Tag: academic publishing

Acta Biologica Sibirica signs with Pensoft and moves to ARPHA

Acta Biologica Sibirica, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of Altai State University, with its content on original research in the field of experimental and field biology, moves to Pensoft and the publisher’s scholarly platform ARPHA. The journal has been published since 2015 and follows all the standards in modern biological research and Open Access policy. The first papers published in 2020 are already available on a brand new user-friendly website, running on ARPHA publishing platform.

Acta Biologica Sibirica
Credit: Acta Biologica Sibirica and Pensoft
License: CC-BY 4.0 — The first papers in 2020 of Acta Biologica Sibirica, journal of Altai State University, are published on the innovative ARPHA publishing platform and already available online on a user-friendly brand new website
Credit:*Acta Biologica Sibirica* and Pensoft
License: CC-BY 4.0

Acta Biologica Sibirica is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal on the biodiversity of Siberia and the adjacent lands by Altai State University. Since 2015, it has been publishing original research in the field of experimental and field biology.

Starting from 2020, Acta Biologica Sibirica moves to the full-featured technologically advanced platform ARPHA and will be published in collaboration with the scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.

Pensoft’s original publishing system ARPHA allows Acta Biologica Sibirica to publish original research papers, reviews, short communications, letters and discussion papers, book reviews and memorial articles. The scholarly platform was designed to facilitate authors in the manuscript writing, submission and review process as end-to-end experience, including publication of the data and multimedia content in the form, suitable for both enhanced high-tech human and machine discoverability of the scholarly outputs.

Acta Biologica Sibirica accepts for publication papers in taxonomy, phylogeny, biogeography, faunistics, floristics, biological systematics, nature conservation and protected areas. In the fields of faunistics and floristics there are several types of articles, available for submission: floral and faunal lists on any region of the world, faunal and floral discoveries (e.g. species newly recorded in a particular region, additions to previously published inventories), papers on methodology of faunal and floral studies.

«Our basic task is to turn our journal into a high-quality world-class publication. Without the help of modern publishers, this is almost impossible. The choice of the publisher was perfectly logical – the reputation of Pensoft Publishers and its founder, the famous Bulgarian zoologist Lubomir Penev, is impeccable. To stand in one cohort with powerful publications with a long history is an honor for us. High standards of editing and reviewing manuscripts, the absolute level of originality and scientific novelty – these are the criteria on which we will rely»,
comments the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Professor of Altai University Roman Yakovlev.

«At Pensoft, we are delighted to initiate this wonderful partnership with yet another renowned research institution in Russia, namely Altai State University. With our long-year experience in zoological and biodiversity research publishing and dissemination, I am certain that the journal has found a fitting place in the family of Pensoft and ARPHA»,
comments Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft and ARPHA.

The first papers of 2020 are already available online on the new website of Acta Biologica Sibirica.

Within the pioneering papers published in the renewed journal, there is a research article about the first result of DNA-studies on the Central Asiatic owlet moths in the genus Euchalcia. The studied specimens were collected in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan during the expeditions of the Russian Entomological Society in 2017-2019. When comparing a specific mitochondrial gene (cytochrome C oxidase subunit I or COI) between various species, the scientists revealed that the difference amongst European Euchalcia species is smaller than the one amongst high-mountainous Central Asiatic species.

Another study records the first occurrence of the moorland clouded yellow in Altai Region. The butterfly was found to share a mitochondrial barcode with some specimens from mountain populations from the Alps and the Czech Republic.

Colias palaeno, male, vicinity of Ozerki village, Talmenskiy district, Altai region, Russia
Credit: Nazar A. Shapoval
License: CC-BY 4.0

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Additional information

About Altai State University:

Altai State University is one of the leading Russian classical higher education institutions established in 1973. It is a major educational, research and cultural center located in the Asian part of the country, integrated into the international academic community, training the intellectual elite and conducting high-impact research.

The unique geographical position of Altai region, located in the center of Asia predestinates the University’s mission – to appear as an international research and educational center that integrates, develops and spreads the modern Western, Russian and Asian knowledge in education, science and culture within the Asian region.

About ARPHA:

ARPHA is the first end-to-end, narrative- and data-integrated publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring to reviewing, publishing and dissemination. ARPHA provides accomplished and streamlined production workflows that can be customized according to the journal’s needs. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models to choose from.

