ScienceOpen: Rethinking Scholarly Publishing

We are living in the information age and the internet has truly and radically changed how we define,

create, access, and use that information. Networks for sharing and discovery have grown up in all

areas and have challenged traditional sources and structures. Sharing rather than ownership is the new normal for the upcoming generation “open”. What does this mean for scholarly publishing?

Scientific information has long held a privileged place for its truth-value. Publishers of scholarly

research have built up complex editorial and peer-review processes to ensure the validity and

novelty of the research results they publish. But their traditional business model, based on library

subscriptions to journals, depends on an economy of ownership (i.e. copyright) that is out of step

with how scientists now share, use, and reuse scientific literature on the internet. It is time to rethink

scholarly publishing and this was our goal when we set out to build the research and publishing network ScienceOpen.

1. The future of scholarly publishing With yearly ca. 1.8 million articles published in around 28,000 scholarly journals, it seems counter-

intuitive to say, but the scientific community needs even more publications: negative results, all

clinical trials, protocols, data papers, observations. We also need to include more research output

from high growth areas such as China, Brazil and India. One of the biggest challenges facing

researchers, institutes and scholarly publishers already is how to evaluate this swelling tide of

information. We will need new tools to make scientific communication faster, easier and more

collaborative, while still rewarding first class ideas and results. At ScienceOpen we believe that an

open, network model is the most efficient way to achieve these goals. We envision ourselves as a

communication platform to serve the needs of the research community, universities and institutes, funding bodies and the scholarly publishing industry.

1. It must be OPEN The first step is free and immediate access to information. At ScienceOpen we are idealists: we

believe that knowledge drives creativity, innovation and development. But we also know that young

scientists looking for solutions and ideas wil l share them with their network, regardless of copyright

status. So as pragmatists we chose a business model that encourages sharing. Everything we publish in our ScienceOpen journals has a creative commons CC BY 4.0 attribution license.

When research articles are open with a CC BY license, exciting things can happen. Open Access is

making large numbers of structured research articles across all publishers freely available. We

wanted to play with the large dataset and see what was possible. Beyond publishing our own

content, ScienceOpen is a platform that aggregates Open Access articles across publishers with over

1.6 million Open Access articles to date. For these open articles we have mined and exposed citation,

authoring and publisher information to create new discovery tools for researchers to find and share

relevant articles. Articles and authors can be ranked by number of citations in the ScienceOpen

database – a relative number to help researchers orient themselves. This has allowed us to add

metadata for closed access articles to the system for a total of roughly 10 million articles. We also

provide a metrics badge (from Altmetric) for all content to further capture activity in social networks,

blogs, and other sources on the web. On each article page we display detailed article metrics. All of

these discovery services are completely free for researchers to use .

2. Networks work Some of the most successful companies of the last decade have been based on the collective power

of user networks – Amazon, Airbnb, Spotify, TripAdvisor, Sina WeiBo – the list goes on. The collective

recommendations of our peers help us to make decisions on where to stay, what to buy, what to

read or listen to. Is this peer endorsement system in fact so different from the basic tenets of peer

review? A recommendation from a well-respected scientist is a strong motivation to engage with an

article. As the network grows, researchers will be able to connect with peers to discover new articles – without the “noise” of broader social networks such as Twitter or Facebook.

A core ScienceOpen idea is to direct the power of professional networks to evaluating research

results. Any researcher with the appropriate qualifications (5 published articles and ORCID ID)

registered with ScienceOpen can write an open review for any of the 10 million articles and records

on our site. Reviews must be written with full identity disclosed in order to support an open

discourse. For our own journals we have a novel concept of publishing submitted articles

immediately after an editorial check, and then opening them up for a transparent “post-publication peer review to speed up the process of scientific communication.

3. Researchers are looking for information, not journals Researchers searching the scientific literature are looking for a specific answer to a problem, an

overview of a new field or inspiration for their next step. Nearly all scientists begin their search from

a scientific search engine such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, etc. depending on their field. If

they find an article with the information they need, then the journal publisher is only a secondary

concern. This new search mode has inspired a whole generation of “megajournals” such as PLOS ONE and ScienceOpen Research as opposed to multiple niche journals.

In a new trend, many publishers of megajournals have begun creating topical collections post-

publication from the wide range of articles they publish. This gives them more flexibility to publish

single articles quickly and to make collections of current hot topics. But from the researcher

perspective, this is only somewhat of interest. For example, if I am working on malaria, I want to find

the best articles across all publishers, not just the best from a single publisher. At ScienceOpen we

have created a collection function that allows editors to choose articles in their field across all

publishers, write an editorial and comment on each article. This tool should unite the most important

aspects of journals – topical bundling, editorial selection, trust and reliability – and open up new avenues of research evaluation beyond the journal impact factor.

But publishers and journal editors are also already doing an excellent job in bundling content. We

would like to work together to help them get more visibility for their content by highlighting their

journals on the ScienceOpen site, as we now do in a pilot project with the publisher Thieme, a top

German medical publisher. We also offer institutes the opportunity to present their output on ScienceOpen.

4. The future of scholarly publishing It seems counter-intuitive to say but the scientific community needs even more publications:

negative results, all clinical trials, protocols, data papers, observations. We also need to include more

research output from high growth areas such as China, Brazil and India. One of the biggest challenges

facing researchers, institutes and scholarly publishers already is how to evaluate this swelling tide of

information. We will need new tools to make scientific communication faster, easier and more

collaborative, while still rewarding first class ideas and results. At Scie nceOpen we believe that an

open, network model is the most efficient way to achieve these goals. We would like to work

together with publishers to help them get more visibility for their Open Access content by

highlighting their journals on the ScienceOpen site, as we now do in a pilot project with the publisher

Thieme, a top German medical publisher. We also offer institutes the opportunity to present their

output on ScienceOpen. We see ourselves as a communication platform to serve the needs of the research community, universities and institutes, funding bodies and the publishing industry.

Collectively our scientists are working hard on our behalf to solve the toughest problems of mankind.

Communicating about their progress and sharing their findings should speed up the process, not slow

it down. At ScienceOpen we are building tools for the future to make the communication and evaluation of science more efficient, more global, and more open.