Publishing services

Launching a new open access journal or an open access press? ScienceOpen now provides full end-to-end open access publishing solutions – embedded within our smart interactive discovery environment. A modular approach allows open access publishers to pick and choose among a range of services and design the platform that fits their goals and budget.

You want to create a unique publishing identity? Book your own sub-domain powered by ScienceOpen to manage and host existing open access publications or start new journals. ScienceOpen can provide technical infrastructure for manuscript submission, peer review management, open access hosting, article versioning, distribution, analytics and APC management for journals and (coming soon) books. The ScienceOpen platform has its own powerful citation index and is uniquely integrated with ORCID, Crossref and Altmetric to immediately plug your publications into the infrastructure of global scholarly communication.

Publisher branding

Your own publishing platform on ScienceOpen comes with a branded URL and website with lots of space for customization. See, for example, the recently launched  UCL Open megajournal platform. The underlying ScienceOpen infrastructure includes user profiles via ORCID, with interactive features such as share, recommend, comment, and review functionalities, lay summaries and community curation. Transparent article-, journal- and publisher-level metrics, including views, citations and altmetrics, can be used to sort search results to help your best content get the most attention, both within your own sub-domain and beyond in the full ScienceOpen discovery environment.

Open review and versioning

Journals publishing on the ScienceOpen platform can choose between blinded review and an open, transparent process. An intuitive manuscript submission and peer review dashboard help editors to track and manage the review process both before and after publication. A full set of notifications – branded with the publisher’s logo – support editors for faster turn-around times.

Beyond the first round of decision-making, the ScienceOpen platform offers a built-in infrastructure for open, post-publication peer review that has been used and improved since 2014. Broadly applicable questions refined with the help of over 100 editors, peer review experts, researchers and publishers form the basis for an article review. Users comment and review with their full identity and ORCID and a review requires a certain level of expertise, as measured by 5 peer-reviewed articles attached to the reviewer’s profile. All review reports receive a citable Crossref DOI. Authors may reply to reviews via the comment function, creating a transparent discussion platform. Reviews/comments are attached to a particular version of an article and the full history of a publication is visible. Reporting tools can provide both a view based on aggregated metrics for multiple versions, as well as individual metrics for each version.

Publishers can choose between innovative workflows that include posting pre-print content or more traditional publishing paths that publish the final peer-reviewed version in XML and PDF.

Content in context

Every scholar painstakingly places their argumentation in the context of the research that has come before. Publishing on ScienceOpen, you can recognize that effort with linked references within our discovery environment and place your journal in the context of the excellent research cited by your authors. Your content will be recommended on all relevant content within the 88+ million articles on the ScienceOpen – both at the article and journal level, for increased visibility and dissemination.

Furthermore, researchers on ScienceOpen are encouraged to create collections of literature around their research topics to build communities and foster communication. Publishers can benefit from this community curation with increased visibility and activity. This feature is particularly useful for very broad scope journals just starting out.

Advantages of the new ScienceOpen open access publishing platform

Articles published on ScienceOpen benefit from the following services and features:

• Separate publisher-branded subdomain powered by ScienceOpen technology
• Manuscript submission system with flexible editorial management structures
• All notifications with customized publisher branding
• Peer review management dashboard for open or single-blind peer review
• Open post-publication peer review, commenting and recommendation infrastructure
• Article versioning structure
• Full integration with Crossref (including DOIs for peer review reports), ORCID and Altmetric
• All content with machine-readable Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 open-access license
• Long-term archiving
• XML creation / own pdf design (optional)
• APC management (optional)
• Full-text hosting of metadata, XML and pdf, automatic deposit with Crossref
• Context environment of 88+ million records driving search and discovery
• Dynamic search and filtering of all content at journal, publisher, author, and collection level
• Article- and collection level usage statistics on the fly
• Monthly usage reports
• Author profiles and self-promotion tools for users to add lay summaries, share and track their work
• Collections promoted with a banner on all relevant content drawn from the whole database
• Community-run, researcher-led topical collections further promote usage – encourage authors to apply for collection editor status.

Professional service infrastructure: The ScienceOpen team provides a wealth of experience with both traditional and alternative publishing models with over 10 years at the cutting edge of open access. Our responsive technical team can provide support with best practices in XML metadata, discovery, and delivery. The software and database architecture of the ScienceOpen platform with its existing technological infrastructure for scientific publishing has been deployed since 2013. ScienceOpen hosts, operates, maintains and updates the platform and its software on a frequent basis to reflect the state of the art in technology developments, updates with the latest versions of the deployed technical solution and evolving user requirements and feedback.

We would love to work with you on your next publishing project. Contact Stephanie Dawson or Stuart Cooper for more information, a live demo or a quote for your project.