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well-known worldwide for its innovations in the field of semantic publishing, as well as for its cutting-edge publishing tools and workflows. In 2013, Pensoft launched the first ever end to end XML-based authoring, reviewing and publishing workflow, as demonstrated by the Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT) and the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), now upgraded to the ARPHA Publishing Platform. Flagship titles include: Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), One Ecosystem, ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys and many more.

Contacts:

Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at ARPHA and Pensoft
Email: penev@pensoft.net

Prof. Alex Matsyura, Editor-in-Chief of Acta Biologica Sibirica
Email: amatsyura@gmail.com

Prof. Roman Yakovlev, Editor-in-Chief of Acta biologica sibirica
Email: yakovlev_asu@mail.ru

Viticulture Data Journal: Non-conventional papers foster Open Science & sustainability

Non-conventional, yet pivotal research results: data, models, methods, software, data analytics pipelines and visualisation methods, related to the field of viticulture, find a place in a newly launched, open-access and peer-reviewed Viticulture Data Journal.

The publishing venue is one of the fruits borne during the collaboration between scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft, its self-developed ARPHA Platform and the EU project AGINFRA+, whose mission is to provide a sustainable channel and data infrastructure for the use of cooperating, but not fully connected user communities working within the agricultural and food sciences.

The novel journal brings together a wide range of topics related to the field of viticulture: from genetic research, food safety of viticultural products to climate change adaptation of grapevine varieties through grape specific research. Amongst these are:

Phenotyping and genotyping
Vine growth and development
Vine ecophysiology
Berry yield and composition
Genetic resources and breeding
Vine adaptation to climate change, abiotic and biotic stress
Vine propagation
Rootstock and clonal evaluation
Effects of field practices (pruning, fertilization etc.) on vine growth and quality
Sustainable viticulture and environmental impact
Ampelography
Plant pathology, diseases and pests of grapevine
Microbiology and microbiological risk assessment
Food safety related to table grapes, raisins, wine, etc.

With the help of the ARPHA Platform’s signature writing tool, authors are able to use a set of pre-defined, yet flexible manuscript templates: Data Paper, Methods, Emerging Techniques, Applied Study, Software Description, R Package and Commentary. Furthermore, thanks to the advanced collaborative virtual environment provided by the tool, authors, but also reviewers, editors and other invited contributors enjoy the convenience of working within the same consolidated online file all the way from the authoring and peer review stages to copy editing and publication.

“The Viticulture Data Journal was created to respond to the major technological and sociological changes that have influenced the entire process of scholarly communication towards Open Science,”
explain the editors.

“The act of scientific publishing is actually the moment when the long effort of researchers comes to light and can be assessed and used by other researchers and the wider public. Therefore, it is little wonder that the main arena of transition from Open Access to Open Science was actually the field of academic publishing,”
they add.

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The first research publication made available in VDJ is a data paper by the research team from Agricultural University of Athens: Dr Katerina Biniari, Ioannis Daskalakis, Despoina Bouza and Dr Maritina Stavrakaki. In their study, they assess and compare both the qualitative and quantitative characters of the grape cultivars ‘Mavrodafni’ and ‘Renio’, grown in different regions of the Protected Designation of Origin Mavrodafni Patras (Greece). The associated dataset, containing the mechanical properties, the polyphenolic content and the antioxidant capacity of skin extracts and must of berries of the two cultivars, is available to download as supplementary material from the article.

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During the AGINFRA+ project, ARPHA has been extended to be used from the AGINFRA+ Virtual Research Environment (VRE), which would allow the authors to use the VRE as an additional gate to the AWT and the journal, as well as to benefit from the integration of AWT with several other services offered by the AGINFRA+ platform. The AGINFRA+ platform has been designed as a Gateway providing online access through a one-stop endpoint to services, aiming at the integration of the traditional narrative of research articles with their underlying data, software code and workflows.

