The scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft and its self-developed publishing platform ARPHA welcome The International Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) to their portfolio. With this addition, the publisher, best known for a wide range of biodiversity-themed journals, steps into the field of computer science.
Since 1995, J.UCS has been publishing, digitally and in print, research articles and editorials on all aspects of computer science. With a free-of-charge policy for both authors and readers, and a review process usually taking between 6 and 10 weeks, its volumes have been documenting, connecting and reflecting novel aspects of computer science. J.UCS’ peer-reviewed monthly issues, as well as special issues on selected topics, continuously serve as one of the major knowledge bases for the research community in computer science. Currently, its Impact Factor stands at 1.139 (2020), and its CiteScore is at 2.0 (2020).
By moving to ARPHA, J.UCS now enjoys a long list of high-tech perks, which dramatically enhance the entire publishing process, from submission to publication, distribution and archiving.
The journal is already publishing on a brand-new, user-friendly website under Pensoft’s scholarly publishing platform ARPHA. Its latest issue features a model for forecasting air travel demand with machine learning; an analysis of the effect of different stimuli, such as video and sound on a user’s sense of presence in a virtual environment; and a new approach for solving the 15-puzzle problem using the artificial bee colony algorithm.
By moving to ARPHA, J.UCS now enjoys a long list of high-tech perks, which dramatically enhance the entire publishing process, from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. All users of the journal’s system – authors, editors, and reviewers, can benefit from ARPHA’s integrated approach, which ensures that once submitted, each manuscript goes through the whole cycle: from manuscript submission, review and copy/layout editing to publication, dissemination and archiving, without ever leaving ARPHA’s collaboration-focused online environment.
The easy-to-use platform offers features such as papers available in a machine-readable XML format, automated data export to aggregators, automated notifications and reminders, usage metrics and web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, which ensure that published articles are easy to discover, access, cite and reuse by both humans and machines all over the world.
“Since its foundation, J.UCS has built on and even created innovative features for digital libraries. By moving to the ARPHA platform, the J.UCS community can take advantage of the latest publishing features and technologies, including long-time archiving and review acknowledgement. Thus, the J.UCS team can concentrate on the journal’s core business and content quality, and can rely on professional service and support. Moving to the new platform was only possible due to the financial support of our consortium partners Graz University of Technology, ZBW, American University and California Polytechnic State University, and by in-kind support from Internet Studio Isser and photographer Christian Trummer for their graphical design contribution.”
Five years on, the Open Science-driven journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) published an editorial that looks back on the 300 research ideas and research outcomes it has published so far.
Since its early days, RIO has enjoyed quite positive reactions from the open-minded academic community for its innovative approach to Open Science in practice: it provides a niche that had long been missing, namely the publication of early, intermediate and generally unconventional research outcomes from all around the research cycle (e.g. grant proposals, data management plans, project deliverables, reports, policy briefs, conference materials) in a cross-disciplinary scientific journal. In fact, several months after its launch, in 2016, the journal was acknowledged with the SPARC Innovator Award.
‘Alternative’ research publications
In times when posting a preprint was seen as a novel and rather bold practice across many fields, RIO facilitated much deeper dives into the research process, in order to unveil scientific knowledge and the process by which it is gathered, well before any final conclusions have been drawn. Long story short, to date, RIO has published 33 Research Ideas, 78 Grant Proposals, 16 Data Management Plans, 33 Workshop Reports and 5 PhD Project Plans, in addition to plenty of other early, interim and final non-traditional research outcomes, as well as conventional articles. Over time, RIO has kept adding additional article types to its list of publication types, with a few more expected in the near future.
What’s more, over the years, we’ve already observed how papers published in RIO successfully followed up on the continuity of the research process. For example, the Grant Proposal for the “Exploring the opportunities and challenges of implementing open research strategies within development institutions” project, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), was followed by the project’s Data Management Plan a year later.
