ScienceOpen is a website. It is freely accessible for all and offers hosting and promotional services within the platform for publishers and institutes. The organization is based in Berlin and has a technical office in Boston. It is a member of
CrossRef,
ORCID
The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...
, the
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...
,
STM Association and the
Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proj ...
. 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.”
History
ScienceOpen began in 2013 when
Alexander Grossmann, a professor of Publishing Management at the
Leipzig University of Applied Sciences
The Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, in German the Hochschule für Technik, Wirtschaft und Kultur (HTWK), is a Fachhochschule in Leipzig, in the Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially th ...
and former publishing director at scholarly publishing house
De Gruyter
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature.
History
The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...
, and
Tibor Tscheke, president and CEO of the content management system company
Ovitas, decided to start a platform that would 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. In September 2015, ScienceOpen hit the 10 million article record mark. In June 2016 they announced their partnership with
SciELO
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countrie ...
, the largest publisher in
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived ...
, to enable discovery of
SciELO
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countrie ...
content in ScienceOpen. Additional publishing partners include
UCL Press
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = � ...
,
Emerald Publishing,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press was founded in 1933 to aid in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's purpose of furthering the advance and spread of scientific knowledge.
CSHL Press publishes monographs, technical manuals, handbooks, review volumes ...
,
PeerJ
''PeerJ'' is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley) and publisher Pe ...
,
Open Library of the Humanities,
Microbiology Society
The Microbiology Society (previously the Society for General Microbiology) is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with a worldwide membership based in universities, industry, hospitals, research institutes and schools. It is the large ...
,
Karger,
Equinox
A solar equinox is a moment in time when the Sun crosses the Earth's equator, which is to say, appears zenith, directly above the equator, rather than north or south of the equator. On the day of the equinox, the Sun appears to rise "due east" ...
, Hogrefe,
EDPSciences,
UTS ePRESS,
Higher Education Press, Europe's Journal for Psychology, the Italian Society of Victimology and more.
As of January 2018, the site had 38 million articles and records from
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center ...
,
ArXiv
arXiv (pronounced " archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists o ...
,
PubMed
PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain ...
,
SciELO
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countrie ...
, and numerous individual publishers. ScienceOpen provides 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.
Business model
ScienceOpen offers open access journal hosting services, as well as advanced indexing and promotional services that showcase customer content within the discovery platform.
Every research article on ScienceOpen has a traceable genealogy through citations, a public peer review process, and social interaction tracked by
altmetrics
In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and ''h''-index. The term altmetrics was proposed i ...
, which they call research "context". The technology behind the ScienceOpen platform is provided by Ovitas.
ScienceOpen appoints members of the research community as Collection Editors who curate articles from multiple publishers in any topic. Collections support discovery of and within research communities. 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
The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...
, and all articles can be publicly commented on by members with one or more items.
The primary intend of ScienceOpen originally was to provide a platform to provide a
peer-review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
for and publish
Open Access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...
science articles. Authors can upload their manuscripts free of charge onto ScienceOpen Preprints, where they immediately receive a
DOI number. After this the authors need to invite potential reviewers for their manuscript. After received the reviews, the authors can modify their manuscript and submit the second version, which is usually accepted for publication. After having received at least 2 independent reviews with recommendation for acceptance , the authors have an option to publish their work on ScienceOpen Research for 400 US$. After several years of operation, on 2022-08-01 ScienceOpen lists 115 reviews (with only 2 negative) and 77 publications.
There are several other web services in the same market niched as ScienceOpen, but they have been even less successful in attracting customers:
Qeios,
PREreview.org, Hypothesis,
F1000,
Publons
Publons was a commercial website that provided a free service for academics to track, verify, and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions for academic journals. It was launched in 2012 and was bought by Clarivate in 2017. It claime ...
,
PubPeer,
PubPub.
Headquarters
ScienceOpen has its headquarters located at Pappelallee 78-79, 10437 Berlin, Germany and its technical hub is at 155 Middlesex Turnpike, Burlington, MA 01803, USA.
See also
*
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...
(OASPA)
*
Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proj ...
(DOAJ)
*
Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
*
Open access in Germany
*
List of academic databases and search engines
This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific an ...
References
External links
*
ScienceOpen Research
ScienceOpen Posters {{ISSN, 2199-8442
Open access publishers
Open access (publishing)
Scholarly communication
Citation indices