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Viticulture Data Journal is indexed by Altmetric, CrossRef, Dimensions, EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, Mendeley, Microsoft Academic, Naviga (Suweco), OCLC WorldCat, OpenAIRE, OpenCitations, ReadCube, Ulrichsweb™, Unpaywall; and archived at CLOCKSS and Zenodo

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All Pensoft journals indexed in Transpose to support transparency in journal policies

All open-access, peer-reviewed academic titles of Pensoft‘s, as well as those using the white-label publishing solution provided by the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, have their journal policy data fed into the Transpose database, in order to increase their discoverability and transparency.

Thanks to the recent integration with the community-sourced initiative Transpose, details about each journal’s approach to peer review, co-review and preprint publication can be easily accessed, navigated and compared through a user-friendly interface. Visitors can also query the data by journal title, publisher, ISSN or DOI, and apply several filters.

Having estimated that almost 1/3 of the top-cited journals across disciplines do not provide clearly basic information about their editorial policies, including whether they operate blind peer review or not, the team behind Transpose launched the forward-thinking community-sourced initiative with the aim to advance practices in academia and increase awareness and transparency amongst authors, editors and many other stakeholder groups. To highlight the essentiality of free and easy access to editorial policies for a wide range of actors, Transpose have published user testimonials on their website coming from various points of view, including early researchers, supervisors, project investigators, funders, publishing staff, and others.

Recent integration of the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA and Transpose results in the editorial policies of all ARPHA-hosted journals being fed into the associated database. Thus, various stakeholders from across the academic landscape are provided with an easy access to details about the peer review, co-review and preprint policies at each journal via a user-friendly interface.

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

“Having been Open Science advocates from the very beginning, at Pensoft and ARPHA, we have always supported our clients and users in being as transparent as possible. Favourite examples are the open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), welcoming continuously updatable publications from across the whole research cycle, and Rethinking Ecology, launched to voice innovative and even bold ideas for the purposes of taking swift actions towards the conservation of the environment. The former operates public pre- and post-publication peer review to support efficient collaboration in research, while the latter relies on double-blind peer reviews, in order to encourage researchers of various experience and background to share their inventive ideas in ecology. Obviously, journal policies are and should be crucial when it comes to picking a specific journal over another regardless of the perspective. This is why I am certain that joining Transpose is doing good for all ARPHA-hosted journals, as well as the academic community.”

ASAPbio‘s Executive Director and member of the team behind Transpose, Dr Jessica Polka adds:

“We’re thrilled to incorporate data from Pensoft into Transpose. Making policy information clear and easy to find ensures that authors and reviewers can work with journals that best align with their values — and that scholarly work can be fairly interpreted by everyone, including general readers.”

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Additional information:

About Transpose:

Transpose is an initiative to build a database of journal policies. It focuses on three areas: open peer review, co-reviewing, and detailed pre-printing policies. It welcomes contributions from anyone, but seeks verification from journals and publishers. The goal of Transpose is to foster new practices while increasing awareness among authors, editors, and other stakeholders, and we seek to provide resources to assist journals in setting, sharing, and clarifying their policies.

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.

Rebranded Social Psychological Bulletin opens up to the world with PsychOpen GOLD & ARPHA

Formerly known as Psychologia Spoleczna, the scholarly journal is now publishing exclusively in English and is free to both readers and authors after joining the PsychOpen GOLD platform based on ARPHA

Social Psychological Bulletin (SPB), formerly known as the Polish-born Psychologia Spo?eczna, has rebranded and evolved to reflect its new international outlook and dedication to social psychological research and open science practices.

In line with its renowned legacy, the peer-reviewed journal welcomes original empirical research, theoretical review papers, scientific debates, and methodological contributions in the field of basic and applied social psychology.

However, from now on, accepted articles are to be exclusively in English and openly accessible from day one of publication. Furthermore, authors are able to publish with SPB free of charge in the name of socially committed and responsible research.

The journal places special emphasis on what its Editors-in-Chief Drs Michal Parzuchowski and Marcin Bukowski call “the updated FOCI” – an abbreviation for Focused on people, Open, Committed and Integrative.

The changes meant to lead up to the journal’s long-term progress, also outlined in the latest Editorial, come as a result of SPB joining two prime movers in the open science field – the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) with its unique publication platform, PsychOpen GOLD, and Pensoft with its innovative journal publishing and management system, ARPHA.

Since 2012, PsychOpen GOLD – The European Open Access Publishing Platform for Psychology – allows for both journals and authors to increase the visibility and accessibility of novel psychological research in the spirit of open science practices free of charge.

