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!
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. 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”.
Help us inform others and get credit for it! At ScienceOpen, we are catalysing the information campaign around the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19. Our Collections infrastructure is available to use free-of-charge, for both publishers and researchers alike. Everyone can join us to build a rich network of knowledge around the coronavirus, and each individual contribution is very important and valued on our platform!
In this post, we want to showcase a number of coronavirus-related Collections curated by researchers, and to present to you how to use the ScienceOpen platform to share own research and create digital resources for others to learn from.
ScienceOpen has released a Collection of COVID-19 research that highlights rigorous, peer-reviewed articles by reputable journals and publishers within the rapidly growing coronavirus knowledge base. Almost two dozen publishers have already participated in ScienceOpen’s initiative, bringing together 1000s of articles and enabling better discovery for the research community.
ScienceOpen offers powerful filters for enhanced discovery and interactive tools to recommend, review and share research. Publishers can create unique collection landing pages for their coronavirus-related content within the context of thousands of preprints and articles aggregated from around the world.
The fast-paced research that we need to quickly understand the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 and effectively find treatments has changed how scientists are communicating their results. Many researchers are posting their findings as preprints to speed up data sharing, rather than waiting for peer review and publication in an academic journal. But publishers are also stepping up and providing expedited processes to make peer reviewed information available as fast as possible, collecting all relevant publications together and making those freely accessible during this crisis.
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.
Rolf Dietrich Brecher, Speeding up, Flickr, CC-BY SA
The “Preprint” allows researchers to openly share their results with peers at an early stage and still publish the final version in the peer-reviewed journal of their choice. From the start, ScienceOpen has supported preprints and their essential role in speeding up science by integrating arXiv preprints in the physical sciences on the platform. We now include over 1.7 million arXiv records on ScienceOpen. In our new release we have added even more preprints to the mix, with a focus on the biomedical sciences.
Preprints in the biological and medical sciences were kickstarted by the founding of bioRxiv in 2013, and by the advocacy organization ASAPBio in 2015 and have taken off rapidly since then. Now on ScienceOpen we have added records for over 20,000 bioRxiv preprints to our discovery environment, together with the capacity to include records from other preprint servers such as PeerJ Preprints, Preprints.org and ChemRxiv. Up next are all the great preprint servers on OSF Preprints. We are working hard!
Preprints have the advantage of being rapidly and freely accessible. However, they have not undergone a peer review process and must be read with a more critical eye. Preprints are, therefore, clearly flagged on ScienceOpen. During his physics PhD, ScienceOpen co-founder Alexander Grossmann and his colleagues went first to the arXiv for the newest results to build upon and shape their thinking. They knew it was unfiltered and not peer reviewed, but they were often already at the next step in their research by the time the final version was published. Many features on ScienceOpen were created with this kind of speed in mind. Continue reading “Speeding up Research with Preprints”