Five years later, the figures reflecting the usage and engagement with the content published in RIO are evidently supportive of the value of having non-final and unconventional academic publications. For instance, the Grant Proposal for the COST ActionDNAqua-Net, a still ongoing project dedicated to the development of novel genetic tools for bioassessment and monitoring of aquatic ecosystems, is the article with the most total views in RIO’s publication record to date. In the category of sub-article elements, whose usage is also tracked at the journal, the most viewed figure belongs to a Project Report and illustrates a sample code meant to be used in future neuroimaging studies. Similarly, the most viewed table ever published in RIO is part of a Workshop Report that summarises ASAPbio‘s third workshop, dedicated to the technical aspects of services related to the promotion of preprints in the biomedical and other life science communities.
Response to societal challenges
A unique and defining staple for RIO since the very beginning has also been the pronounced engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as formulated by the United Nations right around the time of RIO’s launch. In order to highlight the societal impact of published research, RIO lets authors map their articles to the SDGs relevant to their paper. Once published, the article displays the associated badge(s) next to its title. Readers of the journal can even search RIO’s content by SDG, in the same way they would filter articles by subject, publication types, date or funding agency. Next on the list for RIO is to add another level of granularity to the SDGs mapping. The practice has already been piloted by mapping relevant RIO articles to the ten targets under SDG14 (Life below water).
Taking transparency, responsibility and collaboration in academia and scholarly publishing up another notch, RIO requires for reviews to be publicly available. In addition, the journal supports post-publication reviews, where peers are free to post their review anytime. In turn, RIO registers each review with its own DOI via CrossRef, in order to recognise the valuable input and let the reviewers easily refer to their contributions. A fine example is a Review Article exploring the biodiversity-related issues and challenges across Southeast Asia, which currently has a total of three public peer reviews, one of which is provided two years after the publication of the paper.
Public, transparent and perpetual peer review, pre- and/or post-publication
What’s more striking about peer review at RIO, however, is that it is not always mandatory. Given that the journal publishes many article types that have already been scrutinised by a legitimate authority – for instance, Grant Proposals that have previously been evaluated by a funder or defended PhD Theses – it only makes sense to avoid withholding these publications and duplicating associated evaluation efforts. On such occasions, all an author needs to do is provide a statement about the review status of their paper, which will be made public alongside the article.
On the other hand, where the article type of a manuscript requires pre-publication review, to avoid potential delays caused by the review process and editorial decisions, RIO encourages the authors to post their pre-review manuscript as a preprint on the recently launched ARPHA Preprints platform, subject to a quick editorial screening, which would only take a few days.
Further, RIO has now abandoned the practice of burdening the journal’s editors with the time-consuming task of finding reviewers, and instead requiring the submitting author to invite suitable reviewers upon submission, who are then immediately and automatically invited by the system. While significantly expediting the editorial work on a manuscript, this practice doesn’t compromise the quality of peer review in the slightest, since the reviews go public, while the final decision about the acceptance of the paper lies with the editor, who is also overlooking the process and able to intervene and invite additional reviewers anytime, if necessary.
Project-driven knowledge hub
The most significant novelty at RIO, however, is perhaps the newly assumed role of the journal as “a project-driven knowledge hub“, targeting specifically the needs of research projects, conference organisers and institutions. For them, RIO provides a one-stop source for the outputs of their scientists, in order to comply with the requirements of their funders or management, or simply to facilitate the discoverability, reusability and citability of their academic outputs and to highlight their interconnectedness.
Unlike typical permanent article collections, already widely used in scholarly publishing, with RIO, collection owners can take advantage of the unique opportunity to add a wide range of research outputs, including such published elsewhere, in order to provide even greater context to the assembled research outputs in their project- or institution-branded article collection (see the Horizon 2020 Project Path2Integrity‘s project collection as an example).
A permanent topical collection in RIO Journal may include a diverse range of both traditional and unconventional research outputs, as well as links to publications from outside the journal (see What can I publish on the journal’s website).
