The “Recent advancements in the risk screening of freshwater and terrestrial non-native species” Special Issue in the open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal NeoBiotais now open for submissions.
The deadline for submission is 28 February 2022, with the issue scheduled for publication in August 2022.
The new special issue is expected to collate prominent contributors from the field of invasive ecology, thereby addressing existing gaps in the knowledge about both freshwater and terrestrial non-native species and their management.
The editors note that despite the current efforts and measures to monitor and tackle the spread of non-native species, and especially those posing imminent threat to local biodiversity and ecosystems, further expansion of such populations has increasingly been recorded in recent years. Of special concern are developing countries, where legislation for controlling non-native species is still lacking.
A major problem is that – as of today – we are still missing on risk screening studies needed to provide evidence for the invasiveness potential of many non-native species across several taxonomic groups, which would then be used to support specific conservation efforts. Unfortunately, this is particularly true for species inhabiting the world’s biodiversity hotspots, point out the editors.
Risk-based identification of non-native species is an essential process to inform policy and actions for conservation and management of biodiversity. Previously published papers on risk screening of aquatic non-native species, and especially those using the most widely-employed ‘-ISK’ decision-support toolkits, have attracted mounting interest from the wider scientific community.
“Trends in Arthropods of Alpine Aquatic Ecosystems” is the first topical collection for the journal of the Swiss Entomological Society
The open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal Alpine Entomology, published by Pensoft on behalf of the Swiss Entomological Society, announced its very first topical collection of articles, which will be focusing on arthropods associated with aquatic ecosystems in mountainous regions.
The journal is currently inviting scientists, working on aquatic fauna from alpine habitats, to openly publish their research articles and short notices that provide evidence how arthropods’ biogeography, species communities, distribution, behaviour and morphology have changed in recent times.
The aim of the “Trends in Arthropods of Alpine Aquatic Ecosystems” collection is to bring together data and findings about what many agree is the most impacted type of environment on Earth: aquatic ecosystems, especially running waters.
“Aquatic invertebrates are key indicators of global or local changes. Furthermore, many aquatic ecosystems are closely linked to mountains because they originate in them. Many valuable unpublished datasets on aquatic arthropod fauna may therefore be available from mountainous regions,”
The collection will remain open for submissions for the next two years. In the meantime, the accepted manuscripts will be published on a rolling basis, as soon as they are ready for publication.
Originally developed by scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft to cater for the needs of its very own journal portfolio, ARPHA Platform is now available as an independent publishing solution to publishers, societies and institutions seeking a new, technologically-advanced and highly-customisable home for their journals.
Below, we’ve listed the top 15 features at ARPHA that have so far persuaded over 60 open-access scholarly journals from around the globe to choose and keep on using our publishing platform.
With ARPHA, a scholarly journal no longer needs to approach different vendors, in order to manage its publishing processes. The platform provides an authoring tool (optional) and submission interface, while also supporting peer review, production, publishing, hosting, indexing, archiving and contentdissemination.
As a result, all journal users (i.e. editors, reviewers, authors, layout managers and linguistic editors) can work within a single online environment, where they can benefit from:
one-stop entry and unified interface from the start to the end of the publishing process;
reduced manuscript turnaround times;
in-built tools for monitoring and control at all stages of the publishing process;
reduced costs and optimised cost/quality ratio
data security and GDPR compliance.
(2) White-label and (co-)publishing
With ARPHA, a journal is not necessarily associated with the platform’s developer and owner Pensoft. Our white-label solution allows for the journal to be published under its own logo and imprint, including those of its publisher, society or institution.
Alternatively, some journals, especially starting titles, might rather be (co-)published by Pensoft, where they can benefit from better recognition, promotion and development as part of the publisher’s portfolio. For example, a journal’s outputs might be more likely to appear as related content from a relevant Pensoft journal through social media, browsers or newsletters.
On top of its full-featured publishing solution, ARPHA’s team and our partners offer a wide range of software integrations and human-provided services, including editorial management, customer support, and assistance in indexation, journal development, marketing and science communication. Selected on a mix-and-match basis, they can perfectly align with the journal’s existing workflows, future needs and budgetary requirements.
Use case I: Where journals already maintain their own editorial and/or production staff, they can opt to use ARPHA’s software platform in part and keep some of the work (e.g. editorial management and production) in-house. For example, the Plant Sociology journal of the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) decided to go for ARPHA’s ADVANCED pricing model, while continuing to use their own copy-editing and typesetting services, leaving to ARPHA the building and maintenance of the entire editorial management and publishing platform, along with the highly specialised work on XML tagging and semantically-enhanced publishing. As a result, the journal achieved a quick technological modernisation, while significantly optimising its operational costs, allowing authors to publish with APCs as low as €350 (discounted at €250 for society members).