In the new pilot project, ZPID’s PsychOpen GOLD also collaborates with the technologically advanced academic journal and book publishing platform ARPHA in order to further facilitate and increase visibility of the novel findings of societal value.

As a result of the partnership, SPB will make use of the long list of high-tech and user-friendly innovations, provided by ARPHA, which go far beyond the brand new sleek look and feel of the journal.

“We proudly present the new SPB journal to the scientific community, representing a major breakthrough in open access publishing in psychology,” says ZPID director Prof. Dr. Michael Bosnjak. “SPB on PsychOpen GOLD assisted by ARPHA is now up and running at record speed.”

“It’s really exciting to announce our partnership with ZPID, PsychOpen GOLD and SPB, in this collaborative venture to advance accessibility and visibility of research with such an impact on our own society,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA Platform and its developer – Pensoft Publishers. “At ARPHA and Pensoft, we have always worked towards next-age innovations in Open Science – be it improved accessibility, findability, usability or collaboration – so it only makes sense to join in this amazing initiative to open up the latest fine research in psychology.”

The journal’s first thematic issue comprises 10 forum papers (by Dariusz Doli?ski, Arie Kruglanski, Adam Factor & Katarzyna Jasko; Leonel Garcia-Marques & Mario Ferreira; Wolfgang Stroebe; Karl Halvor Teigen; Jolanda Jetten & Alexander S. Haslam; Miros?aw Kofta; Bogdan Wojciszke & Konrad Bocian; and Klaus Fiedler) dedicated to discussions on behavior and its measurement as triggered by Prof. Dariusz Dolinski’s article “Is Psychology Still a Science of Behaviour?”.

In his paper, Doli?ski calculates that the number of articles in a recent volume of the flagship Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2017) presenting studies in which the dependent variable consisted of a real behavior was 4 out of 49 (8.2%). Out of a total number of 290 studies presented in this volume, a mere 18 (6,2%) addressed behaviour.

He argues that in addition to studying phenomena like stereotypes, attitudes, and values – which he dubs the “what, how, and why people think”, social psychology needs to also remain dedicated to the “what, why and how people act”, i.e. things such as aggression, altruism, and social influence.

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Follow the discussion in the second 2018 issue of Social Psychological Bulletin on the journal’s new website.

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Russia’s NaRFU moves its Arctic Environmental Research journal to new-age ARPHA Platform

In its latest issue, the Northern (Arctic) Federal University’s open-access journal demonstrates a brand new look and a range of high-tech innovations

Formerly known as Bulletin of the Pomor University and Bulletin of the Northern (Arctic) Federal University, the open-access peer-reviewed journal published by Russia’s Northern (Arctic) Federal University (NArFU) recently changed its name to Arctic Environmental Research (AER) to accentuate its international relevance. Now, it also accommodates a whole set of novelties and innovations as a result of its move to the journal platform ARPHA.

Its first issue in collaboration with the revolutionary publishing solution, developed by scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft, is already live on the journal’s new website.

Launched in 2012, AER continues to provide a scholarly venue for publication of research findings related to the Arctic and adjacent areas, in order to draw attention to the most relevant, promising and interesting findings from the region, and facilitate exchange of scientific information on an international level.

Traditionally, the journal covers a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geodesy and cartography, geoinformatics, geoecology, engineering geology, permafrost and soil science, prospecting and exploration of solid minerals, oil and gas fields, biogeography, botany, microbiology, zoology, genetics, ecology, hydrobiology, parasitology, mycology, soil science, biological resources. Its focus is placed on original research based on field or laboratory experiments and mathematical modeling of processes taking place in high latitudes.

Thanks to its collaboration with ARPHA platform, the journal has already implemented a long list of high-tech perks in addition to its brand new sleek and modern look and feel.

To the benefit of authors, reviewers, editors and readers alike, the fast-track and convenient publishing workflow provided by ARPHA takes care for each manuscript all the way from submission and reviewing to dissemination and archiving without ever leaving the platform’s singular collaboration-friendly online environment.

Once published, all articles in AER are to be available in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML), enriched with a whole set of semantic enhancements, so that the articles are easy to discover, access and harvest by both humans and machines.

