 SciPost logo | |
| Founded | 2016 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jean-Sébastien Caux |
| Country of origin | International |
| Headquarters location | Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
| Publication types | Academic journals |
| Nonfiction topics | Science |
| Official website | scipost |
SciPost is a non-profit foundation dedicated to developing, implementing and maintaining innovative forms of electronic scientific communication and publishing. It is notable for operating the scipost.org open-access scientific publishing portal.
The foundation is headquartered in Amsterdam and registered under Dutch Chamber of Commerce. [1] It was established in 2016. [2] Its chairman is Jean-Sébastien Caux, with Joost van Mameren acting as secretary, and Jasper van Wezel as treasurer.
SciPost published the 2000th article in 2023, an article in SciPost Physics. The authors included Giorgio Parisi, a Nobel Prize winner. [3]
| Title | ISSN | Launched | Impact factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| SciPost Chemistry | 2772-6762 | 2021 | |
| SciPost Physics | 2542-4653 [4] | 2016 [5] | 5.5 (2022) |
| SciPost Physics Core | 2666-9366 [6] | 2019 | 3.6 (2022) |
| SciPost Physics Lecture Notes | 2590-1990 [7] | 2018 | - |
| SciPost Physics Proceedings | 2666-4003 [8] | 2019 | - |
Authors are encouraged to make use of preprint servers (for physics, the arXiv e-print archive) but can also submit directly. The recommendation of using preprints leads to SciPost often being thought of as an overlay journals system. [9] [10] This is incorrect since the platform self-hosts all its publishing workflows and results.
Refereeing at SciPost uses an open procedure known as peer-witnessed refereeing. Submitted manuscripts must be picked up for editorial processing by one of the Fellows of an Editorial College. Besides invited referees, registered contributors can also volunteer reports. The contents of the reports are made publicly visible (the referee can choose to remain anonymous or not). Publication decisions are taken by the Editorial College by majority voting.
Publications carry a Creative Commons license. Metadata is deposited at Crossref and at the DOAJ [11] (all journals carry to DOAJ Seal [11] ). As a participant in the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), SciPost makes all its citation data open.
SciPost is funded through a consortial business model whereby universities and research funding agencies worldwide contribute to pooled resources used to run operations. No article processing charges are levied. Sponsors and further benefitting organizations are publicly listed with tallies of linked publications. This data is used to suggest sponsorship levels for sustainability.
The SciPost model resembles the one used by the Open Library of Humanities and is similarly mentioned in discussions on the reform of publishing business models. [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
Organizations which have sponsored SciPost in its early stage include the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), [19] [20] the University of Melbourne, the Max Planck Society / Max Planck Digital Library, [21] the University of Amsterdam, CERN, [22] the EPFL, [23] TU Dortmund, [24] VSNU, [25] OpenAIRE, the University of Lorraine, University of Bern, [26] the University of Queensland, Technical University Munich, [27] Forschungszentrum Jülich, Johannes Kepler University Linz, [28] Delft University of Technology, Stockholm University, [29] VU Amsterdam, Heidelberg University, Leiden University, [30] an Austrian national consortium led by the FWF [31] Austrian Science Fund.
In the context of Plan S, Robert-Jan Smits singled out SciPost and suggested classifying it as a "Rhodium" publisher. [32] In a Nature editorial on the evolution of journals into "information platforms", SciPost was qualified as "most impressive". [33]
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.
DAREnet stands for Digital Academic Repositories and is an initiative by the Dutch organisation Surf. The DARE programme is a joint initiative by the Dutch universities and the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) with the aim to store the results of all Dutch research in a network of so-called repositories, thus facilitating access to them. DAREnet is now integrated into the portal Narcis.nl.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals making all their content available for free, without delay or user-registration requirement, and meeting high quality standards, notably by exercising peer review or editorial quality control. DOAJ defines those as open access journals where an open license is used so that any user is allowed immediate free access to the works published in the journal and is permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [the] articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose. The mission of DOAJ is to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Namely, the rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom is zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (or SCOAP3) is an international collaboration in the high-energy physics community to convert traditional closed access physics journals to open access, freely available for everyone to read and reuse, shifting away the burden of the publishing cost from readers (traditional model) and authors (in the case of hybrid open access journals). Under the terms of the agreement, authors retain copyrights and the articles published under SCOAP3 will be in perpetuity under a CC BY license. The initiative was promoted by CERN in collaboration with international partners.
ScienceOpen is a web-based platform, that hosts open access journals. It is freely accessible for readers, authors and publishers, and it generates its revenues via promotional services for publishers and authors' institutions. The organization is based in Berlin and has a technical office in Boston. It is a member of CrossRef, ORCID, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, STM Association and the Directory of Open Access Journals. The company was designated as one of “10 to Watch” by research advisory firm Outsell in its report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
Open access to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s. Publishers Beilstein-Institut, Copernicus Publications, De Gruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, ScienceOpen, Springer Nature, and Universitätsverlag Göttingen belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
In France, open access to scholarly communication is relatively robust and has strong public support. Revues.org, a digital platform for social science and humanities publications, launched in 1999. Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL) began in 2001. The French National Center for Scientific Research participated in 2003 in the creation of the influential Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Publishers EDP Sciences and OpenEdition belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
Open access scholarly communication of Norway can be searched via the Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA). "A national repository consortium, BIBSYS Brage, operates shared electronic publishing system on behalf of 56 institutions." Cappelen Damm Akademisk, Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing, University of Tromsø, and Universitetsforlaget belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Norwegian signatories to the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include CRIStin, Norsk institutt for bioøkonomi, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Tromsø, University of Bergen, University of Oslo, and Wikimedia Norge.
In January 2008, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian academics issued the "Belgorod Declaration" in support of open access to scientific and cultural knowledge. Russian supporters of the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include Belgorod State University, National Electronic Information Consortium (NEICON), and Webpublishers Association.
Open access (OA) to academic publications has seen extensive growth in Australia since the first open access university repository was established in 2001 and OA is a fundamental part of the scholarly publishing and research landscape in Australia. There are open access policies at the two major research funders: The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) and around half of Australian Universities have an OA policy or statement. Open Access Australasia, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) are advocates for Open Access and related issues in Australia.
Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S", a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. The "S" stands for "shock".
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
The VSNU Elsevier contract is a legal agreement between Dutch research organisations and the scientific publishers Elsevier. Lasting from 2020 - 2024, the agreement has been portrayed as a significant shift in scholarly publishing, offering individual researchers at Dutch universities unlimited right to freely publish articles in Elsevier journals. While informally known as the VSNU contract, it is signed on behalf of a number of umbrella organisations for research in the Netherlands - the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The Dutch ICT organisation SURF acted as legal signatories for the contract.
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