Use case II: When the European Science Editing (ESE) journal by the European Association for Science Editing (EASE), got in touch with our team about possible partnership, we agreed to provide the platform for free, because of the invaluable role of the Society in improving and maintaining the quality and integrity of scientific publishing in Europe. By then, EASE had already adopted their own approach to typesetting their articles into PDF format, and preferred not to use the HTML format for their content, thus leaving only the XML publishing to ARPHA’s team. However, they remain able to upgrade to full-text HTML and XML publication at any point in the future. At the time of writing, ESE is using ARPHA’s BASIC pricing plan and operates with a Diamond Open Access publishing module.
(4) Flexible pricing plans
In support of transparency in academia, we’ve made sure that the ARPHA’s cost structure is publicly available on the platform’s website. There, potential clients may find a detailed list of the software modules and human-provided services featured in each pricing plan, including opt-in services.
To better illustrate how much it costs to run a journal on ARPHA Platform, we’ve calculated a few exemplary scenarios for a journal’s annual publishing costs, depending on its volume of content:
Exemplary journal
Basic
Advanced
Premium
2 issues 20 articles per year
€ 4,450
€ 8,850
€ 12,850
4 issues 40 articles per year
€ 6,050
€ 14,850
€ 22,850
Starting total prices for one journal published on ARPHA per year by pricing plan (APCs included).
Use case I: Check List is a large international journal popular with scientists from the Global South. It sought an affordable publishing venue for its authors, while providing them with a modernised and technologically-advanced platform. ARPHA elaborated a custom business model for Check List based on PDF-only publishing, but providing distribution of metadata in XML and HTML, thus allowing the Article Processing Charges (APCs) to be reduced to €120-€150 per article.
Use case II: The journal Evolutionary Systematics of the University of Hamburg is published on ARPHA under the conditions of a fixed yearly budget, which does not need to be calculated on the basis of the number of articles published per year. ARPHA customised a business model, based on a fixed number of pages published each year, which allowed for flexibility in publication of articles of different size within the yearly limit, while keeping the costs in accordance with the planned budget.
Use case III: At the time of our discussion with the Swiss Entomological Society, the society had been publishing its historical journal Mitteilungen der Schweizerischen in print-only black-and-white ever since the mid-19th century. Having discussed and finalised their publishing solution, the journal was re-launched in November 2017 under the name Alpine Entomology on its own ARPHA-powered website and sporting a full set of the latest technological advancements in scholarly publishing, including semantically enhanced XML, HTML and PDF. Yet, the costs for publishing were still well below the allocated by the society budget, even when we added the yearly printing of 300 full-colour journal copies to be distributed to the members of the society.
(5) Various business & operational models
While we do support Diamond Open Access, we do realise that journals do not always rely on external financial support generous enough to support their survival in the long run. This is why we offer to our clients a range of several business models:
Diamond Open Access – all costs are covered by an institution, society or third party, so that the authors publish for free.
Mixed model – the costs can be covered partially by an institution, society or third party, so that the authors are only charged with a fee as small as a fraction, compared to the average APCs in the industry.
APC-based income model – a society or institution may set their APCs so that they cover the production costs or even add a surplus to support their financial sustainability.
Differentiated groups model – some authors can publish for free (e.g. staff or society members), others can benefit from discounts or waivers (e.g. authors in low-income countries) and a third group may pay full APCs.
Custom-fit models that can be elaborated together by the journal and ARPHA.
Use case: In 2020, the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) expanded their journal portfolio by launching Vegetation Classification and Survey. Their aim was to achieve financial sustainability for the journal within three years. Thanks to ARPHA’s integrated elaborate and high-tech accounting and payment modules, we’ve set up their publishing solution to provide a quite complex and highly-automated APCs model, where society members enjoy full waivers in 2020 and 2021, and discounts in the years after. Various discounts and waivers are also applicable for journal editors and authors from different groups of low-income countries, based on the World Bank classification. As a result, the journal is expected to become cost-neutral for the Society or even to bring in a small income for it, while offering APCs that are two to three times lower than those charged by large commercial publishers.
