For many publishers the requirements of modern digital publishing can be dizzying – XML DTDs, PIDs, DOIs, metatags. At ScienceOpen we have been consulting publishers on their metadata for years to help get the most visibility possible for academic publications. We have increasingly built systems with our technical partner, Ovitas, to support publishers with metadata creation and distribution and made each new tool available to the next customer. As a metadata technical hub, we can automate time-consuming tasks and let publishers concentrate on the content. Here are a few of the services that we can provide to help take the pain out of publishing:
A common goal of authors and publishers has long been more readership for their publications. Traditionally, the abstract was a teaser to encourage the potential reader to buy or subscribe to read the full text. Even in an open access economy, a good abstract can trigger a coveted “download” and even more coveted citation. Why then do many publishers not make their abstracts and other metadata such as references or license information freely accessible in a machine-readable format?
Missing an article or citation from ScienceOpen, or want to add more of your own publications? Users can now request articles to be integrated into our database via their dashboard. These can be your own articles, or someone else’s – the choice is yours!
All we need are either a list of:
CrossRef DOIs
DOAJ IDs
PubMed IDs
Simply upload a file or copy and paste them in, click the button and away you go! We’ll send you a notification by email to let you know the status of each article. We’ll work our magic behind the scenes and integrate your selection as soon as is computationally possible.
One of the great things about this new feature is that you can add a list of DOIs of articles that cite your own work. We provide a free and open citation network for each of our users, based on extracting citation data from peer reviewed publications. Thanks to initiatives like I4OC, it is becoming easier to provide enriched citation information like we do for researchers for free.
To find your Dashboard, click on the My ScienceOpen tab at the top!
By adding research that cites your work, we provide an easy and great way to make sure that your citation profile is complete! This isn’t gaming the system, it’s simply making it comprehensive and open. That’s important. Put this in the context of our recently launched author-metrics, and you’re on to a winning academic profile!
For collection editors
If you have a collection at ScienceOpen, you can specify that these records be automatically integrated into them. You can add these in bulk, with 100 DOIs per request for now. Personalising your collections and making them complete has never been easier! If you want to set up your own collection and try out these features, contact us here!
Integration and validation
By using the new ‘claim authorship’ feature, your articles will be directly integrated with your ScienceOpen profile and ORCID. This provides crucial cross-validation of your research history, a unique feature of ScienceOpen. If you’re adding you own article records, these will be available in your ‘Claim your articles’ section of the Dashboard, where you can easily add them to your profile.
We recognise that no research database is complete, and ScienceOpen is no exception. We work closely with publishers, ORCID, and platforms like PubMed to integrate new content on a daily basis. But we can’t pick up everything, and that’s where you come in!
By adding personalised content, you help us to fill in the blank spots in our database. This helps to enrich our network by putting this content into our semantically linked network. We are currently only indexing research articles and not book chapters, proceedings or other content types.
So pop over to your dashboard, try it out, and let us know what you think!
Today we are pleased to announce the winners of the April round of our free Open Access indexing competition.
These journals come from around the world, and by offering free-to-publish Open Access options for researchers, we in turn offer them free integration into our platform to help build their status and visibility.
The following journals will all become part of our next-generation indexing and discovery platform:
Published by the Russian New University, this journal is devoted to cardiological issues with special focus on cardiovascular system performance and diagnostics. The title of the journal, Cardiometry, is a new field in cardiology providing application of the most up-to-date technologies of measurements of heart and cardiovascular system performance parameters and considered as an interdisciplinary scientific field joining cardiology, biophysics, biomechanics, IT and metrology.
Published by European Publishing, this journal encompasses all aspects of tobacco use, prevention and cessation that can promote a tobacco free society. Their aim is to foster, promote and disseminate research involving tobacco use, prevention, policy implementation, disease development- progression related to tobacco use, tobacco use impact from the cellular to the international level and the treatment of tobacco attributable disease through smoking cessation.
