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!
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.
Join us for a Panel Discussion on Open Peer Review for Peer Review Week 2021
This year, Peer Review Week is taking place September 20th through 24th, and ScienceOpen has put together an expert panel to discuss the why’s and how’s of open peer review. Peer Review Week is an annual weeklong event that is led by the community to celebrate the essential role that peer review plays in scientific and academic communication. The event brings together all those committed to sharing the central message that quality peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly research. As a proponent of open peer review, we thought it would be the perfect topic to discuss during Peer Review Week this year. Below you will find the details and registration link for the panel we have assembled to discuss everything on the topic of open peer review which will take place on September 24th at 4 pm London time (UTC+1). We would love to have you join this free, online event during Peer Review Week!
We are pleased to announce our new partnership with the British Association for Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO). We have collaborated to index two of BAPIO’s medical journals, The Physician and Sushruta Journal of Health Policy, in featured collections on ScienceOpen to increase their visibility and discoverability to a wider audience. BAPIO is a non-profit, voluntary professional organisation in its silver jubilee year, whose mission is to provide a global forum for health professionals to promote excellence in healthcare, education, research and leadership by promoting diversity, equality and inclusion for all. BAPIO as a national organisation, functions through a number of regional chapters, special interest forums and arms-length bodies and is closely affiliated to the Global Association of Physicians of Indian Origin.
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.