(6) Language flexibility
While it’s become a standard for scholarly articles to be published in English, at ARPHA we do realise that there are still journals – including highly renowned and historic titles – that would rather have their content available in the language of their major audiences. This is why we’ve designed ARPHA to support bilingual solutions at interface, metadata and content levels.
Use case I: The journal Maandblad voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie of the Amsterdam University Press transitioned to open access and XML publishing on ARPHA in 2018. The journal wanted to keep the metadata and website interface exclusively in English, so that it is generally understandable to the international audience, but at the same time, the main content and journal’s news announcements to be published exclusively in Dutch. The result was more than satisfactory for the editors, authors and readers, especially after ARPHA uploaded the journal’s historical content (since 1924) and made it searchable and discoverable at article level on MAB’s new website.
For Population and Economics, ARPHA developed a special solution that supports bilingual publications, allowing for the reader to download a PDF copy of an article in Russian straight from its webpage. To avoid potential confusion in references, citations etc., both the Russian- and English-language articles are using the same DOI.
Use case II: The journal Population and Economics, published by the Moscow State University, was established as an international journal publishing exclusively in English, while also offering its content in Russian to the vast community of Russian economists and population geographers. ARPHA created a special solution for formatting and publication of a Russian version of all articles, identical to the primary English text and formatted according to the journal’s design standards. The Russian version is published as PDF under the same DOI as the English version and under English Language metadata only; a special statement is included in the Russian version to be cited with its original English metadata to avoid splitting the citation counts between the two language communities.
(7) Advanced semantic enhancements of content
Arguably the most enjoyed by our journals’ Editors-in-Chief and managers high-tech feature, the advanced semantics publishing module allows tagging and enhancement of content and the development of multiple interactive tools linked to the article’s content. While the module has a vast set of functions elaborated specially for the needs of the Biology, we are ready to develop a similar function for any field on demand.
Content tagging and enhancement allows for readers to access valuable related information with a single click and no need to be redirected from an article’s web page. Clicking on a species name, for example, displays information about the species of concern, including occurrence records, genomics data etc. available from various external sources.
During the production stage, a manuscript’s content undergoes semantic mark-up, where various text elements are linked to related sections (e.g. in-text citations link to figures, tables or supplementary files) or externally sourced information (e.g. biological taxon names link to occurrences maps or treatments in the literature). Then, the published article allows for readers to visualise additional information right next to the text they are currently reading, so that they can easily contextualise the findings with no need to navigate away from the webpage.
Semantic enhancements currently at use on ARPHA Platform include:
Referenced publications
Citations
Figures
Tables
Supplementary materials
For biological taxa: occurrences, genomics, nomenclature, literature treatments, images
(8) Machine-readable (XML) publications
These days, there are various tools and platforms already in existence to do the search and delivery of research information for us. However, in order to fully use these functionalities, publishers need to first ensure that the content they publish can in fact be found and ‘read’ by thosecomputer algorithms.
Not only are publications made available to computer algorithms, so that they are easily discoverable via various browsers and sources, but key elements (e.g. images, nomenclature, occurrence records) from within the article’s text are automatically fetched and deposited at relevant databases.
To address this issue, in addition to PDF and HTML formats, ARPHA publishes all journal content in XML. Additionally, machine-readability allows for key elements (e.g. images, nomenclature, occurrence records) from within the article’s text to be automatically fetched and deposited at relevant databases.
(9) Automated indexing & archiving
Given today’s information and data deluge, we cannot rely exclusively on our clients’ audiences to keep tabs on each journal at all times. On the contrary, a great part of a journal’s readers access content via various aggregators of information.
Hence, indexing and archiving of published content at various databases is a must if we wish to make sure that scientific results are permanently preserved and efficiently disseminated. Thanks to ARPHA’s fully-automated indexing and archiving module, all journal content is instantaneously distributed on the day of its publication via web services.
While some indexers and archivers (e.g. DOAJ, Publons, Zenodo) are integrated with a journal as soon as it completes its transition to the platform, provided the journal’s scope aligns with the one of the database, others (e.g. Scopus, Web of Science) may require for the title to first cover specific criteria. Once again, ARPHA’s team is glad to step in and help with advice on how those requirements can be best addressed, and even submit the necessary application forms on behalf of the journal.
(10) Personal approach in technical support and consultancy
Journals joining ARPHA enjoy a personal, reply-within-a-business-day, approach from a designated team member and benefit from operational training and technical support included in all pricing plans. The platform also offers consultancy and support in journal development, indexing & archiving andmarketing & promotion. All these services are elaborated in fully transparent and flexible plans, so that editorial boards can opt for services they really need, in order to improve the journal’s performance.