For example, a project coordinator could open a collection under the brand of the project, and start by publishing the Grant Proposal, followed shortly by Data and Software Management Plans and Workshop Reports. Thus, even at this early point in the project’s development, the funder – and with them everyone else – would already have strong evidence of the project’s dedication to transparency and active science communication. Later on, the project’s participants would all be able to easily add to the project’s collection by either submitting their diverse research outputs straight to RIO and having it accepted by the collection lead editor, or providing metadata and link to their publication from elsewhere, even preprints. If the document is published outside of RIO, its metadata, i.e. author names and affiliations, article title and publication date, show up in the collection, while a click on the item will lead to the original publication. As the project progresses, the team behind it could add more and more outputs (e.g. Project Reports, Guidelines and Policy Briefs), continuously updating the public and the relevant stakeholders about the development of their work. Eventually, the collection will be able to provide a comprehensive and fully transparent report of the project from start to finish.
Expected to move to the Pensoft-developed technologically advanced scholarly publishing platform ARPHA later in 2020, the three academic outlets will not only acquire their own glossy and user-friendly websites, but will also take advantage from ARPHA’s signature fast-track, end-to-end publishing system, which is to benefit all journal users: authors, reviewers and editors alike. In addition, the journals will use all unique services offered by ARPHA, such as data publishing, linked data tables, semantic markup and enhancements, automated export of sub-article elements and data to aggregators, web-service integrations with more than 40 world-class indexing and archiving databases, sub-article-level usage metrics, and more.
Thereby, each submitted manuscript will be carried through the review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving stages without leaving ARPHA’s collaboration-centred online environment. The articles are to be available in PDF, machine-readable JATS XML formats, and semantically enriched HTML for better reader experience to ensure they are easy to discover, access, cite and reuse.
Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny succeeded the historical Entomologische Abhandlungen, formerly published by the Museum of Zoology, Dresden, in 2006. Its scope covers the taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeontology of arthropod taxa.
Similarly, Vertebrate Zoology was preceded by Zoologische Abhandlungen, also formerly published by the Museum of Zoology, Dresden. It deals with research on the taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeontology of vertebrates.
Meanwhile, Geologica Saxonica – Journal of Central European Geology, began its life in distant 1876, when it was founded under the name Mitteilungen aus dem Koniglichen Mineralogisch-Geologischen und Prahistorischen Museum by German geologist Hanns Bruno Geinitz, renowned for his work on the Carboniferous and Cretaceous rocks and fossils of Saxony.
“At Pensoft, we take pride in our latest partnership with the world-renowned natural history association of Senckenberg. We are certain that our collaboration will bring many advantages to the research community: readers, authors and their affiliates alike,”
comments Pensoft and ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
Senckenberg, Research Institutes and Natural History Museums, conduct research in bio- and geoscience. Major research fields are biodiversity and ecosystem research and the research on the entire Earth-Human-Earth system. Senckenberg headquarters are located in Frankfurt am Main, but research on marine, terrestrial and climate systems is also housed at additional nine locations throughout Germany: in Dresden, Gelnhausen, Gorlitz, Hamburg, Messel, Muncheberg, Tubingen, Weimar and Wilhelmshaven. Senckenberg employs about 1,000 people, including 300 scientists. Senckenberg scientists are active in projects worldwide, most of which are international collaborations with universities and other research institutions. Senckenberg hosts biological and geological research collections with more than 35 million series.
The first 2020 papers of the open-access, peer-reviewed international journal Plant Sociology are now available on the journal’s new, user-friendly and visually appealing website
Having succeeded the historical journals of the Italian Society of Vegetation Science (Società Italiana di Scienza della Vegetazione): Fitosociologia (1990-2011) and Notiziario della Societa Italiana di Fitosociologia (1964-1989), the open-access, peer-reviewed international journal Plant Sociology undergoes another major transformation by moving to the technologically advanced ARPHA Platform, after signing with the scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.
As a result of the recently started partnership, the first 2020 papers of Plant Sociology are now available on the journal’s new website. All pre-2020 issues remain available on the former website.
With a wide scope covering vegetation studies from plant community to landscape level, Plant Sociology puts a special focus on topics such as Plant Sociology and vegetation survey for developing ecological models, as well as plant classification, monitoring, assessment, management and conservation, as long as the studies are based on rigorous and quantitative measures of physical and biological components.
