ScienceOpen

ScienceOpen is a privately owned discovery and research network with three roles: aggregation, open access publishing and the evaluation of scholarly literature in all scholarly disciplines.

History

ScienceOpen began in 2013^[1] when Alexander Grossmann, a professor of Publishing Management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences and former publishing director at scientific house De Gruyter, and Tibor Tscheke, president and CEO of content management systems company Ovitas, decided to start a platform. Their idea was to allow researchers to share scientific information, both formally by publishing articles and participating in post-publication peer review, and informally by reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and by updating their own papers.

Its beta version was introduced in November 2013, and release 1.0 launched in May 2014.^[2] As of September 2015 the site has 10 million articles and records^[3] from PubMed Central, ArXiv, PubMed and ScienceOpen, and a publicly available citation index which is free for researchers to use wherever they are and is provided at no cost to libraries, which in February 2016 was dubbed the Open Citation Index.^[4] All content on the platform is available for post-publication peer review by scientific members with five or more peer-reviewed publications on their ORCID, and all articles can be publicly commented on by members with one or more items.

ScienceOpen appoints members of the research community as Collection Editors^[5] who curate articles from multiple publishers in any topic. Thieme, a German medical publisher, mirrors three open access journals on the platform.

The organization is based in Berlin and has a technical office in Boston. It is a member of CrossRef, ORCID, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association^[6] and the Directory of Open Access Journals. The company was designated as one of “10 to Watch” by research advisory firm Outsell in its report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”

In 2015, Tscheke provided further clarification of ScienceOpen’s focus on aggregation and filtering content.^[7]

Business model

ScienceOpen publishes articles of almost any type and from any research field, including the social sciences and humanities. This includes primary research articles, opinion papers, posters, case studies, negative results, and data publications. To fund article publication, ScienceOpen charges a publication fee ($800 as of this time of writing, in 2015) to be paid by the author or the author’s employer, funder or library. This is for a post-publication peer review process and publication after editorial control,^[8] and is facilitated through integration with ORCID.^[9] Additionally, authors can opt to use the 'Peer Review by Endorsement' model,^[10] in which peer review is conducted prior to submission, and for a fee of $400. Included in this fee are up to two article revisions within 12 months, with full version control. Revised versions have a new DOI so that it is easier to link back to cited versions. A partial or full fee waiver is available to those who demonstrate need. Poster session publishing is free. All published articles are published via a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.^[11]

From 2016, ScienceOpen has started partnering with publishers to offer advanced indexing services. In June 2016 they partnered with SciELO, the largest publisher in Latin America"ScienceOpen helps to put scientific research in a global context with more than 15 million article records – ScienceOpen Blog". blog.scienceopen.com. Retrieved 2016-06-14. . Additional publishing partners include Higher Education Press^[12] and The Italian Society of Victimology.^[13] In September 2015, ScienceOpen hit the 10 million article record mark,^[14] and as of 27 June 2016 has more than 13 million records.

Every research article on ScienceOpen has a traceable genealogy through citations, a public peer review process, and social interaction tracked by altmetrics, which they call research "context".^[15] The technology behind the ScienceOpen platform is provided by Ovitas.

ScienceOpen are findable on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Publications

• ScienceOpen Research, ISSN 2199-1006
• ScienceOpen Posters, ISSN 2199-8442

Headquarters

ScienceOpen has its headquarters located at Pappelallee 78-79, 10437 Berlin and its technical hub is at 60 Mall Rd., Burlington, Mass.

See also

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)

References

External links

• Official website