Use case I:When the journals Russian Journal of Economics and Population and Economics moved to ARPHA, the editorial boards wanted to make the most of the new platform and its features, with the shortest possible uptake time for their in-house staff. As a result, a two-day training was organised for the editorial teams in their Moscow offices, where they received an induction to the platform’s technical features, insights on how to make the most of its workflows and complementary training in journals’ promotion and PR. This induction has led to the requirements of the Editorial Board for these journals being met and successful adoption of the ARPHA platform.
Use case II: Earlier this year, we organised and held an online meeting for the editorial board at our client journal One Ecosystem, in order to help the journal’s team refine its development strategy and set out its next goals to becoming a go-to publication venue for ecologists. There, we brought together the bright and enthusiastic editorial team and updated them about the latest trends in One Ecosystem’s performance and the ARPHA features and services available at their disposal. Thus, we successfully laid the groundwork for an engaging and fruitful discussion and future actions.
(11) Promotion and science communication services
While talk about the power and value of science communication is growing stronger by the day, at ARPHA, we’ve been putting special efforts in popularising the content our client journals publish amongst the scientific community and the general public for over a decade. To do so, ARPHA’s PR team relies on the company’s and journals’ own social media channels, ARPHA’s and Pensoft’sblogs, specialisedscience and academic news platforms (e.g. Eurekalert, Knowledgespeak), as well as personal contacts with journalists from theworld’s top news media.
Use case I: Earlier in 2021, we did a PR campaign around a study published in Biodiversity Data Journal that reported on the successful conservation efforts of the Green Balkans NGO to bring back breeding populations of the Saker Falcon in Bulgaria. The press announcement posted to the top science news platform Eurekalert and sent to ARPHA’s media contacts triggered multiple headlines internationally, including a story in The Guardian.
Use case II: At ARPHA, we encourage our customers to not only share news about the scientific discoveries their journals publish, but also news about the journal itself. Having transitioned three of Senckenberg Nature Research Society’s flagship journals to ARPHA in a joint co-publishing venture with Pensoft, we announced the news about our collaboration and explained what this brings to the journals’ users across our channels, i.e. Knowledgespeak, Eurekalert, ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s blogs and social media channels.
(12) Multiple real-time usage metrics
To demonstrate and track the real-life visibility, outreach and scholarly impact of each published article, ARPHA-hosted journals accommodate a range of metrics on both article and sub-article level.
Various article and sub-article usage metrics publicly accessible from each article’s webpage (see example from ZooKeys).
Our own statistics provide a quick, real-time report for article total and unique views by format, in addition to a total and unique clicks oneach figure and table. Thanks to our partnership with Altmetric, each paper also displays an instantaneous insight into its mentions on news media, blogs, social media, Wikipedia etc. from across the Internet, while the colourful badge from our collaborators at Dimensions links to the article’s citations in scholarly articles, policy documents, grants, clinical trials and others.
(13) Journal performance statistics and reports
Reporting and monitoring of journal performance is the cornerstone in understanding the highs and lows of a journal and tailoring its future development strategy. So, ARPHA Platform provides various statisticsto Editors-in-Chief and Managing editorsaccessible from their user dashboards within the ARPHA environment.
From their user dashboards within the ARPHA Platform’s environment, Editors-in-Chief and Managing editors have access to a range of key statistics about their journal (see how it works in the ARPHA Manual).
Hence, they can select a specific time period and visualise detailed data and graphics illustrating trends in how many manuscripts are submitted and published, how long it takes to review, accept and publish articles on average, where the majority of authors are based and many others. In addition, our team emails a report with all key statistics to each journal’s Editor(s)-in-Chief and Managing editors twice a year.
(14) Multi-purpose platform
Apart from journals, ARPHA Platform and its services can also be used for academic books, conference abstracts or full-text papers, preprints and institutional documents. For all these different products, ARPHA can create multifunctional platforms for institutions and societies operating under the customer’s logo and branding.
Each year, participants of the annual TDWG conferences submit their conference abstracts to BISS Journal, where they remain permanently available in their respective collections and subcollections. Browse the contributions to date at https://biss.pensoft.net/collections.
