Happy New Year! I would like to take this moment to personally wish you a successful 2023 and thank you for your support of ScienceOpen over the past year. Each December tends to end in a rush, so I always appreciate the opportunity in the first days of the new year to reflect on what we have accomplished and look forward to the exciting projects ahead.
Open Peer Review
Open peer review is an integral part of the ScienceOpen platform, and it was a central focus in 2022. We did a survey on open peer review and were involved in the #PublishYourReviews campaign and the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review workshop. We will continue to advocate for more open review in 2023.
We are particularly proud of the journal UCL Open Environment that has been publishing with a fully transparent open peer review system on ScienceOpen since 2019. It has published 4 volumes with 61 open access articles and 118 open peer review reports. Kudos!
We are also excited to welcome another open peer review journal – the Journal of Systems Thinking.
Sneak Peak: Building on our open peer review experience and infrastructure we will be building an open publishing portal for the EU funded drug repurposing project REPO4EU. The portal will be open to all researchers in the field of drug repurposing and will include a preprint submission system, open access journals, a research showcase for REPO4EU and a collection of relevant research.
Journals
ScienceOpen is home to over 60 open access journals hosting their content directly in our search environment of over 83 million articles. This year we added some exciting new tools for those journals such as detailed usage reports, that include geolocation and institutional usage data. We also added new volume and issue navigation elements to our hosted journals to create interactive table of contents and issue lists. (image)
We put in a lot of effort refining our peer review management system, both for open and blinded peer review. But of course, there are many more features that we can add. So, stay tuned for the addition of more persistent identifiers in the manuscript submission interface such as ROR Ids and Fundref.
UCL Press increased their visibility and discoverability by creating a separate subdomain powered by ScienceOpen’s aggregation technology to host their 15 open access journals.
I would also like to highlight some new journals on the platform this year – 21 newly open access journals by Pluto Journals, and 5 new journals with the Emirates Scholar. We are also very proud that the Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications Journal, that had long used ScienceOpen to promote their articles, moved to full hosting this year.
Our list of new journal additions in 2022 includes as well:
Sneak Peak: We also created a system of do-it-yourself banners, currently in beta, that allows an editor to add a banner to each article page with a call for papers or conference highlights or promotion for their other journals and books. We developed this feature for our hosted journals but have now rolled it out for all collections on ScienceOpen. Try it out!
Books
With the launch of our open BookMetaHub funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research we continued to focus on ways to showcase books within the ScienceOpen discovery environment through better metadata. We added persistent identifiers for affiliation (ROR IDs) and for funding bodies (Funder Registry) and created an open API. Look out for the launch of the final version this spring.
We were excited to have added some new book projects in 2022 such as Peter Lang Books, Sunway University Press, Medical Physics Publishing, Radboud University Press, and to see all the new books added in the collections of Amsterdam University Press and Michigan Publishing.
Sneak Peak: In the new year we will add an easy integration point between the BookMetaHub and ScienceOpen with a big focus on book DOIs and metadata enhancement.
Conferences
This year was a big year for conferences on the ScienceOpen platform– the Road to Open Meta Conference wrapped up our BMBF funded project and the ReXpo22 Conference) kicked off the new EU funded REPO4EU project. We also supported UNISA Press with the ODEL Conference in South Africa.
The Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) series hosted on ScienceOpen hit over 1 million views this year. Congratulations!
It was great to be back on the road as part of our open science outreach. We were involved in a wide range of conferences this year – from London Book Fair, to SSP in Chicago and ALPSP in Manchester, to our stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair and a trip to Cairo for the Forum for Open Research in MENA. Look for us at this year’s industry conferences and stop by for a chat.
UN SDGs
As an overarching topic we always try to keep the UN Sustainable Development Goals in mind in all that we do. Stuart Cooper, our Global Business Development Director is an active member of the HESI UN SDG Fellows Program, and we covered SDGs related research on our blog through our #ExploreSDGs campaign.
Search for SDGs in our blog and you will find the best and most relevant research featured on our platform under each Goal.
Looking forward to 2023!
The wish list of new features for 2023 by our partners and customers is long so we will be developing at top speed. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Nina Tscheke, Content Integration Manager, and the tech team leads Bálint Herzceg and Tihamér Rozman for all their dedication and good solutions over the past year. Also, a big shout out to Kevin Jasini for his excellent work running our blog and social media channels and to Haibao Xue for promoting ScienceOpen in China. And of course, if you are interested in learning more about our services and solutions get in touch with Stuart Cooper, our Global Business Development Director.
We appreciate the feedback and support of the researcher community, editors, reviewers, publishers, and partners who help us to improve the ScienceOpen platform. I hope you will continue to share your experiences and ideas with us in the coming year. Best wishes for a healthy, joyful, and successful new year from ScienceOpen.
Stephanie Dawson, CEO