Amongst the high-tech widgets at disposal to anyone who accesses an article in the revamped journal are the article-level metrics available thanks to the partnership between ARPHA and the revolutionary discovery and analytics tools Dimensions and Altmetric. By searching through millions of research articles, grant applications, clinical trials, as well as policy documents, news stories, blogs and social media posts, they allow for each article’s references and citations in both the academic and the public sphere to be monitored in real time.

“I am truly delighted to welcome Arctic Environmental Research to ARPHA’s family,” says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Being proven pioneers on the scholarly publishing scene in addition to our strong presence in environmental science, at ARPHA we believe that our white-label publishing solution makes a perfect match for forward-thinking institutions such as the NArFU and AER.

“We are starting our cooperation with the scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft and moving to the journal ARPHA platform,” says NArFU’s Vice rector for scientific work and AER’s Deputy Editor-in-Chief Dr. Boris Filippov. “We believe that it will help us fulfil the aims of AER, i.e. draw the scientists’ attention to the most relevant, interesting, and promising areas of research in the Arctic and adjacent territories, as well as promote information exchange in the international scientific arena.”

AER is the fourth Russian journal to find its new publishing home with ARPHA Platform after Comparative Cytogenetics, Research results in Pharmacology and Russian Journal of Economics. Several new titles are expected to join them later this year.

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.

Pensoft’s ARPHA teams with Hypothesis to encourage scientific discourse through annotation

In a new integration, the Pensoft-developed innovative journal publishing platform ARPHA teams up with nonprofit, open-source annotation technology provider Hypothesis to further enable academic discussion and foster collaboration in the spirit of open science practices.

This partnership makes Pensoft the second publisher to implement this technology across its whole journal portfolio.

Current and future scholarly journals using ARPHA, including Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal), ZooKeys, One Ecosystem, Journal of Hymenoptera Research and others, will have a new layer added to their content, so that anyone registered with Hypothesis will be able to add public sentence-level annotations within any publication and use it as a starting point for further discussions. All annotations are stored at Hypothesis and listed in the user’s account.

Upon opening an article published in any ARPHA journal, website visitors can now spot a dialog-box icon in the top-right of the screen showing the number of submitted annotations, which he/she can reply to at the click of a button. Annotations appear highlighted within the webpage whenever a user is logged into their account on Hypothesis.

Alternatively, the user can simply select some text and add a note to share his/her own idea, feedback, opinion or question inspired by the publication. Thus, the content of the research paper becomes alive, while readers could contribute to the study’s discourse.

“I am delighted to see ARPHA partnering with Hypothesis not only because this benefits our users and journals, but because it also works for the good of science and academia in general,” comments Pensoft’s and ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

“What we’ve learned from implementing Open Science more and more vigorously in research practices is that striving for transparency and easier collaboration only stimulates scientific progress,” he adds. “One way to do this is definitely by providing the right platforms for giving and addressing feedback.”

Dan Whaley, CEO at Hypothesis, adds:

“We’re excited to see annotation brought to the many publications on the ARPHA platform. As an early member of the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition with a strong commitment to open research and transparent data, Pensoft shares Hypothesis’ commitment to facilitating conversations around scholarly content and improving researcher workflow. We look forward to working with the journal editors to integrate annotation into existing workflows to maximize the success of this initiative.”

For a better grasp of the Web Annotation Architecture, as seen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), see their interactive infographic.

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About Hypothesis:

Hypothesis is a US 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and spread of open, standards-based annotation technologies and practices that enable anyone to annotate anywhere, helping humans reason more effectively together through a shared, collaborative discussion layer over all knowledge. Hypothesis is based in San Francisco, CA with a worldwide team. Learn more from <web.hypothes.is>.

Evolutionary Systematics joins Pensoft’s portfolio of open access scholarly journals

Evolutionary Systematics is the latest authoritative journal to join the lines of the open access titles published on the Pensoft-developed technologically advanced journal publishing platform ARPHA.

Launched in 1884 and 1912, respectively, University of Hamburg’s journal Mitteilungen aus dem Hamburgischen Zoologischen Museum und Institut and Entomologische Mitteilungen are now resurrected under the name of Evolutionary Systematics.