Use case I: In 2016, we were approached by the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG): a non-profit scientific and educational association, working towards the development of standards for the exchange of biodiversity data, for the purposes of biodiversity informatics. They wished to find a way to collate and permanently preserve the outcomes of their annual conference, in order to ensure that valuable outputs presented at and inspired by the events remain discoverable and freely accessible well after the conference has concluded. Eventually, ARPHA set up the journal Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (BISS), where conference participants can submit their abstracts prior to the conference rather than emailing them to the conference organisers or uploading them to odd single-use portals. As a result, the abstracts are published similarly to the articles in any ARPHA-hosted journal: in PDF, semantically enhanced HTML and machine-readable XML; with their own DOIs; and featuring references, figures and tables, also stored as data. Apart from conference abstracts, BISS also publishes research posters and presentations, case studies, forum papers, software descriptions and more.
Use case II: The Bulgarian Society of Cardiology transferred its 25-years old journal Bulgarian Cardiologyon ARPHA in 2019. The journal is multilingual and publishes articles in English, Bulgarian and occasionally in other European languages. The new ARPHA-designed website of Bulgarian Cardiology provides a bilingual interface and the possibility to publish both English and Bulgarian language metadata and articles in either of the two languages. Shortly after the journal’s launch, the Society commissioned a new society website following the journal’s corporate design, yet providing a wide variety of other features to present the Society’s activities, publication of various documents, news items and so on. Both websites are available through a platform built on the Society’s domain address bgcardio.org.
(15) New integrations and tools implemented continuously
While at ARPHA we’re doing our best to cater for all our clients and their own users by providing a versatile list of customisable services, we do realise that one’s needs and wants change over time and so do the requirements and expectations of the academic publishing industry.
This is why we regularly develop and implement new features and services, and deliver them to our clients either by default or on an opt-in basis. To further enrich our portfolio of services, we also keep an eye on the latest innovations in scholarly publishing, and seek out partnerships whenever we identify something that might improve our users’ experience.
Check out our earlier blog post to find more about the top features we introduced at ARPHA in 2020:
ARPHA Preprints
Dedicated editorial workflow for Special Issues and Topical article collections
Editor and reviewer application form
Journal performance statistics
Journal performance reports
Workload statistics for reviewers and subject editors
Review rating
Contributor roles for co-authors
Easy update of user expertise
Integration with the research discovery app Researcher
Preprints submission workflow at ARPHA-hosted journals that have opted-in for the integration.
Use case I: While preprints have been gaining traction in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly put an enormous pressure on researchers to share their scientific results as early as possible. It was then that we put the development of our own much-anticipated preprint platform on high priority with the aim to provide a fast-track publication of preprints for authors that have selected an ARPHA-hosted journal for their studies. We offered a seamless integration with ARPHA Preprints to all our clients as an opt-in service at no additional charge. The journals that accommodated it, provide to their authors the opportunity to post their manuscripts as preprints upon submission at the click of a button, with no need to reformat their submission files.
The research-discovery app Researcher provides its user with a continuous feed of the latest scientific publication addressing their topics of interest.
Use case II: As we’ve always been taking special care to ensure that content published in ARPHA-hosted journals enjoys as much visibility and accessibility as possible, we couldn’t allow ourselves to stay away from yet another fantastic way to reach further into the readership of our clients. So, last year, we signed up with Researcher, whose research-discovery app allows its users to browse and receive a continuous feed of the latest research publications addressing their topics of interest. Having added the integration to all journals published on ARPHA platform by default, their content reaches more than two millions users on Researcher.
The Austrian Academy of Sciences’ journalBiosystematics and Ecology now boasts an improved publishing infrastructure after moving to the technologically advanced ARPHA Platform and signing with publisher and technology provider Pensoft. The publisher, well-established in the domain of biodiversity-themed journals, is eager to welcome this latest addition to its growing open-access portfolio.
Biosystematics and Ecology is a continuation and replaces the established print-onlyBiosystematics and Ecology Series of theAustrian Academy of Sciences’s Commission for Interdisciplinary Ecological Studies. It publishes research focused on biodiversity in Central Europe and around the world, a domain of rapidly growing importance as а global biodiversity crisis is looming. A great advantage of Biosystematics and Ecology, in contrast to its predecessor, is the ability to simply update existing checklists and therefore to account for new scientific findings about taxonomic groups or regions.
The peer-reviewed outlet includes contributions on a wide range of ecology and biosystematics topics, aiming to provide biodiversity data, such as catalogi, checklists and interdisciplinary research to the scientific community, while offering the maximum in accessibility, usability, and transparency. The journal is currently indexed in Crossref and archived in CLOCKSS, Portico and Zenodo.
