Tag: African Research

ScienceOpen is a freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context. We believe that free access to knowledge drives creativity, innovation, and development, and we support publishers and scholars from all over the world, enhancing their discoverability and increasing their impact in the open.

Our publishing partners represent different regions of the world, and today we want to highlight the research from Africa, which enriches our discovery environment of over 90 million articles, books, and book chapter records.

ScienceOpen will support with its full range of discovery services the promotion of scholarly content and will also facilitate the wide dissemination of ROAPE’s mission, bringing more scholars and researchers in contact with this important network.

ScienceOpen users will be able to interact fully with the Journal’s content by bookmarking, recommending and easily sharing their favorite articles, while accelerating progress in various SDGs covered by different issues of the journal.

Giving back

In the giving spirit of the holidays, we wanted to take this time to make you aware of some ways you could support open access publishing around the world! If the last two years have shown us anything, it is that we are all very connected and dependent on one another.

We work with several truly inspiring nonprofits who accept donations to help them in their endeavors to develop their continents’ research infrastructure and foster open access. Each organization has a resource or contact for you to find out specifically how your contribution is being used. Below we have given a description of the organization and links to donate through. Additionally, we have just become the hosting platform for Pluto Journals who have switched to being a fully open access publisher. Their membership programme may interest you as a way to support one of their journals, which cover a wide variety of social justice matters. Moreover, all of these institutions’ research supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through their respective missions.

Introducing our partner: African Minds

ScienceOpen has partnered with the not-for-profit, open access publisher, African Minds, to host its scholarly books in a unique Collection on ScienceOpen. While ScienceOpen has been hosting open access journal content for years, it is the first time ScienceOpen has hosted open access book content. With the implementation for African Minds, we kick off a new service for open access publishers. The technical team of ScienceOpen has built a user-friendly interface that produces streamlined, machine readable metadata to quickly integrate rich book records onto ScienceOpen, provide Crossref DOIs, long-term archiving and more. Our partners at African Minds have tested and implemented the new interface to create a collection of books and book chapters that will extend the reach and accessibility of science from Africa.  

Connecting the Global Research Community

ScienceOpen was founded to facilitate scientific exchange and accelerate scholarly communication, and a main pillar of how we do this is by fostering open and public communication among academics. We think it is especially important for collaborations to reach across continental and cultural boundaries to increase inclusivity in the scientific community. Thus, we continually reach out to publishers and organizations outside of the Western research community of Europe and North America to increase the diversity of content on ScienceOpen, both in topics and perspectives. In doing so, we strive to broaden the global context of research indexed on the platform and to expand the network of researchers using ScienceOpen to encourage collaboration among research communities. These efforts have led to the start of many new projects across the world, and today, we are proud to introduce our newest partnership with the Pan African Medical Journal (PAMJ).

A Collaboration for #OAWeek2020

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.