Rebranded and refreshed, the journal has acquired a long list of technological user-friendly innovations, while simultaneously keeping its well-known expertise and devotion to whole-organism biology and collection-related research.

Its first issue in collaboration with Pensoft comprises two editorials dedicated to the extensive tradition and the bright future of the journal along with seven articles are already live on the journal’s new website.

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, accessed and harvested by both humans and machines.

“We are happy to have joined forces with Lyubomir Penev and his professional team at Pensoft Publishers, once again now after having already successfully established together Zoosystematics and Evolution as an international journal of the Berlin Natural History Museum,” say editors Prof. Dr. Matthias Glaubrecht, Prof. Dr. Andreas Schmidt-Rhaesa and Dr. Martin Husemann.

“Certainly, I’m pleased to welcome Evolutionary Systematics to the family of Pensoft,” says the publisher’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Combining our own solid experience in scholarly publishing with their amazing background, dating back to 19th century, will definitely benefit not only the two of us as collaborators, but all our present and future readers and users as well.”

Amongst the first papers, there is the description of the Bob Marley’s Intertidal Spider – a new arachnid species that emerged at low tide to the surprise of the research team of Drs. Barbara Baehr, Robert Raven and Danilo Harms. Once the scientists concluded it was a previously unknown species, they were quick to associate it with the reggae legend’s song “High Tide or Low Tide”.

The first issue also features the description of the Grey Wolf Spider – a common, yet enigmatic new species, which prompted the establishment of a new genus all to itself. The inaugural issue goes on to also announce as many as seven species of goblin spiders new to science . Their discovery results from a genus review involving a significant collection from the Otonga Nature Reserve, Ecuador.

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Additional information:

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The world’s 3rd oldest entomological journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ) turns 160 years

Near the closure of an extremely successful year at Pensoft, we’re pleased to be part of yet another great celebration – the 160th anniversary of the Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ) journal.

Being the third oldest of world’s currently existing entomological periodicals, the Museum für Naturkunde’s historical journal has never ceased to progressively make a difference in the world of systematic entomology, as well as science in general.

Originally founded in the distant 1857 under the name of Berliner Entomologische Zeitschrift by the young and dedicated visionary Ernst Gustav Kraatz and the Berliner Entomologischer Verein (BEV) society, the journal was intended to turn into the publishing platform of the soon to be established German Entomological Society (Deutsche Entomologische Gesellschaft).

The journal managed to overcome a number of perils, which dominated the first fifty years of its existence. Those included two world wars, splitting of the society and personal controversies. Nevertheless, the title was only to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. In retrospect, the journal has published the astonishing total of 22,613 species new to science.

Most of the credit to all those glorious defeats goes to the Kraatz, who promoted a number of nomenclature rules and practices in entomology that scientists abide by to this day.

Amongst the latest steps in building DEZ’s excellent and solid reputation was joining the ranks of openly accessible academic titles when it moved to Pensoft – a scholarly publisher well-known for its dedication to transparent and easily discoverable open science.

In an era, where specimens were commonly kept in personal collections and curators could deny or allow access to material at their sole discretion, Kraatz was already a fervent proponent of inclusive and facilitated access to knowledge. It was his desire to help any entomology aficionado that made him plan and eventually establish the Entomological National Museum to bring together the collections and libraries of all German entomologists. The institution is still standing today under the name of DEI – Deutsches Entomologisches Institut.

“It would have certainly pleased Gustav Kraatz that since the transfer of the DEZ to open access with Pensoft in 2014 all articles are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, likewise facilitating the access to knowledge,” says the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Dr. Dominique Zimmermann.

“Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift is the journal I’ve grown up with as entomologist some 30 years ago,” adds Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Pensoft’s founder and CEO. “At that time it was published in East Germany, hence it was easy to access, read and publish with if you were an Eastern European scientist. It’s delightful for me to be part of this iconic title’s journey on the road to next-generation technology, innovation and openness.”

At Pensoft, we would like to congratulate all editors, authors and reviewers of DEZ for yet another conquered milestone and express our deepest gratitude for sharing this marvelous achievement with us.

We are looking forward to many more decades of disseminating the finest of entomological research with the world!

A special Editorial was recently published in DEZ to celebrate the anniversary and conclude the journal for 2017.

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