Having already acquired its own glossy and user-friendly website provided by ARPHA, the journal also takes advantage of the platform’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end publishing solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. The platform offers a synergic online space for authoring, reviewing, editing, production and archiving, ensuring a seamlessly integrated workflow at every step of the publishing process.
Thanks to the financial support of the Academy, Biosystematics and Ecology will publish under Diamond Open Access, which means that it is free to read and publish. Opting for ARPHA’s white-label publishing solution, the journal is published under the Academy’s branding and imprint, while benefiting from all signature high-tech features by ARPHA.
Biosystematics and Ecology also makes use of ARPHA Preprints, another platform developed by Pensoft, where authors can post a preprint in a matter of seconds upon submitting a manuscript to the journal. Once the associated manuscript gets published, the preprint is conveniently linked to the formal paper, displaying its citation details.
ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform offers high-end functionalities such as diverse paper formats (PDF, machine-readable JATS XML, and semantically enriched HTML), automated data export to aggregators, web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, advanced semantics publishing, and automated email notifications and reminders. Features like these make it easy for both humans and machines all over the world to discover, access, cite, and reuse published research.
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.”
The first papers of the journal of the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology in Munich since the move to Pensoft’s publishing platform are now online
The scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft welcomes the latest addition to its diverse portfolio of scientific outlets – the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Zitteliana, which publishes research in the fields of paleontology and geobiology.
Zitteliana is a journal of the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology Munich, which is part of the State Natural History Collection of Bavaria (SNSB), a research institution for natural history comprising five state collections.
Published both online and in print, the journal contains original articles, short contributions and reviews on all aspects of palaeontology and geobiology, welcoming research on all regions of the Earth and all periods of geologic time. The journal invites both modern and traditional research outputs, including palaeobiology, geobiology, palaeogenomics, biodiversity, stratigraphy, sedimentology, regional geology, systematics, phylogeny, and cross-disciplinary studies of these areas.
Since its launch in 1961, the journal has changed its name several times (i.e. Mitteilungen der Bayerischen Staatssammlung fuer Palaeontologie und historische Geologie, Zitteliana A (Abhandlungen) and Zitteliana B (Mitteilungen)), and has extended both scope and thematic range to cover global research from all areas of palaeontology and geobiology.
“This year, Zittelliana is celebrating its 60th anniversary in brand new gear. The move to the innovative scholarly publisher Pensoft shows how tradition can work hand in hand with innovation and modernity. We are very excited about this relaunch and very much look forward to transforming Zitteliana into an internationally leading journal in Paleontology and Geobiology together with Pensoft,” the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Professor Gert Woerheide adds.
After moving to Pensoft’s scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, and with a brand-new, user-friendly website, Zitteliana now takes full advantage of ARPHA’s signature fast-track, end-to-end publishing system, which significantly improves user experience for authors, reviewers and editors alike. The collaboration-focused platform supports manuscripts in all steps of the publishing process – submission, peer review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving, all within its online environment. To the benefit of readers, published articles are then made available in PDF, machine-readable JATS XML formats, and semantically enriched HTML, which makes them much easier to discover, access, cite and reuse.
In addition, ARPHA Platform offers a long list of high-tech features and human-provided services such as advanced data publishing, linked data tables, semantic markup and enhancements, automated export of sub-article elements and data to aggregators, sub-article-level usage metrics, and web-service integrations with more than 40 world-class indexing and archiving databases.
Zitteliana is the latest in a series of biodiversity-themed journals to join the Pensoft family – earlier this year the ichthyology journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoriasigned with the scholarly publisher and moved on to ARPHA Platform.
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Follow Zitteliana on Facebook and Twitter.Additional information: 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.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.
Contacts:
Prof. Dr. Gert Woerheide, Editor-in-Chief of Zitteliana woerheide@snsb.de
The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society is an international scientific journal dedicated to all fields of geography and interrelated fields of earth, ecological, social, economic and geoinformation sciences. It has a global geographical scope with a focus on Southeastern Europe and the Balkans, and its first issue dates back to 1933.
Having already acquired its own glossy and user-friendly website provided by ARPHA, the journal also takes advantage of the platform’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving.
With features such as machine-readable XML format for papers, automated data export to aggregators, automated email notifications and reminders, and web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, the easy-to-use, open-access platform ensures that published research is easy to discover, access, cite and reuse by both humans and machines all over the world. The journal is now indexed in the likes of Crossref, Google Scholar, OpenCitations, Publons and Scibey, and archived in CLOCKSS, Portico and Zenodo.
