the new OA research + publishing network, is a bit different and quicker from what researchers may have experienced elsewhere! Here’s a short video that explains how we make publishing easier.
Q. For busy researchers & physicians, time is short, so why bother to publish with ScienceOpen?
A. So you can share your results quickly and get back to your research.
At ScienceOpen, we understand that the publishing process is all too often painful and time consuming. This picture demonstrates why rapid and informal web publishing plus Post-Publication Peer Review could well be the future!
Here’s a quick overview of ScienceOpen services:
Publishes ALL article types: Research, Reviews, Opinions, Posters etc
From ALL disciplines: science, medicine, the humanities and social science
Aggregates over 1.3 million OA articles from leading publishers
Publication within about a week from submission with DOI
ScienceOpen strives to offer services to researchers for a price ($800) that is significantly less than most OA journals. Full and partial fee waivers are available to those in need in low and middle income countries and in less well funded disciplines.
Welcome to the next wave of Open Access Publishing. Join us today.
Registering with ScienceOpen, the new OA research + publishing network, is almost as easy as pushing this button. To see for yourself, watch this short video or just sign up now (it takes about the same length of time).
Q. For busy researchers & physicians, time is short, so why bother to spend it registering with ScienceOpen?
A. So you can be part of the conversation to move research forward.
We’re one of the first to maintain the level of expert discussion on our platform by allocating roles and privileges (such as Peer Review) based on the number of publications listed on your ORCID iD.
Have five or more publications on your ORCID iD? You are an Expert or Scientific Member.
Review any of over 1.3 million OA articles on Science Open and get a DOI
Lead Group discussions about relevant OA articles, make a Collection and call for more submissions
Have one or more publication? You are a Member.
Comment on articles
No previous publishing history? Publish for the first time with us.
Authors can invite up to 10 experts to review their article
Non anonymous peer-review should result in more balanced and relevant feedback
Use workspaces to collaborate on any document, publish elsewhere if you’d prefer
Don’t want to register at all? A pity, but naturally you can still read and re-use over 1.3 million OA articles
Convenient to have multiple OA publishers on one platform
For those who are new to us and that’s pretty much everyone, here’s a quick overview of ScienceOpen services:
Publishes ALL article types: Research, Reviews, Opinions, Posters etc
From ALL disciplines: science, medicine, the humanities and social science
Aggregates over 1.3 million OA articles from leading publishers
Publication within about a week from submission with DOI
Just posting this quick update because the discussion about the AAAS letter, the response of their CEO, and subsequent coverage in Times Higher Education is moving rapidly this morning. With many different time zones involved, it can be tricky to keep up for the few of us who occasionally like to sleep! Here’s a round-up for those on the West Coast who are just waking up to this or anyone who is interested.
As some of you may know, last week 115 people from the the Research and Open Access (OA) community (including some from ScienceOpen and our Boards) sent this letter to the AAAS to protest the pricing level and structure for the new OA journal Science Advances.
Science Advances has a new Twitter stream which has but one tweet:
A couple of things to point out here, Possibly in an effort not to give the open letter more publicity, the AAAS don’t say in the tweet what they are responding to (no mention of open letter or link) and neither do they say in the response. A quick read of the AAAS CEO response (who is Alan Leshner, also not named!), shows it to be a classic PR piece that copiously links to previous corporate (but it’s a non-profit member led organization) AAAS statements about Science Advances, but nowhere to the letter!
Thankfully, the AAAS CEO response does now have a link to the open letter, published at The Winnower, via a comment from Ernesto Priego, a Lecturer in Library Science at the Dept of Library and Information Science, City University, London.
Paul Jump, science and research reporter for Times Higher Education to whom the AAAS response is addressed, has today written an article entitled “Shock and derision as Kent Anderson named Science publisher” which does mention and link to the letter and clears up the confusion. However, it is also worth noting that although the article headline is true, the open letter itself doesn’t make mention of Kent Anderson and focuses on pricing and licensing.
The team behind the open letter (Erin McKiernan and Jon Tennant plus others) are strategizing their response and I will update this post as the days (probably minutes!) unfold.
New 1: 8/28 – the follow up email to @aaas_news was published as a comment on the original letter.
New 2: 8/30 – took AAAS a few days to come up with this “response” to the letter, an achingly funny corporate FAQ which doesn’t mention the original or the follow up letter and fails to address any community concerns. Hmm. verdict = lame.
New 3: 9/1 – over the weekend, community get a bit fed up with not being heard by AAAS (a non-profit member organization that is meant to Advance Science). Some prominent news outlets interview Jon Tennant and Erin McKiernan. First result, this excellent article by New Statesman.
This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, eNeuro.
We welcome the diversification of journal choices for authors looking for open access venues, as well as the willingness of eNeuro to accept negative results and study replications, its membership in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, the publication of peer review syntheses alongside articles, and the requirement that molecular data be publicly available.
As strong supporters of open access, we welcome the commitment of the Society to making the works it publishes freely and openly available. However, we are concerned with several aspects of the specific approach, and outline herein a number of suggestions that would allow eNeuro to provide the full benefits of open access to the communities the journal aims to serve. Continue reading “Open Letter to the Society for Neuroscience”
To mark the publication of her first ScienceOpen article, Nitika, who is also a member of our Editorial Board, prepared this video which is compelling both for what she says and how she says it – with a great deal of commitment!