Amongst the first newly published papers is an article by a team from the University of L’Aquila, which reports on two years of observations of the vegetation dynamics at the Gran Sasso – Monti della Laga National Park in central Italy, after the protected area suffered from an accidental fire of anthropogenic origin in 2017. With their study, the researchers aim to determine the potential of the Sentinel-2 satellite as a tool to measure, identify and monitor the short-term response of vegetation in a peculiar mountainous landscape.
Another new publication presents a phytosociological survey on the weed vegetation of two crops of Protected Designation of Origin: the bean “Fagiolo Cannellino di Atina” and the red pepper “Peperone di Pontecorvo” – both growing exclusively within a few hundreds of square kilometres in the Province of Frosinone (central Italy), conducted at four selected farms by researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Thanks to the Pensoft’s signature open-access scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, Plant Sociology demonstrates a complete makeover, including a modern and user-friendly interface in addition to a long list of high-tech perks, meant to ensure that published articles are easy to discover, access, cite and reuse by both humans and machines all over the world.
Furthermore, all users of the journal’s system: authors, editors and reviewers alike, are to greatly benefit from ARPHA’s integrated approach to the publication process. This means that once submitted each manuscript goes through the whole cycle: from review and copy/layout editing to publication, dissemination and archiving without leaving ARPHA’s collaboration-focused online environment.
Plant Sociology has a completely renewed Editorial board, which sees Daniela Gigante from the University of Perugia in the role of Editor-in-Chief, and Simonetta Bagella (University of Sassari), Gianni Bacchetta (University of Cagliari) and Daniele Viciani (University of Florence) as Co-editors. The Editorial board is complemented by a Consultant editor and an Editorial secretary (respectively, Edoardo Biondi and Diana Galdenzi, both from the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona). A large, international Editorial team includes 35 members with specific skills and long-dated expertise in various fields related to vegetation science. A dedicated Social media team takes care of the dissemination of the journal.
“At the Plant Sociology‘s Editorial board, we are looking with great expectations to the cooperation with Pensoft, certain that the publisher’s skills and experience will support the journal in its growth and consolidation as an international reference point for vegetation science studies,”
says Editor-in-Chief Dr Daniela Gigante.
“It’s delightful to have the Italian Society of Vegetation Science putting their trust in us with their signature journal. With our strong background in scholarly publishing, technology development and open science practices, I am certain that we are to provide the right venue for a high-quality and enterprising journal like Plant Sociology,”
says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
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 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.
“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.
Thanks to the new collaboration between content recommendation engine TrendMD and journal publishing platform ARPHA, readers of all journals under Pensoft’s imprint, as well as those using the white-label publishing solution provided by the platform, will be given a useful list of recommended articles related to the study they are reading. The new widget is to save the users a great amount of time, by simply pointing them to the most relevant papers on the topic from across a constantly expanding network of of peer-reviewed articles and research news.
While nearly 8,000 new scholarly articles are published each day, it is basically impossible staying up-to-date with the news from a single scientific field, let alone doing cross-disciplinary research. Furthermore, sifting out the quality literature is another painstaking activity no academic is looking forward to. Hence, TrendMD comes as the sensible solution to help a reader find the most relevant and fine studies on a particular topic. The widget’s recommendations are based on the topic a user is currently reading, what papers they have read in the past, and the articles others with similar interests have sought out – all available from the most authoritative and quality journals in the world.
“TrendMD is excited to welcome Pensoft, a highly innovative, open access, online publishing platform, to the TrendMD network! This partnership will bring over 5,000 open access articles and books in the field of natural history, predominantly taxonomy and organismal biology, to TrendMD’s ever expanding network,” says Paul Kudlow, CEO and co-founder of TrendMD.
“In our continuing effort to develop and implement the most novel tools and workflows in academic publishing, at Pensoft we are pleased to have integrated our journal publishing platform ARPHA with the new-age scholarly innovation that is TrendMD’s tool, so that our readers have an easy and constant access to the most relevant and best-quality research,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