The very first publications for 2021 (vol. 44) are out now. An opening editorial presents the background, the new mission and perspectives of the journal. A paper, authored by Stanley D. Brunn, communicates the mapping morality and its visible and invisible geographies. The rest of the issue’s articles will be published upon approval, following a “flow publishing” schedule.
“In the autumn of 2020, the editorial team and the executive committee of the Bulgarian Geographical Society agreed upon a new mission of the journal. It aims to respond and to adapt to the newest developments in scholarly publishing by providing a platform for high quality and innovative papers in all fields of geography and interrelated fields of earth, ecological, social, economic, and geoinformation sciences. The geographical scope of the journal will cover the entire world with special attention to Southeastern Europe and the Balkans,”
comment the journal’s editors.
“In these days of continuous speeding up of paces of work and life, the idea of facilitating the sharing of existing knowledge in order to create synergies, new knowledge, and innovation is more than timely and our journal can join the efforts to achieve these goals. That is why we are excited by the launch of JBGS on the ARPHA platform – a next-generation publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring and reviewing to publishing and dissemination.”
The scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft welcomes the latest addition to its diverse portfolio of scholarly outlets – the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria (AIeP), which publishes research in the fields of ichthyology and fisheries.
AIeP is an international scientific journal publishing articles in any aspect of ichthyology and fisheries concerning true fishes (fin-fishes), including taxonomy, biology, morphology, anatomy, physiology, pathology, parasitology, reproduction and zoogeography. The academic outlet, which was launched in 1970, favours research based on original experimental data or experimental methods, or new analyses of already existing data. AIeP is indexed by all major indexers, including Web of Science and Scopus. The journal’s first Impact Factor was released in 2010, and currently stands at 0.629 (2019).
The first 2021 issue of the the open-access, peer-reviewed international journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria is already online on a brand-new website
In joining the Pensoft portfolio, AIeP gets a brand-new user-friendly website with improved design and access to Pensoft’s self-developed full-featured platform ARPHA, which offers an end-to-end publishing solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. With features, such as papers available in semantically enhanced HTML and machine-readable XML formats, automated data export to aggregators, and web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, the easy-to-use, open-access platform ensures that published research is easy to discover, access, cite and reuse by both humans and machines all over the world.
Amongst the published papers there are also practical suggestions for species conservation and sustainable fisheries management – for example, an evaluation of the size of freshwater fish in Bangladeshi wetlands recommends only harvesting fishes with a total length of over 8.80 cm.
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.
Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny, Vertebrate Zoology and Geologica Saxonica are the latest historic titles to select the various services and advanced technology provided by the OA-born scholarly publishing platform
One of the largest natural research associations in Germany, the Senckenberg Nature Research Society moved three of its international, open-access scholarly journals to the publishing platform ARPHA, following a recent contract with the scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft.
Having opted for the white-label publishing solution, the journals remain under the brand of the Society and the Senckenberg Natural History Collections Dresden, one of the oldest natural-science museums in the world. Despite transitioning to a new platform, the past volumes of the journals remain accessible from a link on their website homepages.
Following their recent move to the Pensoft-developed publishing platform, Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny, Vertebrate Zoology and Geologica Saxonica have not only acquired their own glossy and user-friendly websites, but have also taken 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 are already using many of the unique services offered by ARPHA, including publication in PDF, semantically enhanced HTML and machine-readable XML formats; advanced data publishing; sub-article-level usage metrics; automated export of sub-article elements and data to key aggregators; web-service integrations with major indexing and archiving databases; and others.
In particular, to the appeal of the authors, editors and reviewers, the ARPHA’s collaboration-centred online environment takes care after each submitted manuscript during the review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving stages, so that no one needs to deal with locally stored files and their transfer by email or third-party cloud storages. Additionally, the platform is designed to regularly notify the users about any required action, thus sparing the burden of unnecessary communication and ensuring the speedy processing of manuscripts.
All three journals operate a Diamond Open Access policy, thanks to the support of the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, making the journals free to publish for all authors.
Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny
Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny is the successor of the historical Entomologische Abhandlungen, formerly published by the Museum of Zoology at Dresden.
Its scope covers the taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeontology of arthropod taxa, but excludes faunistics and research with a strong regional focus. Descriptions of new taxa are only welcome when embedded in a wider context, for example, a phylogenetic, evolutionary, or biogeographical framework.
Similarly, Vertebrate Zoology was preceded by Zoologische Abhandlungen, also formerly published by the Museum of Zoology at Dresden. Its first publications since the move to ARPHA Platform and part of the first journal volume for 2021 are already a fact.
