![[Open] Science accessible for all](https://blog.scienceopen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Header-blog-25.png)
Our digital infrastructure allows for an easy integration of alt-text elements that will manifest themselves on the HTML full-text article landing pages, making content more accessible for all of our users, improving their overall user-experience on ScienceOpen, and enabling them to access information more effectively.
Open science is not only about paywalls – it is also about guaranteeing that everybody across the globe can freely and fairly participate in disseminating knowledge. Chinese science is on the rise – an estimated one-third of the worldwide scientific output in 2016 was published in China (Xie & Freeman, 2019). However, Chinese publications face considerable challenges, both structural and cultural, when it comes to communicating science to non-Chinese communities. The mission of ScienceOpen is to remove these obstacles and open Chinese research to a wider audience. To make this happen, ScienceOpen partners with several institutions from China to host and represent their content within its open research network and to help make it easily discoverable in the digital space. In the ScienceOpen database you can find thousands of Chinese research articles. Would you like to get to know the most relevant papers but do not know where to start? Then our featured and non-featured Collections are the right go-to resource! Those article selections integrate handpicked papers highlighting state-of-the-art science. They are a perfect point of departure for anyone wishing to explore new strands of research. As there’s over a dozen (!) Collections from Chinese researchers, we thought we would give you a walk-through and introduce the Collections with which you can begin your adventure!
Continue reading “ScienceOpen Highlights Chinese Research for Inclusive Open Science”
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.
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:
Here you can find out more about how this process works or discuss the production of a lay summary for your research paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recently, we announced new features enabling authors to add non-specialist summaries to their articles indexed on ScienceOpen. We believe that having authors add these to their articles helps to make them more accessible to a wider audience, increase their reach. It makes a clear statement that they care about the societal impact of their research.
Well, clearly you are all seeing the value in these features too! We’ve already had over 170 great authors writing non-specialist summaries since making the announcement. By integrating this into our research engine, we are seeing those articles gaining a huge boost in popularity! These authors have also added extra keywords and thumbnails to their articles to make them more visible and discoverable on ScienceOpen.
We are extremely happy to see authors keen to make their work more accessible. The great thing about adding these summaries is that they are valuable whether or not the articles are published Open Access.
Some of our favourites so far are:
Last week, we were pleased to announce the launch of our new professional networking platform, MyScienceOpen.
Fully integrated into our article archive of 32 million article records, and combined with our extensive researcher toolkit, MyScienceOpen is the only research networking platform you will ever need!
Now, this is not just another researcher profile. This is the researcher profile. Why have one profile for your research usage, another for you article records, another for your science communication activities, another to record your peer reviews, another for searching for research, and another for tracking citations and Altmetrics? It’s exhausting!
MyScienceOpen brings you all of these features into one platform. We make this even easier by leveraging the power of ORCID to make integration, tracking, and activation of your research one seamless process. All it takes is the click of a button!
Continue reading “Enhanced article impact with MyScienceOpen”
