Four years ago, the late Jon Tennant, who was a significant contributor to the Open Science movement and a friend and colleague to the ScienceOpen team, interviewed people on ScienceOpen’s behalf from around the world who were active supporters of making science more open. This year, we got back in touch with several of the interviewees to get their opinion on the current status of Open Science in 2020. We heard from Dr. Joanne Kamens, Executive Director of Addgene, Professor Dr. Samir Hachani at Algiers II University, and Dr. Chris Hartgerink, Executive Director of Liberate Science GmbH. We also received an interesting update on the state of Open Science in Indoensia from Dr. Dasapta Erwin Irawan. Where do you think Open Science is heading in 2020? Share your thoughts with us! Here are our Open Science Stars’ responses:
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.
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?
There’s nothing better than being able to share something that inspires you with just one click. That is why we are excited to introduce ScienceOpen’s new sharing features that enable more types of shareable content and a new platform to share to – Sina Weibo! ScienceOpen’s platform now enables users to directly share their search results, which is a convenient tool for users, especially those using our platform for bibliographic analysis. In addition to being able to instantly share articles, collections, and searches to Twitter, Facebook and email, you can now upload ScienceOpen’s content to Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site. Let us elaborate more on the significance of the latter addition, not only for ScienceOpen users, but also for scientific communication in the digital era.
The new ScienceOpen Collections by the IET features recent scientific advances and increase their accessibility for the global audience with the overarching aim of informing next generations of engineers in the dynamically changing fields of artificial intelligence and of transport.
Robust data is at the heart of every research article. Increasingly, researchers are making great efforts to make their raw data and software available to other researchers as part of a move to more open and reproducible science. They are carefully managing data generation with new tools and storing digital research data in open data repositories or special subject repositories. But the heterogeneous and sometimes sensitive nature of data raises numerous hurdles. ScienceOpen has taken up the challenge by adding Data Availability Statements to all of its preprint and poster publications and as an additional metadata field for all articles on the site. If your data is open, share it with the world!
“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” (W. Edwards Deming)
Open science is not only about paywalls – it is also about guaranteeing that everybody across the globe can freely and fairly participate in disseminating knowledge. Chinese science is on the rise – an estimated one-third of the worldwide scientific output in 2016 was published in China (Xie & Freeman, 2019). However, Chinese publications face considerable challenges, both structural and cultural, when it comes to communicating science to non-Chinese communities. The mission of ScienceOpen is to remove these obstacles and open Chinese research to a wider audience. To make this happen, ScienceOpen partners with several institutions from China to host and represent their content within its open research network and to help make it easily discoverable in the digital space. In the ScienceOpen database you can find thousands of Chinese research articles. Would you like to get to know the most relevant papers but do not know where to start? Then our featured and non-featured Collections are the right go-to resource! Those article selections integrate handpicked papers highlighting state-of-the-art science. They are a perfect point of departure for anyone wishing to explore new strands of research. As there’s over a dozen (!) Collections from Chinese researchers, we thought we would give you a walk-through and introduce the Collections with which you can begin your adventure!
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!
Open science is not only about free PDFs! It is also fundamentally concerned with the ways of collecting, storing and transforming data, as well as making sure that research does not live in a vacuum but has a home among other relevant publications. Rich databases, comprehensive discovery environments and integrated web services are going to play the central role in such reshaping of scholarly communication.
Therefore, in order to facilitate this technological shift, ScienceOpen and Pensoft Publishers have entered into a strategic collaboration partnership that will focus on the unified indexation, the integration of Pensoft’s ARPHA Platform content into ScienceOpen and the utilization of novel streams of scientific dissemination for the published materials.
This partnership bring together two leaders of innovative content dissemination. From promotional collections to Open Access hosting and full publishing packages, ScienceOpen provides next-generation services to academic publishers embedded in an interactive discovery platform. Pensoft Publishers is an independent academic publishing company, well known worldwide for bringing novelty, its cutting-edge publishing tools and commitment to open access practices.
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.