Published by the University of Tehran, Desert covers all aspects of environmental management of arid, semi-arid and desert environments and addresses issues ranging from basic to socio-ecological systems of arid, semi-arid and desert ecosystems.
Published by the Instituto Florestal (Institute of Forestry) of São Paulo, this journal is dedicated to works in Forestry Sciences and related sciences written in Portuguese, English or Spanish. It publishes articles in the following thematic areas: urban tree planting, protected areas and nature conservation, wildlife conservation, ecology, forestry policy and economy, genetics and forest improvement, geography and environmental planning, hydrology, plant taxonomy and phytogeography and forest products technology.
All of these journals fulfil the double challenge of publishing high-quality Open Access research while charging no APCs to their authors. As such, they provide significant contributions to open scholarship as well as democracy in science from month to month.
To support these great efforts, we recently partnered with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to help make these valuable sources of the published scholarly record more visible and easily accessible in a competitive global research environment.
Bringing together results from different fields of research and geographical regions, successful applicants will add new colours to our research network of over 31 million articles and growing.
Thank you to everyone who applied for the latest round of ScienceOpen’s free indexing competition! We are also grateful to DOAJ for their valuable contributions.
To apply for the next round, an application form can be found here. As a little help, you can find our guidelines here. Good luck!
ScienceOpen offers free indexing to Open Access journals that are free for authors to publish in, as part of our mission to enhance open scholarship.
We recently partnered with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to help make these valuable contributions to the scholarly record more visible.
In the latest round of our indexing competition, we are pleased to announce three new journals from across Europe that will be integrated into and promoted on our platform. These are:
Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues, from Croatia
Published by the University of Split, this journal publishes articles from the Social Sciences, including topics in industries, land use, labour, and industrial management.
Published by the Universidad de La Laguna, this journal publishes articles in Spanish, Castilian, and English in the fields of Language and Literature, Linguistics, Communication, and the Mass Media.
Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Słowiańskiej, from Poland
Published by the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, this journal publishes articles from the field of Linguistics in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and English.
Publishing can be a big, expensive business, or it can be done on a small scale by research communities themselves – by researchers for researchers. For very narrow topics and small research communities it can make sense to just do it yourself and there are wide range of journals that offer a formal peer review process, editorial oversight, publishing services and a Creative Commons open access license to authors but still charge no APCs.
To support these great efforts, ScienceOpen offers free indexing for up to 10 APC-free OA journals per month, and the best candidate receives a free journal collection page for 1 year. We are pleased to announce a partnership with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in making these valuable contributions to the scholarly record more visible.
In order to qualify for our free indexing offer your journal must meet the following requirements, all of which contribute to enhancing the visibility and discoverability of your content.
Be indexed in DOAJ and without publication charges
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists over 9000 open access scholarly journals meeting certain quality standards. Listing in DOAJ is a requirement for the ScienceOpen free indexing program to assure good quality articles from an editorial standpoint. Furthermore, having DOAJ IDs also ease the indexing procedure significantly. With your articles registered in DOAJ, the only thing you have to do is to check there are no APC or other publication charges and to send ScienceOpen a list of the DOAJ ID-s for each article record and your content will be indexed in no time.
Continuing the highly successful Open Science Stars series, this round we’re honoured to bring you Prof. Kamel Belhamel, the recently appointed DOAJ Ambassador for North Africa. Here’s his story.
Hi Kamel, and thanks for joining us here! Could you start off by letting us know a little bit about your background?