Just 35 seconds into the video, a big smile spreads over Nitika’s face as she starts to talk about Open Access (OA) and her fist goes up as she says “more power to Open Access”! From then on, she discusses her real-life experiences of not having access to journals when she was training in India, wanting to spare others the same experience and why OA was therefore “the jewel for me”. Nitika’s enthusiasm for OA is infectious and energizing, she calls it a “pure movement”, says it is a way to “give back to the community” and believes it is going to permeate all sections of society, helping knowledge to spread. Continue reading “Welcome to author Nitika Pant Pai – impassioned OA advocate!”
Image credit: justinc, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Dear AAAS,
This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in journal choices for authors looking for open access venues, there are many positive aspects of Science Advances: its broad STEM scope, its interest in cross-disciplinary research, and the offering of fee waivers. While we welcome the commitment of the Association to open access, we are also deeply concerned with the specific approach. Herein, we outline a number of suggestions that are in line with both the current direction that scholarly publishing is taking and the needs expressed by the open access community, which this journal aims to serve. Continue reading “Open letter to the AAAS”
Image credit: Frustration, by Eric (e-magic), CC BY-ND. https://www.flickr.com/photos/emagic/
On August 7th, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) responded to a call from the Global Coalition of Access to Research, Science and Education Organizations (signed by more than 80 entities and counting, including ScienceOpen) to withdraw their new model licenses.
So what exactly is all the fuss about? Our headline pretty much sums it up and comes courtesy of OA advocate Graham Steel who rightly observed that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The Open Access (OA) community happily relies on a license suite from Creative Commons (CC) to provide an interoperable and simple standard for our industry. ScienceOpen uses the most flexible CC “attribution license”, known to its many friends as CC-BY. We like it because it allows maximum scope for the creative re-use of research, including commercially, no permission from us required. The only caveat is “credit where credit is due” which only seems fair and means that the original authors and source must be cited, together with the license type and ideally a link to the work. We believe that research works better and faster without any limitations and that CC-BY facilitates this.
So why does the STM Association, the “voice of academic and professional publishing” (but not ours, we’re not members), think that we need new licenses? One reason they give in their response is that “Creative Commons (CC) licenses are designed to be used across the entire creative sector, and are not specifically designed for academic and scholarly publishing”. Sadly, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of the true power of the licenses which comes precisely because they were developed for use across different creative industries.
This is very important for those who work in scientific communication whose job it is to explain science to a broader audience. Research is frequently complex and mashing it up with CC-BY images (of which there are over 58 million at the photo sharing site Flickr), Wikipedia links (over 4 million CC articles) even music can really bring a story to life. Making this content freely available under a CC license is important because advances in science and medicine should ideally be available to and understood by everyone.
For those who have a role in this field, the reality is that navigating and selecting the best content from the overwhelming volume on the internet and then complying with the current dizzying array of more and less restrictive copyright licenses is already quite tricky enough, thank you kindly! We simply don’t need any more complexity.
Image credit: Editing a paper, Nic McPhee, Flickr, CC BY-SA
While I am sitting on the sofa composing this blog post, WordPress is seamlessly taking care of my corrections, proofs and versions at the touch of a button. I take this service completely for granted am grateful for it since I usually run through quite a few drafts before I am satisfied.
The time and accuracy necessary to compose a thoughtful research article, which should be replicable and on which others may choose to build, is far greater than the effort I am expending here.
Correcting the scientific literature is therefore rightly more complex and the changes more meaningful, but surely the services offered to scientists should at least match those that are available through this free blogging software?
Sadly, this is not always the case in scientific publishing, where some authors are expected to publish without a proof and making corrections to the PDF is not an option.
Although we all strive for perfection, we know that mistakes occur and that changes need to be made, before and sometimes after publication. When this happens, having a versioning process that readers can follow is reassuring.
Authors who publish with ScienceOpen can:
Submit any article type: research, reviews, opinions, clinical case reports, protocols, posters etc.
Submit from any discipline: all sciences, medicine, humanities and social sciences
Submit manuscripts posted at preprint servers such as BioRxiv and arXiv
Use a private pre-publication workspace to develop their manuscript with co-authors
Get a yes/no decision on their submission within about a week after an internal check
Have their original manuscript published as a Preview with DOI
Receive proofs
Get copy-editing and language help when necessary as a courtesy benefit (please note, this is not a translation service!)
Make as many proof corrections as they wish
Sign off on final proofs
Have their Preview article replaced with a Final article in PDF, HTML and XML formats
Can respond to reviewer feedback by publishing a revised version, with either minor or major changes (Version 1 is the original publication, 2/3 can be minor or major in any combination and are included in the Publication Fee)
Each version has a different DOI that is semantically linked to the DOI of the original version for easy tracking. Versions are clearly visible online, the latest are presented first with prominent links to previous versions. We maintain & display information about which version of an article the reviews and comments refer to, this allows readers to follow a link to an earlier version of the content to see the article history.
ScienceOpen strives to offer services to researchers that are the best they can be, for a price ($800) that is significantly less than most OA journals. We welcome you to register today (takes about a minute) and consider publishing your next OA article with us.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has revealed some new “model” licenses which are ironically entitled “making OA licensing work”. We’re sorry, did we miss something? Continue reading “ScienceOpen joins the Coalition against STM Licenses”
