Tag: Public engagement

Modern research is about weaving together different strands of information, thought, and data to discover something we did not know before. At ScienceOpen, humanities research lives in harmony with Maths, Engineering and the Natural and Physical Sciences. We specialize in integrating research from across the  humanities and social sciences from disciplines such as Linguistics with Brill, Literature, History and Cultural Studies with the Open Library of Humanities, and Psychology with Hogrefe. Our ever-expanding humanities section includes rare delights such as Medieval Heritage, Comics, or Greek Linguistics.

Integration leads to discovery

By working with a range of publishers and transcending disciplines, our research network constantly finds new connections for users to explore. This enriched context is based on article-level citation and reference analysis, with each nod, or link, in this network designed to expand the horizons of researchers and help them to discover previously unknown relevant research. Recently, we took the diverse field of Archaeology and integrated it into this mix to see what happens.

Our recent additions to the discipline include the Open Access Internet Archeology, and the researcher-led collection Digital Archaeology (edited by Dominik Hagmann). These latest additions fit beautifully in to our already existing Archaeology corpus of 9980 research articles, with the 5 colourful featured Archaeology journals by Equinox already thriving among them.

Let’s take a look at what all this new research has to offer! They reveal to us the material remains of ancient cultures, historical accounts of past lives, and tell us stories about what is it like doing Archaeology in a modern, digital research environment.

Continue reading “This does not belong in a museum! Digging for new Archaeology research on ScienceOpen”  

Context is something we’ve been thinking a lot about at ScienceOpen recently. It comes from the Latin ‘con’ and ‘texere’ (to form ‘contextus’), which means ‘weave together’. The implications for science are fairly obvious: modern research is about weaving together different strands of information, thought, and data to place your results into the context of existing research. This is the reason why we have introductory and discussion sections at the intra-article level.

But what about context at a higher level?

Context can defined as: “The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.” Simple follow on questions might be then, what is the context of a research article? How do we define that context? How do we build on that to do science more efficiently? The whole point for the existence of research articles is that they can be understood by as broad an audience as possible so that their re-use is maximised.

There are many things that impinge upon the context of research. Paywalls, secretive and exclusive peer review, lack of discovery, lack of inter-operability, lack of accessibility. The list is practically endless, and a general by-product of a failure for traditional scholarly publishing models to embrace a Web-based era.

Continue reading “Why ‘context’ is important for research”