Thank you for interviewing me Jon and congratulations on receiving your hard-earned doctoral degree. Best wishes for the future. (Ed: Thank you!! 🙂)
Image credit: Kamel Belhamel
I am Kamel Belhamel, full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bejaia, director of the Laboratory of Organic Materials and Editor in chief of Algerian Journal of Natural Products (E-ISSN: 2353-0391). I graduated in Chemistry at the University of Setif- Algeria and achieved my PhD at the same University in the field of Process Engineering and Chemistry of Materials. I have taken part to several international projects such as: Italian project, German – DAAD, French- Algerian framework programme CMEP and co-ordinator of several Algerian national research projects, CNEPRU, PNR). My scientific activity is focused on the chemistry of macrocycles; Solvent extraction of metal ions from ores and waste solutions; Extraction and study of chemical composition from plant extract; Electrodeposition of metals and alloys. I am author/co-author of 20 scientific papers in international scientific journals and more than 50 abstract books in national and international conferences. I was Supervisor of many Master’s and 11 PhD students. I am a member of the Scientific Committee of the Faculty of Technology, the Algerian Chemical Society, and Training Manager of Master of Science: pharmaceutical processes at the University of Bejaia. Recently, I was appointed as the DOAJ Ambassador for North Africa.
When did you first hear about open access/data/science? What were your initial thoughts?
I have heard about open access journals during my first scientific visit to Freie Universität, Berlin in 2000. When I selected an open access journal, Molecules, and edited by MDPI, in order to publish our research results, my friend, Prof. Rainer Ludwig, has refused to publish in this journal because, in this period it hadn’t obtained an impact factor and asked for high APCs (article-processing charges). One important element to keep in mind when discussing Open science, that this concept is very old. By the 12th century, Bejaia, my city was an important port and an open centre of science in the North Africa. The Italian mathematician Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1250) has studied Arabic numerals and algebraic notation in Bejaia. He introduced these and modern mathematics into medieval Europe in his famous book Liber Abaci. Another influential North African Muslim thinker of the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun, has been extensively studied in the Western world with special interest. He has written a part of his famous Muqaddimah “Introduction” in Bejaia. This document, summarize his theories of the science of sociology, was the greatest legacy that he freely offered for all of humanity and the generations to come.
Open Science is a global issue. This series has so far highlighted perspectives from our open science stars from around the world, and we believe having this diversity is critical to have a well-informed viewpoint on the state of research in general.
So this week, we are absolutely delighted to have Obinna Ojemeni with us from Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria.
Hi Obinna! Thanks for joining us. Could you tell us a bit about your background?
I am from the South-eastern part of Nigeria and the third/last of the three sons of my parents. I attended Nnamdi Azikiwe University where I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Science Education & Mathematics. After my National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) program, I proceeded to the premier University of Ibadan where I obtained both Master of Education and Master of Information Science in 2010 and 2014 respectively. A Science Educationist and Information Scientist by training, and presently a University Teacher in the newly formed department of Library and Information Science, Enugu State University of Science & Technology. I am also a Doctoral (PhD) student in Nnamdi Azikiwe University where I’m studying Information Science with special focus on developments in Nigeria’s Open Access publishing landscape and bibliometric studies.
When did you first realise you wanted to be researcher? What was it that turned you?
That would be probably after my Master of Education degree program in the department of Teacher Education, University of Ibadan, which is also where I learnt how to do research and had academics that inspired me too. Besides having been trained as an Educationist, the best career would be to educate the younger generation and encourage them too as well as change the poor perception about the teaching profession.
I would rather emphasize that I come from a family of teachers, both my paternal grandparents were secondary (grandfather) and primary (grandmother) school teachers respectively. While my Mother was a Secondary school teacher, which is why I decided to take the family legacy to another level by becoming a University Teacher 🙂
When did you first hear about Open Access and Open Science? What did you first think about it all?
I was introduced to Open Access by my Master of Information Science Project Supervisor, Dr Williams Nwagwu at Africa Regional Centre for Information Science (popularly known as ARCIS) in University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Before then I was proposing a bibliometric study of a local journal published by a scholarly society and suggesting its’ inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), but had no knowledge of the concept of Open Access. So I was mandated by my supervisor to read up studies on Open Access which gave me background knowledge of the concept and the BBB declarations that facilitated its adoption globally.
My first thought was the reality that little or no research would have been possible in Nigeria without the free availability of OA publications via the internet. And we as Nigerians especially Academics, are doing little or nothing to foster its sustenance.
