Tag: academic journals

Strategic collaboration agreement signed between ScienceOpen and Pensoft

The research discovery platform ScienceOpen and Pensoft Publishers have entered into a strategic collaboration partnership with the aim of strengthening the companies’ identities as the leaders of innovative content dissemination. The new cooperation will focus on the unified indexation, the integration of Pensoft’s ARPHA Platform content into ScienceOpen and the utilization of novel streams of scientific communication for the published materials.

Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well known worldwide for bringing novelty through its cutting-edge publishing tools and for its commitment to open access practices. In 2013, Pensoft launched the first ever, end-to-end, XML-based, authoring, reviewing and publishing workflow, now upgraded to the ARPHA Publishing Platform. As of today, ARPHA hosts over 50 open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals: the whole Pensoft portfolio in addition to titles owned by learned societies, university presses and research institutions.

As part of the strategic collaboration, all Pensoft content and journals hosted on ARPHA are indexed in the ScienceOpen’s research and discovery environment, which puts them into thematic context of over 60 million articles and books. In addition, thousands of articles across more than 20 journals were integrated into a “Pensoft Biodiversity” Collection. Combined this way, the content benefits from the special infrastructure of ScienceOpen Collections, which supports thematic groups of articles and books equipped with a unique landing page, a built-in search engine and an overview of the featured content. The Collections can be reviewed, recommended and shared by users, which facilitates academic debate and increases the discoverability of the research.

The Pensoft Biodiversity collection is available from: https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/PensoftBiodiversity

“It is certainly great news and a much-anticipated milestone for Pensoft, ARPHA and our long-year partners and supporters from ScienceOpen to have brought our collaboration to a new level by indexing the whole ARPHA-hosted content at ScienceOpen,” comments Pensoft’s and ARPHA’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Most of all, the integration between ARPHA and ScienceOpen at an infrastructural level means that we will be able to offer this incredible service and increased visibility to newcoming journals right away. On the other hand, by streaming fresh and valuable publicly accessible content to the ScienceOpen database, these journals will be further adding to the growth of science in the open.”

Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen says, “I am particularly excited to add new high-quality, open access biodiversity content from Pensoft Publishers to the ScienceOpen discovery environment as we have a very active community of researchers on ScienceOpen creating and sharing Collections in this field. We are looking forward to working with Pensoft’s innovative journals to support their open science goals.”

The collaboration reflects not only the commitment of both Pensoft and ScienceOpen to new methods of knowledge dissemination, but also the joint mission to champion open science through innovation. The two companies will cooperate at a strategic level in order to increase the international outreach of their content and services, and to make them even more accessible to the broad community.

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About ScienceOpen:

From promotional collections to Open Access hosting and full publishing packages, ScienceOpen provides next-generation services to academic publishers embedded in an interactive discovery platform. ScienceOpen was founded in 2013 in Berlin and Boston by Alexander Grossmann and Tibor Tscheke to accelerate research communication.

Austrian Herpetological Society’s journal Herpetozoa moves to Pensoft’s ARPHA platform

Newly published research articles demonstrate numerous innovative features to the benefit of readers, authors and all other users

Published since 1988 by the Austrian Herpetological Society (ÖGH, Österreichische Gesellschaft für Herpetologie), the renowned peer-reviewed, open-access Herpetozoa is added to the growing portfolio of international scientific journals published on the ARPHA scholarly platform, as a result of a new partnership with scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.

Follow Herpetozoa on Twitter and Facebook.

As before, Herpetozoa welcomes original research articles, short contributions and reviews covering all aspects of the study of amphibians and reptiles. The papers are published in English, whereas a translation of the abstract into German may also be included. The journal operates a single-blind peer review policy.

Thanks to the fast-track and convenient publishing provided by ARPHA, each manuscript is carried through all stages from submission and reviewing to dissemination and archiving without ever leaving the platform’s collaboration-friendly online environment.

Right underneath the new sleek look and feel welcoming users from the journal’s homepage, there are a lot of high-tech perks to benefit authors, readers, reviewers and editors alike.

Furthermore, all publications are available in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML), complete with a whole set of semantic enhancements, so that the articles are easy to find, access and harvest by both humans and machines.

