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. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment. Elsevier is part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier, a publicly-traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2022 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,800 journals; as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, with over one billion annual downloads.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.
F1000 is an open research publisher for scientists, scholars, and clinical researchers. F1000 offers a different research evaluation service from standard academic journals by offering peer-review after, rather than before, publishing a research article. Initially, F1000 was named after the 1,000 faculty members that performed peer-reviews, but over time F1000 expanded to more than 8,000 members. When F1000 was acquired by Taylor & Francis Group in January 2020, it kept the publishing services. F1000Prime and F1000 Workspace were acquired by different brands.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.
Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.
PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Crossref is a nonprofit open digital infrastructure organisation for the global scholarly research community. Uniquely and persistently recording and connecting knowledge through open metadata and identifiers for all research objects such as grants and articles. It is the largest digital object identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. It has 19,000 members from 150 countries representing publishers, libraries, research institutions, and funders and was launched in early 2000 as a cooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-platform citation linking in online academic journals. As of July 2023, Crossref identifies and connects 150 million records of metadata about research objects made openly available for reuse without restriction. They facilitate an average of 1.1 billion DOI resolutions every month, and they see 1 billion queries of the metadata every month.
Berghahn Books is a New York and Oxford–based publisher of scholarly books and academic journals in the humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on social and cultural anthropology, European history, politics, and film and media studies. It was founded in 1994 by Marion Berghahn.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Data publishing is the act of releasing research data in published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.
Pensoft Publishers are a publisher of scientific literature based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pensoft was founded in 1992, by two academics: Lyubomir Penev and Sergei Golovatch. It has published over 1000 academic and professional books and currently publishes over 60 peer-reviewed open access scientific journals including ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, Check List, Comparative Cytogenetics, Journal of Hymenoptera Research, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, and Zoosystematics and Evolution.
Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.
SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base about scientific resources. It is a community portal for researchers and a content management system for data and databases. It is intended to provide a common source of data to the research community and the data about Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), which can be used in scientific publications. After starting as a pilot of two journals in 2014, by 2022 over 1,000 journals have been using them and over half a million RRIDs have been quoted in the scientific literature. In some respect, it is for science and scholarly publishing, similar to what Wikidata is for Wikimedia Foundation projects. Hosted by the University of California, San Diego, SciCrunch was also designed to help communities of researchers create their own portals to provide access to resources, databases and tools of relevance to their research areas
GigaScience is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 2012. It covers research and large data-sets that result from work in the biomedical and life sciences. The editor-in-chief is Scott Edmunds. Originally, the journal was co-published by BioMed Central and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). In 2016, it left BioMed Central to form a new partnership between the GigaScience Press department of BGI and Oxford University Press. In 2018, GigaScience won the Association of American Publishers' PROSE Award for Innovation in journal publishing in the multidisciplinary category.
Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."
The Research Parasite Award is an honor given annually at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing to recognize scientists who study previously published data in ways not anticipated by the researchers who first generated it. The tongue-in-cheek name of the award refers to a New England Journal of Medicine editorial that coined the term "research parasite" to disparage such work. The idea was first suggested on Twitter by Iowa State University researcher Iddo Friedberg shortly after the editorial was published, and was then brought to life by Casey Greene, a pharmacologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
GigaDB is a disciplinary repository launched in 2011 with the aim of ensuring long-term access to massive multidimensional datasets from life science and biomedical science studies. The datasets are diverse and include genomic, transcriptomic, and imaging data. The datasets are curated by GigaDB biocurators who are employed by BGI and China National GeneBank.
