At ScienceOpen, we’ve realized that “open,” which was once applied really only at the article level, should actually be applied to the whole process. Open peer review is a prime example of this. By opening up the peer review process, we increase transparency in the review process, and it simultaneously benefits researchers by giving them credit for the work they do to review a manuscript. On the ScienceOpen platform, you will find that we have innovatively implemented open peer review in a variety of ways–i.e. in the management of preprints, post publication review, and in the creation of open access journals. To demonstrate the solutions we have created in recent months, we invite you to an online session in which Stephanie Dawson will give a complete overview of open peer review on ScienceOpen!
Recently ScienceOpen has made several important additions to our services around books and book chapters on ScienceOpen. We announced new book hosting services for two publishers—African Minds and Carl Grossmann Verlag. Additionally, we have indexed several publishers’ book collections onto the platform, providing extensive technical support which led to the creation of an interface for producing and enhancing book metadata. These customers includeUUM Press, Huddersfield Uuniversity Press,University of Westminster Press, and Trivent among others.
In the last several years, preprint servers have become increasingly attractive to publishers as strides have been made, such as the assigning of digital object identifiers, that make preprints a better, more trackable form of scientific communication. Moreover, with the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, the scientific community has seen preprints play a major role in enabling the swift relaying of research results. Thus, there is a lot of excitement over the future of preprints and how they could transform the scientific publishing landscape. We are therefore excited to announce a new cooperation with the University of South Africa (Unisa) Press, with whom we have created a new preprint server: UnisaRxiv. UnisaRxiv will be a forum to facilitate open peer-review of preprint manuscripts and allow for rapid dissemination of the latest findings in diverse topics.
Explore new tools for next-generation, open peer review
In concurrence with Peer Review Week 2020, Stephanie Dawson and Ian Caswell of UCL Press will host a virtual event this Thursday, September 24th, describing the Open Peer Review tools behind UCL Open: Environment. The event will have the form of a case study, and Ian and Stephanie will explain the editorial workflow of UCL Open in addition to sharing their experience in implementing open publishing models on ScienceOpen. Come and tune in if you are a publisher, an editor, or simply an open science enthusiast, and get unique insight into the practical aspects of open publishing! This event will take place over Zoom at 4 pm CEST (UTC+2) on this coming Thursday. Go to the event page here to register so you can take part in this discussion!
At ScienceOpen, we recognize that access to information is essential to those trying to deepen their knowledge of a subject, and that is one reason why our mission is strongly rooted in promoting open access publishing. However, we also realize that there has gotten to be an overwhelming amount of information on nearly any subject for one person to sift through, which means the organization of academic publications is also important in addition to accessibility.
ScienceOpen Collections assist users and researchers
To help with information filtering and to highlight relevant research, we continually reach out to field experts and journal publishers and encourage them to become Collection editors — where they can then compile important research in their field in a Collection and share it on ScienceOpen. These Collections in all scholarly fields are promoted by ScienceOpen and embedded in our discovery platform to help direct readers in their research endeavors. Collections provide an interactive space for researchers to share and discuss important results as articles, preprints, books or chapters with dynamic search and sort filters for large collections of literature, article review functionalities, statistics and more. Importantly, the Collection editor is always named to provide context and so that they receive credit for their work. Expertise is valuable, so share yours!
Learn more about starting a collection – Webinar details
Explore new tools for next-generation, open peer review. ScienceOpen and UCL Press offer an interactive, hands-on, online workshop to demo the open peer review tools behind UCL’s interdisciplinary publishing platform UCL Open: Environment for researchers and editors.
Peer review is a key element of scholarly publishing, but for the past decade the research community has struggled to move beyond the black box and develop new open models of research evaluation. University College London and UCL Press would like to change that. Since the beginning, ScienceOpen has been committed to open peer review – now offering post-publication review options for over 62 million articles and preprints. So, with the vision of a university-led publishing platform based on open review principles, UCL Press teamed up with ScienceOpen to create the journal “UCL Open: Environment”.
ScienceOpen has released an automatically updating Collection on the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), currently integrating over 500 articles. In order to speed up the research cycle, articles that have not yet undergone peer review (flagged as “preprint“) are included and clearly flagged. This Collection is a go-to resource for science on this new disease, as content from many publishers and authors can be found on a single landing page and filtered using our search and discovery tools.
Minimizing the obstacles for knowledge dissemination: Publish conference posters and preprints
We want to support those researchers affected by conference cancellations as result of COVID-19: You can share your research results now by uploading your poster to ScienceOpen. This is a free service that is always and everywhere accessible and indefinitely available to use as open access without paywalls or other limitations.
The unique advantage of having a poster on ScienceOpen is that they immediately become available to community curation – fellow researchers can review and comment your work, creating a discussion and a feedback loop that are such a welcome part of live poster sessions.
ScienceOpen and AfricArXiv are partnering to provide African researchers with accelerated visibility, networking and collaboration opportunities.
The research and publishing platform ScienceOpen provides services and features relevant for publishers, institutions and researchers alike, including content hosting, context building, as well as discoverability features.
2020 will ring in a decade of more openness in scholarly research – more open access, more open peer review, more open source development, more open humanities and science. ScienceOpen is thrilled to support this development with a wide range of technology solutions. After all, it has been part of our mission statement, and our name, from day one.
For small publishing organizations like library publishers, societies, university presses or single journals, metadata generation and distribution can be a time-consuming manual effort. Sometimes important information is left out simply due to technical restrictions. ScienceOpen can take the pain out of these processes, saving you time and resources and providing richer metadata to your partners. Turning these technical tasks over to ScienceOpen as professional service provider can free up your time to focus on more important editorial goals.
For open access journals we now offer full journal hosting within our unique interactive discovery environment of over 60 million article records. With Crossref DOI deposit, ORCID integration, open review infrastructure, long term archiving, and state-of-the-art indexing and SEO, your open access journal can make ScienceOpen its home base and tap into the full infrastructure of scholarly publishing, all for a very reasonable price. We want to see open access journals grow and flourish in the next year and decade!