Editor-in-Chief of Herpetozoa, Dr Günter Gollmann states:

“We decided to move to Open Access online publishing to increase the visibility of our journal, and to speed up the publication process. The highly attractive presentation provided by Pensoft should boost attention for the papers we publish. While Herpetozoa welcomes contributions of any length on all topics in herpetology, I hope that authors will appreciate the suitability of the new format for data-rich studies in natural history. Such research is often dismissed as “too descriptive” by other international journals, but is essential for conservation of biodiversity.”

ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev says:

“I am pleased to see Herpetozoa having found its new home on the ARPHA platform amongst all Pensoft journals and other highly reputed academic titles from around the globe. With our own strong background in zoological sciences, I am certain that our partnership with Herpetozoa will be quick to prove fruitful to both of us, but most importantly, to all readers, authors, editors and reviewers alike.”

With its move to the open-access, technologically advanced scholarly publishing platform, Herpetozoa lines up next to historical and well-known society journals, including Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, Alpine Entomology (previously Journal of the Swiss Entomological Society), Journal of Hymenoptera Research, Zoologia and others, which have all chosen to modernise with the help of ARPHA.

What’s new on Herpetozoa?

Amongst the first batch of articles published in Herpetozoa in partnership with ARPHA/Pensoft, there is an Italian study tracking the long-disputed origin of the Mediterranean-native common chameleon (Chamaeleo chamaeleo) back to its ancestors in North Africa and the Middle East. Another paper by a research team from Romania compares the effects of carnivore, vegetarian and omnivorous diets on the growth, development and mortality in tadpoles of the common toad. In their study of the South American frog species Leptodactylus fuscus, scientists from Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil) compare the diet of a population living in the wild with another one, which inhabits an urban environment. Their aim was to determine the impact urbanisation could be having on this otherwise abundant amphibian.

Distribution of the common chameleon in Salento (southern Italy) in 2018. Black dots represent observation localities (Basso et al. 2019).
Study openly accessible at:
https://doi.org/10.3897/herpetozoa.32.e35611

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Herpetozoa is indexed in Biological Abstracts; BIOSIS (Previews); Current Contents – Agricultural, Science Citation Index (Expanded); Web of Science; Zoological Record (Plus). Currently, its Journal Impact Factor stands at 1.125.

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About the Austrian Herpetological Society:

The Austrian Herpetological Society (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Herpetologie, ÖGH) was founded in 1984 to advance all branches of herpetology. The society supports scientific research and promotes conservation of amphibians and reptiles, as well as their habitats. To raise public awareness of these animal groups, ÖGH organizes meetings and excursions and publishes the journals Herpetozoa and ÖGH-Aktuell.

ScienceOpen indexes >1,000 articles from ARPHA-hosted journals RIO & Check List in a trial

Two scholarly journals published on ARPHA – Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) and Check List – now have their articles freely available via the community-focused search and discovery platform ScienceOpen.

This new trial between the two high-tech innovators and Open Science proponents presents an important step forward to making research publications not only easier to find and access, but also more inviting to fellow scientists seeking new collaborations and platforms for voicing their ideas and expertise.

Currently, there are 168 and 948 article records fed to ScienceOpen straight from RIO and Check List respectively.

While the articles’ underlying data, such as author names, citations, keywords, journals and more, are automatically harvested and analyzed by ScienceOpen, so that research items can be easily interlinked, readers are encouraged to further provide context to the research items. The user-friendly intuitive interface invites them to add their comments, recommendations or open post-publication peer reviews, and even create their own topical collections regardless of affiliations and journals.

To make sure users land on the most relevant articles in what feels like the blink of an eye compared to traditional methods, ScienceOpen also accommodates an advanced multi-layer search engine relying on a total of 20 smart filters and six sorting parameters.

“We have long worked closely with ScienceOpen, as it only makes sense given our shared vision for the future of academia, so the present trial project happened very naturally,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA and its developer – scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft. “Nowadays, we are well aware that scientific findings are of little merit if ‘living’ in a vacuum. Therefore, we need research articles to be as discoverable as possible, and, no less importantly, to be open to feedback and further work.”

“We are thrilled to add this new content to the ScienceOpen as we have both strong researcher communities in zoology and in scholarly communications within our broadly interdisciplinary content. The ARPHA platform is a natural fit to deliver rich metadata to our discovery services and we are very much looking forward to working with their team,” says Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen.

About ScienceOpen:

ScienceOpen is an independent start-up company based in Berlin and Boston, which explores new ways to open up information for the scholarly community. It provides a freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context. Smart filters, topical collections and expert input from the academic community help users to find the most relevant articles in their field and beyond.

