At ScienceOpen, the research + publishing network, we’re enjoying some of the upsides of being the new kid on the Open Access (OA) block. Innovation and building on the experiments of others is easier when there’s less to lose but we are also the first to admit that life as a start-up is not for the faint hearted!

In the years since user generated comments and reviews were first introduced, those of us who strive to improve research communication have wrestled with questions such as: potential for career damage; content for peer and public audiences; comments from experts, everyone or a mix and lower than anticipated participation.

We want to acknowledge the many organizations who have done a tremendous job at showing different paths forward in this challenging space. Now it’s our turn to try.

Since launch, ScienceOpen has assigned members different user privileges based on their previous publishing history as verified by their ORCID ID. This seemed like a reasonable way to measure involvement in the field and provided the right level of publishing experience to understand the pitfalls of the process. This neat diagram encapsulates how it works.

Scientific and Expert Members of ScienceOpen can review all the content on the site which includes 1.3million+ OA articles and a very small number of our own articles (did we mention, we’re new!).

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. Inline annotation captures reviewer feedback during reading. Next up in the site release cycle, mechanisms to make it easy for authors to respond to in-line observations.

In a move sure to please busy researchers tired of participating without recognition, each review, including the subsequent dialogue, receives a Digital Object Identified (DOI) so that others can find and cite the analysis and the contribution becomes a registered part of the scientific debate.

Welcome to our wonderful world of Reviewing! Please share your feedback here or @Science_Open.

David Black is Secretary General of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Australia. An advocate of Open Access for scientific data in his role at ICSU, Professor Black is a proponent of the initiatives of ICSU and ICSU-affiliate groups, such as the Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science (CFRS), the ICSU-World Data System (ICSU-WDS), the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), the ICSU’s Strategic Coordinating Committee on Information and Data (SCCID), Continue reading “ScienceOpen Interview with David Black, Secretary General, International Council for Science.”  

Our interview series continues with a quick chat with ScienceOpen Editorial Board Member and recent ScienceOpen author Professor Miguel Andrade. His paper, entitled “FASTA Herder: A web application to trim protein sequence sets,” ( http://goo.gl/4qa7Ez ) presents a publicly available web application that uses an algorithm to identify redundant sequence homologs in protein databases.

Miguel Andrade received his PhD in Biochemistry at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and trained at post-doctoral level at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and Cambridge. He has been Continue reading “ScienceOpen Author Interview Series – Miguel Andrade”  

As a newcomer on the Open Access publishing scene, ScienceOpen relies on the support of a wide range of academics. With this interview we would like to profile Advisory Board member Peter Suber (http://bit.ly/petersuber ) and share the valuable perspective he brings to our organization.

One of the original founders of the Open Access movement, Peter Suber is currently director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication ( https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/ ) and the Harvard Open Access Project ( http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap ). His latest book, Continue reading “Interview with Advisory Board member Peter Suber”  

Today’s interview continues both the Author and the Editorial Board Interview Series with a conversation between ScienceOpen and Nikos Karamanos, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Patras in Greece. Professor Karamanos is one of the authors of the recent ScienceOpen publication, “EGF/EGFR signaling axis is a significant regulator of the proteasome expression and activity in colon cancer cells” ( http://goo.gl/XD9R0L ), and an established scholar, Editorial Board member for various journals, and chair and organizer of numerous conferences. He is principal investigator Continue reading “ScienceOpen Author Interview Series – Nikos Karamanos”  

The Editorial Board is at the heart of any publishing project. In this interview series, ScienceOpen would like to highlight some of the scientists who are supporting us as members of the editorial board and their reasons for getting involved in the Open Access movement. We’re delighted to welcome expert member Anthony Atala, M.D ( http://goo.gl/ynLgGq ) – Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the W. H. Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center – to our Research + Publishing Network .
Anthony is an Continue reading “ScienceOpen Editorial Board: Anthony Atala, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine”  

Today’s author interview comes from Carol Perez-Iratxeta ( http://goo.gl/fwloa7 ), a bioinformatics researcher based at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) in Ottawa, Canada. Her research concerns data mining and computational genomic analysis applied to human disease.

Together with fellow OHRI researcher Caroline Louis-Jeune, as well as Dr. Miguel Andrade, based at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, she has just published an article entitled, Continue reading “ScienceOpen Author Interview Series – Carol Perez-Iratxeta”  

ScienceOpen continues our series of interviews with our new authors with Professor Lorenzo Iorio (https://www.scienceopen.com/profile/lorenzo_iorio ), who has just published an article on ScienceOpen entitled „Orbital effects of a monochromatic plane gravitational wave with ultra-low frequency incident on a gravitationally bound two-body system.“ ( http://goo.gl/kCYgwd )

Professor Iorio is a physicist working in the field of general relativity and gravitation. He has published over 180 articles and holds a permanent position at the Continue reading “ScienceOpen Author Interview Series – Lorenzo Iorio”