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.
One of the biggest challenges for researchers is time. So when you find an abstract of interest and have just a moment to actually read, you need the full text right now. With our newest release, the ScienceOpen discovery environment incorporates open access data from Impactstory to provide researchers with more ways to read the paper.
Institutional repositories, open access aggregators, self-archiving, preprint servers – the last years have seen a proliferation of access options. The new ScienceOpen article page, therefore, aims for transparency and choice on nearly 40 million article records.
ScienceOpen is excited to work with the Unpaywall data from Impactstory to provide more information about open access licenses and access options for our users. This powerful dataset is being used by several discovery engines to enrich the search experience. Jason Priem of Impactstory says, “we’re thrilled to welcome ScienceOpen as our latest partner to integrate Unpaywall data, and excited about how this new integration furthers our goal to make Open Access content truly ubiquitous for researchers and readers.”
Potsdamer Platz Berlin, Andreas Levers, Traffic Light, Flickr, CC BY-NC
A green light for reading
The publisher’s version of record is a reader’s most reliable source. With our latest release we highlight this version on the article page with a green “Publisher” button for better orientation. Editors and publishers work hard to make the most accurate version of research results available to the community and changes to the version of record are often tracked on the publisher website via Crossref’s Crossmark service. With so little time in the day, reading the original is your best bet.
However, if further freely-accessible versions are available according to data from Unpaywall, these links are also provided and clearly labelled. Repository versions can be helpful outside of academic settings. And sometimes we have not identified an Open Access license, but Unpaywall has – so we, of course, want to give the reader this information as well!
If ScienceOpen indexing is based on the full text XML available on our platform (Open Access Hosting customers or PubMed Central Open Access articles), then the ScienceOpen access button is highlighted green. The same is true if we are getting our indexing information from SciELO. Our goal is always to help users find the best version for their needs.
“By offering more access choices, ScienceOpen has become so much more useful for researchers,” said Nina Tscheke, who has been involved in research community outreach over the past year. “This is an important step towards meeting researchers needs.”
ScienceOpen continues to develop tools and features for researchers and publishers to provide a superior discovery environment for scholarly research. If you are a publisher, editor, society or institute, talk to us today about our platform technology. Contact Stephanie Dawson for more information.
David Black is Secretary General of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Australia. An advocate of Open Access for scientific data in his role at ICSU, Professor Black is a proponent of the initiatives of ICSU and ICSU-affiliate groups, such as the Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science (CFRS), the ICSU-World Data System (ICSU-WDS), the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), the ICSU’s Strategic Coordinating Committee on Information and Data (SCCID), Continue reading “ScienceOpen Interview with David Black, Secretary General, International Council for Science.”
Over the last few days I attended the Spring Meeting of the German Physical Society (DPG) in Berlin. Physicists are considered sometime as a very special species among scientists, and not only because the characters introduced in the “Big Bang Theory” sitcom. Physicists developed the World Wide Web in the late eighties which became the starting point for all internet activities today. In 1991 Paul Ginsparg started to post preprints of research articles in a repository at Los Alamos National Laboratory which is known as “arXiv” ( www.arXiv.org ) which now consists of more than Continue reading “Open Access in Physics: Do we need something outside the arXiv?”
