Tag: Open Access Week

Hearing from you on your open access experiences

A few weeks ago, we sent out a survey to hear about your experiences with Open Access. In this survey we asked questions like, do you believe the scholarly community could do research more effectively if all scientific communication were freely available under an open access license? and, would you prefer if peer reviews were made open? We’re happy to present the results today which coincides nicely with the final day of Open Access Week 2021.  

Before we get into the results, I will preface that this survey was fairly informal and was generated purely from the curiosity of the team at ScienceOpen. In this context, our definition of open access is kept pretty general and just concerns whether a work is legally, freely accessible to all with an internet connection. Now let’s get into the survey results! 

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.

The New Education Journals published by UCL Press

In the last several months, ScienceOpen has welcomed four education and social science journals based at the UCL Institute of Education and published by UCL Press: the Film Education Journal, London Research of Education, International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, and Research for All. The History Education Research Journal (HERJ) is the fifth and final journal of this series to be presented alongside its new issue 17(2), which is out today! All of these education journals are now hosted on ScienceOpen where they are freely accessible and supported by our expert metadata and technology services.  

Open Access Week is the annual event to show our global support for all things open access! The theme this year is all about committing to putting open into action in order to take real steps towards open scholarship and supporting a stronger research framework.

SPARC have created an action portal of various activities you can undertake this week to help yourself and your colleagues support open access. These are:

1. Make a list of open access journals in my discipline I would consider publishing in and share it with colleagues.
2. Start a conversation about Open Access during a research group meeting, journal club, or staff meeting.
3. Send at least one manuscript to an open-access journal within the next year.
4. Deposit at least one of my articles into an open-access repository during Open Access Week and encourage colleagues to do the same.
5. Use the SPARC author addendum on my next publication to reserve rights to make a copy of my work publicly accessible.
6. Contribute to a conversation on campus about institutional support for Open Access.
7. Sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and commit to not using journal-based metrics in evaluation.
8. Sign up for Impactstory to explore the online impact of your research and get an ORCID.

Thankfully, ScienceOpen is here to make these things even easier for you! Some related things you can do are:

• Use our discovery and filter tools to discover journals in your research field.
• Start a research collection for you and your colleagues.
• Peer review any of 26 million research articles, and receive credit for openly sharing your expertise.
• ScienceOpen is already linked with ImpactStory and ORCID, making cross-platform integration even easier!