April has been a very busy month, with a lot of networking, promoting scholarly excellence, and announcing exciting integrations and technological improvements to ScienceOpen’s infrastructure.
This year, the London Book Fair returned, and it was a wonderful occasion to catch up with old and new friends about topics we care deeply about, such as Open Science and the promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals in our network and beyond.
Explore our activities during the month of April through our Monthly Digest.
To commemorate the impact of Ukrainian research and the importance of initiatives like ours in supporting the work of researchers and Ukrainian scholars, we interviewed Oksana Shevchuk, Professor at the I.Horbachevsky Ternopil National Medical University, about the current situation for researchers, the challenges they face, and how researcher communities around the world can assist researchers or research institutions in Ukraine.
The mission of the King Salman Center for Disability Research is to foster a global platform for addressing disability through research and empowerment. Its content will now be published alongside 83 million publications on ScienceOpen, allowing people to access cutting-edge research in just a few clicks.
The Challenge: Academic publishing is transitioning to a fully digital industry which means publishers need access to state-of-the-art technology to keep up with ever-changing best practices. It faces the pressures and challenges of establishing new business models, products, and reputation structures. The cost of innovating is especially high for smaller participants.
The Solution: Discovery is key in the digital space. ScienceOpen offers unique technologies for academic publishers to create, host, and promote their content, whether it be journals, books, conferences, or preprints. Our services also include integrating your content within a freely accessible discovery environment with next-generation metrics and curation tools for reputation management and dissemination. Working closely with all types of scholarly publishers from across the world, ScienceOpen works on an individual base to develop solutions for publisher’s content.
ScienceOpen has a wide range of packages and customizable services, and we are constantly evolving to meet the needs of the future. We have put together below an overview of our services to give an updated account of what we can offer publishers. Contact us to find out even more because we have projects in the pipeline and can often build a new solution to fit the needs of your program.
Discovery infrastructure to let your best content shine
Image by Jared Tarbell E8 Detail CC BY
ScienceOpen has released its newest feature to support academic publishers – the ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR. Over 50 customers have chosen to showcase their content in 300+ Collections within the interactive ScienceOpen discovery environment. Each Collection allows content to be explored in dynamic ways that highlight top articles. With the ScienceOpen INTEGRATOR, it is now possible to embed ScienceOpen’s state-of-the-art discovery tools directly into any website with just a few lines of code. This feature can be used for journal websites, book selections, and topical collections by institutions, publishers, or societies.
At the heart of the United Nations’ ambitious 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These represent a call for action from both developed and developing countries in a global partnership to end poverty and improve health and education for all. The SDGs strive to promote economic growth and development in a way that tackles climate change and preserves biodiversity in our oceans and forests. Increasingly, the academic and publishing communities are coming together to support and promote these ambitious goals. The COVID-19 pandemic has only increased the urgency of awareness and action. ScienceOpen is stepping up.
Publishers, editors, and authors are increasingly experimenting with new communication channels that meet the high standards of “Open Science”. The exciting new journal 4open by EDP Sciences was founded on the four pillars of open science: open access, open data, open code, and open peer review. 4open includes all types of articles and is dedicated to publishing high-quality content in all disciplines of science and research, including materials and engineering. As an interdisciplinary journal that accepts a wide range of research adhering to open science principles, it is an important new addition to the contextual discovery environment on ScienceOpen.
The 4open journal will be featured on ScienceOpen with an attractive Collection landing page, “submit manuscript” button, interactive features, journal and article level metrics, as well as community curation and post-publication article review infrastructure. The journal is off to a great start and has already published 34 articles across a wide range of topics in this completely open model, from cancer research and public health to materials science, mathematics and scholarly publishing. You can now search and sort the full set of articles on ScienceOpen.
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.
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.
