ScienceOpen’s Monthly Digest – February 2023

Welcome to February’s Monthly Digest, where we highlight some of the new additions on ScienceOpen as well as the most current infrastructure improvements.

Follow @Science_Open on Twitter for daily updates, new research and collaborations, and exciting news from our network.

Enhancing accessibility

Our infrastructure is always being improved, bringing new tools and features that are useful to both publishers and academics. By promoting open science, innovative infrastructure and tools that facilitate scientific communication and exchange, we have successfully managed to bridge many gaps in the digital publishing landscape and continue to do so.

Alt-text elements integration in our hosting infrastructure is the latest improvement, aiming to make the content on ScienceOpen accessible to people with visual impairments, who use screen readers to have the contents of a web page read aloud to them.

Alt-text or alternate text, is an optional XML element that provides a brief text description of an image, a graphic, figure, or table on a web page.

The International Journal of Disability and Social Justice and the Journal of Disability Research by KSCDR are two of the pioneers using alt-text elements in their articles. ScienceOpen discovery tools assist both journals, by engaging audiences which will directly profit from this accessibility feature in the exchange process of scientific communication.

New partnerships

Reviewer Credits, the global expert network that makes peer review visible and helps researchers get recognition for their work, is now partnering with ScienceOpen to make Peer Review visible and highlight its importance in the publishing landscape.

Together, both companies will highlight research articles in ScienceOpen’s database that have been reviewed by Reviewer Credit members. Moreover, the reviewer status from Reviewer Credits, will be now reflected in Science Open’s user profiles.

At ScienceOpen we have been developing infrastructure for open peer review for nearly 10 years because we believe that it increases transparency and trust in science. Over the years we have continued to explore open peer review tools and workflows to support preprint management, post-publication review, and the creation of open access journals based on open peer review.

Another exciting collaboration which we are looking forward to expanding further is the one with ROR, a community-supported open infrastructure that is driven by organizations and individuals from all over the world, and which includes persistent IDs and metadata for over 102,000 organizations. The Registry data is freely accessible via a search interface, REST API, and data dump, and ROR is currently the only completely open organization identifier primarily focused on affiliations.

ROR IDs are now integrated in our manuscript submission system, facilitating author affiliation, and enhancing discoverability of our manuscripts in our network and beyond. A simple look-up in our interface allows authors and editors to easily find and insert the correct ROR ID for affiliation as part of the submission process.

ROR IDs will make it possible to quickly add the institutional affiliation to any new manuscript submitted through our system, and then let ScienceOpen’s discoverability tools do the rest.

Try it our for yourself in any of the preprint servers and let us know what you think about this new addition.

European Investment Bank joins ScienceOpen

The European Investment Bank is the lending arm of the European Union, the world’s largest multilateral financial institution and a major provider of climate, infrastructure, innovation and development finance. The Bank publishes a wide range of open-access publications, including reports, studies, books, essays, and other policy documents, aimed at professionals and the general public.

Users of ScienceOpen can now access publications by the European Investment Bank (EIB) through the new research collection, which includes open and freely accessible publications covering the Bank’s activities and a wide range of research disciplines.

The publications are critical in supporting the Bank’s operations. They analyse the changing economic context, investment opportunities, and risks, and help to define the bank’s positioning, strategy and policy in Europe and the rest of the world.

SSP Poster Collection

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) Annual Meeting is one of the major events of the research and publishing industry.

At the 2022 annual meeting, ScienceOpen was invited to present the BookMetaHub, our platform that works as a solution for all book publishers who want to freely access, maintain, or create rich metadata sets for their scientific book publications on a book- and chapter-level. And, as the SSP prepares for this year’s meeting, we at ScienceOpen have dedicated a research collection to all of the posters from the previous meeting, as well as other SSP-related content.

Explore the poster collection by SSP on ScienceOpen, which will serve as a unique platform where ideas, solutions and presentations come together in digital form.

ScienceOpen for Students!

Have you checked our blog highlighting features which might be very useful for students (and researchers) on ScienceOpen?

Get the most out of ScienceOpen and let us assist you paper after paper!