Economics journals hosted on ARPHA to have their content indexed at RePEc

The first to take advantage of the service is the most recent addition to the journal platform’s portfolio — Russian Journal of Economics

Following the recent integration between ARPHA and the collaborative project RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), journals publishing in economics will have their articles indexed in RePEc decentralised bibliographic database upon moving to the technologically advanced platform.

Working with 50,000 registered authors from around the globe, having indexed about 2.3 million research publications from 2,800 journals, and serving over 80,000 email subscriptions on a weekly basis, RePEc’s services are set to further increase the discoverability and creditability of economics papers published in any ARPHA-hosted journal.

The collaboration was inspired by the recent move of the open access peer-reviewed Russian Journal of Economics to ARPHA. Shortly after appearing on the journal’s new website provided by the platform, RuJE’s first 2018 issue, themed ‘The Austrian School of Economics: Its Reception in European Countries,’ was also available via the RePEc’s web interfaces, including IDEAS.

“Having added yet another web-service integration to the list, ARPHA once more demonstrates its flexibility and customer-oriented approach when it comes to providing a new home for journals looking to step up and provide all those innovative and high-tech features to their users,” says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “In times where the findability of a research publication is almost as important as its quality, I am certain that our integration with RePEc will significantly benefit our clients specialising in economics.”

Speaking in Novosibirsk, Russia, the founder of RePEc, Thomas Krichel noted, “When I set out what would become RePEc in the early 1990, my vision was of a non-proprietary system that all could contribute to, and that all could use freely. My particular concern was to level the playing field between publishers. Open access content is particularly valuable. I am pleased that ARPHA has chosen that publishing avenue.”

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Additional information:

About RePEc:

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 96 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics and related sciences.

The heart of the project is a decentralised bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data are then used in various services that provide the collected metadata to users or enhance it.

So far, over 1,900 archives from 96 countries have contributed about 2.3 million research pieces from 2,800 journals and 4,500 working paper series. About 50,000 authors have registered and 75,000 email subscriptions are served every week.

RePEc grew out of the NetEc project founded by Thomas Krichel in 1993.

Articles published in journals on ARPHA indexed by ReadCube for easier discoverability

While research outputs are being published at a rate greater than ever, it is becoming more and more likely to simply pass by the study that is most relevant to your particular interest. This is where ReadCube comes to aid. Now, thanks to the new partnership between ARPHA and ReadCube, all articles in the journals published on Pensoft‘s ARPHA platform, have been indexed and therefore, easily discoverable via ReadCube’s free web, desktop and mobile apps.

“Our mission is to ensure that scholarly literature is not only easily discoverable but also that each article itself is seen as a conduit for deeper discovery, not simply an endpoint,” said Robert McGrath, CEO at ReadCube. “This collaboration with Pensoft supports both these objectives, and we are thrilled to have them as a partner.”

In addition to advanced searchability, all Pensoft articles are also available in ReadCube’s Enhanced PDF format. While maintaining the simple and clean look of a standard PDF at first glance, Enhanced PDFs offer interactive feature connecting the reader to relevant information around the article including supplements, article metric, annotation tools, clickable in-line references and even hyperlinked author names which redirect readers to the author’s historical publications.

“I am pleased to see all journals published on ARPHA, which is to say not only the ones published by Pensoft, but also those that use our white-label journal publishing platform, being indexed by ReadCube,” said Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev. “As a strictly open-access publisher and technological provider with a strong background in semantic content enrichment, Pensoft has always strived to keep research as accessible and discoverable as possible. We are very pleased to collaborate with like-minded people who have their own innovative view on science to be on hand to anyone who asks for it.”

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Additional information:

About ReadCube:

ReadCube develops software to make the world of research more accessible and connected – serving researchers, publishers, academic and commercial organizations.

ReadCube’s web, desktop, and mobile reference management apps, including the ReadCube and Papers brands, dramatically improve the ways researchers find, organize, read, share, and cite research literature

ReadCube’s publisher solutions, adopted by over 70 partners to date, include indexing via Readcube Discover, enhanced PDF viewing and sharing via ReadCube Connect, and article-level ecommerce via ReadCube Checkout.

About ARPHA:

ARPHA is the first end-to-end journal publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring through submission, peer review, publication and dissemination. With ARPHA, journals and publishers enjoy a complete set of services, which enable tailored, technologically advanced publishing solutions. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models to choose from.