Tag: open access

Next-Generation Journal Publishing Platform ARPHA at Frankfurt Book Fair 2016

Following the launch of our self-developed journal publishing platform ARPHA (standing for Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, all happening at one place), we were so happy with the outcome, that we couldn’t help sharing it with the world. Therefore, it’s on offer not only to our own journals and authors, but it’s also at hand to journals looking for their new home. Just let us know you’re interested!

On these lines, what could be a better place to have a chat about the transition in scholarly publishing, open science, research reproducibility and, of course, the advantages of having a journal published on ARPHA, than Frankfurt Book Fair 2016? Between 18th and 23rd October, this immense event will be all about unveiling and celebrating the evolution in the publishing industry, with exhibitors, trade and private visitors from across the globe, gathering together, led by their common expertise and passion.

Meet us at HotSpot Professional and Scientific Information Stage, Hall 4.2, Stand M90, during the Fair, and make sure you don’t miss the “ARPHA: Next-Generation Journal Publishing” presentation at 11:30 AM (local time) on Friday, 21st October, where Pensoft’s Founder and Managing Director Prof Lyubomir Penev will shed more light on the first end-to-end publishing solution, providing everything a journal needs in a technologically advanced, highly efficient and user-friendly manner.

ARPHA in a few notes:

The platform

With ARPHA you can choose between two journal publishing workflows: ARPHA-DOC and ARPHA-XML. The former provides document-based submission for the articles in a journal, as well as peer review and publication. The latter makes use of the ARPHA Writing Tool, which takes all processes, including authoring, peer review and post-publication updates, to an online environment, created with collaboration and openness in mind.

Our services

ARPHA takes care of all the steps that go along with academic publishing and its efficient dissemination, so that it provides a long list of perks to make it easier for the scientific community to bring research to light. Website design, online editorial management system, linguistic editing, semantic markup, promotion and (sub-)article usage metrics are only a part of the services the platform has to offer.

The publishing models

ARPHA basically lets users mix-and-match services and features to create the publishing model that’s the best fit for their journals. How do you envision your imprint / web-design look / manuscript input / peer review process / publication output / revenue model? ARPHA understands your journal’s individual needs and works around them.

Find out more about ARPHA at our talk, or come and meet us at our stand in HotSpot Professional and Scientific Information (Hall 4.2, M90).

Celebration time: ZooKeys releases its 600th issue

With what already sounds like an annual tradition at this time of the year, we are delighted to announce yet another milestone that ZooKeys just reached. Our 600th issue is now out and we are just as proud with it as we were exactly five years and a month ago, when we printed out our first three-digit issue number on a ZooKeys cover.

However, we feel nowhere near getting tired of counting pages, covers and issues, nor do we believe this will ever going to happen. Quite the contrary, every year we take more and more pleasure in adding new achievements next to the name of ZooKeys and Pensoft.

Last year was no exception. During the past 13 months, we published a total of 673 articles, including research findings spectacular enough to reach out to not only the zoological fellowship, but to the wide audience from around the world. While our Impact Factor keeps on increasing, according to the figures Thomson Reuters released last week, we are gratified to observe our progressively growing impact on both the scholarly and the popular-science front.

Thanks to the discoveries, which found a suiting publication partner in ZooKeys, our authors and us made a lot of big headlines in outlets such as National Geographic, Science, CNN, BBC, Sky News, New York Times, Deutsche Welle, Der Standard, DR, Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Guardian, NBC News, and a lot more. We had a bit of everything: record-breakers, species given mystic or splashy names and others bearing nerdy ones. Together, we also gave public voice to serious conservation issues, calling for immediate action.

Last June, we introduced you to the Hades centipede, known to be the world’s deepest-dwelling species of its kind. Who knew that the entrance to the Underworld is located in a Croatian cave?

Later on, in November, published with us snail species Acmella nana broke the World record for the tiniest land snail. Moreover, this happened only about a month after we published the previous ‘prizewinner’ Angustopila dominikae, and that one was already tiny enough to fit 10 of its shells within the eye of a needle at the very same time!

Our pages, which have been and always will be openly available to read for anyone who is online, were also the first to let you know about the existence of the Johnny Cash tarantula, the (Edward) Snowden crayfish, the two daddy longlegs: Smeagol and the ‘Master-of-the-crypt’ Behemoth, the Chewbacca beetle and the Brad Pitt wasp, among many others.

About two months ago, graduate student Madhu Chetri spotted the ancient Himalayan woolly wolf in Nepal. The new knowledge about the beautiful and, sadly, Critically Endangered carnivore, which he acquired, will hopefully help in preventing its otherwise imminent extinction.

In the meantime, Deutsche Welle (DW) featured our Zorro fish along with the eight-legged Johnny Cash’s namesake in their rank list of the 7 “newcomer” species of the year.

While being in the spotlight is definitely a gratifying feeling, we also indulge in our successes achieved far from the eyes of the public, although we are certain that our authors will be just as excited to hear about. Such an accomplishment is our recently sealed partnership with open digital repository Zenodo, who are helping us, along with the rest of the journals, published by Pensoft, to keep our research findings safe and easily accessible by archiving all our articles in both PDF and XML format on the date of publication.

However, let’s not forget that nothing of all the above would be what it is without our authors, editors and reviewers, who have always done their best to keep ZooKeys at the World’s top open access academic journals. We’d especially like to thank our Most active authors, editors and reviewers for being substantial part of ZooKeys.

Research Ideas & Outcomes: New open-access journal to publish entire research cycles

Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO), a new open access journal, is formally announced. The new journal represents a paradigm shift in academic publishing: for the first time, RIO will publish research from all stages of the research cycle, across a broad suite of disciplines, from humanities to science.

Traditional journals accept only articles produced at the end of the research continuum, long after the core work has been completed. RIO will publish ideas and outputs from all stages of the research cycle: proposals, experimental designs, data, software, research articles, project reports, policy briefs, project management plans and more.

The journal takes another step ahead with a collaborative platform that allows all ideas and outputs to be labelled with Impact Categories based upon UN Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) and EU Societal Challenges. These categories provide social impact-based labelling to help funders, journalists and the wider public discover and finance relevant research as well as to foster interdisciplinary collaboration around societal challenges.

These game-changing ideas come packed with technical innovation and unique features. The journal is published through ARPHA, the first publishing platform ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript: from authoring to submission, public peer review, publication and dissemination, within a single, fully-integrated online collaborative environment. The new platform will also allow for RIO to offer one of the most transparent, open and public peer review processes, thus building trust in the reviewed outcomes.

These features come à la carte: RIO will offer flexible pricing where authors can choose exactly which publishing services fit their needs and budget. All its contents – including reviews and comments, data and code – will receive a persistent unique identifier, will be permanently archived and made available under open licenses without any access embargo.

“RIO is not just about different kinds of submissions, though that is a crucial feature and certainly unique for publishing ongoing or even proposed research: it is also about linking those submissions together across the research cycle, about reducing the time from submission to publication, about collaborative authoring and reviewing, about mapping to societal challenges, about technical innovation, about enabling reuse and about giving authors more choice in what features they actually want from the journal.” said Dr. Daniel Mietchen, a founding editor of RIO.

“I’m proud to pioneer the first journal which can publish research from all stages of the research process,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Co-Founder of RIO and Pensoft. “For the first time, researchers can get formal publication credit for previously ‘hidden’ parts of their work like written research proposals. We can publish all outputs in one journal; the same journal – RIO.”

RIO is scheduled to start accepting manuscripts in November 2015.