The journal deals with research on taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, phylogeny, historical biogeography and palaeontology of vertebrates. Again, descriptions of new taxa should be integrated into a proper context, for example, a complete revision of a taxon. To support accountability and reproducibility in science and academia, the journal requires that studied specimens have to be deposited in a public scientific collection.
Vertebrate Zoology’s Impact Factor is currently standing at 1.167, while its last Scopus CiteScore reached 2.1 (2019).
Geologica Saxonica
Geologica Saxonica – Journal of Central European Geology, began its life in distant 1876, when it was founded under the name Mitteilungen aus dem Königlichen Mineralogisch-Geologischen und Prähistorischen Museum by German geologist Hanns Bruno Geinitz, renowned for his work on the Carboniferous and Cretaceous rocks and fossils of Saxony.
The journal’s scope ecompasses geology, paleontology, stratigraphy, petrography, mineralogy and geoscience history with focus on Central Europe.
“At Pensoft, we are delighted to support a world-renowned natural history association like Senckenberg in carrying its legacy and treasure of knowledge into our days and well beyond. Now, with ARPHA’s white-label solution, we’re certain that the journals will simultaneously preserve their identity and enjoy all perks of modern and technologically advanced publishing,”
comments Pensoft and ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
“We are very pleased to have found reliable partners in Pensoft and the ARPHA platform for our three publications to further increase their visibility. Senckenberg’s scientific publications have a long – almost 200-year tradition – and are now shown in a new and innovative design with unprecedented information retrieval options!”
says Prof. Dr. Uwe Fritz, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Vertebrate Zoology and head of the Department of Zoology at Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden.
Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) upgrades its unique concept to appeal to scientific projects, conference organisers and research institutions
Hence, as a forward-looking, open science-driven journalResearch Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) took it as its own responsibility to encourage scientific project teams, conference organisers and research institutions to bring together unconventional research outputs (e.g. grant proposals, data management plans, project deliverables, policy briefs, conference materials) as well as traditional (e.g. research or review papers, monographs, etc.), including such published elsewhere. To do so, RIO now provides the platform ready to be used as a research knowledge hub, where published outcomes are preserved permanently and easier to share, disseminate, reference and reuse.
Hence, RIO stepped up its game by turning permanent article collections into a one-stop source of diverse research items, where project coordinators, conference organisers or research institutions can not only publish early, interim and conclusive research items as they emerge within a research project, a series of events or the continuous scientific efforts at their lab, but also link relevant publications (i.e. preprints, articles or other documents, published elsewhere) available elsewhere through their metadata. As a result, they will receive a one-stop source under their own branding for every piece of scientific contribution ready to present to funding bodies or prospective collaborators and future research teams.
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).
Apart from bringing contextually linked research outcomes together, thus prompting findability, readership and citability en masse, RIO’s approach to collections ensures further accessibility by not only having RIO-published articles available in traditional PDF, semantically enriched HTML and minable XML format. The open-science journal has now made it possible for users to add to their collections preprints from ARPHA Preprints, as well as author-formatted PDFs (e.g. project deliverables, reports, policy briefs, etc.) and linked metadata to documents published elsewhere. Thanks to the integration of the journal with the general-purpose open-access repository Zenodo, all items in a collection are archived, and additionally indexed, disseminated and cited.
By focusing on article and preprint collections coming out from a research project, institution or conference, RIO provides a quite specific and unique combination of benefits to all actors of the research process: scientists, project coordinators, funders and institutions:
Project, institution or conference branding and promotion.
One-stop point for outputs of a research project, institution or conference.
Free publication of author-formatted project outputs (i.e. grant proposals, deliverables, reports, policy briefs, conference materials and others).
Inclusivity through adding articles, preprints and other documents published elsewhere as easy as entering the DOI number of the document.
Credit and recognition for the Collection and Guest editors, who take care to organise and manage the article collection.
Easier discoverability and usability of topically related studies to benefit both authors and readers.
Increased visibility of related papers in a collection, even when these might otherwise not have much exposure.
Simultaneous citation of multiple articles related to a certain subject.
Citation and referencing of the whole collection as a complete entity.
DOI and citation details for collections and individual articles.
Last, but not least, both collections and individual publications in RIO enjoy the variety of default and on-demand science communication services, provided by Pensoft.
How do project coordinators, funders and institutions benefit from a collection in RIO?
At the time a grant proposal is submitted to a research funder for evaluation, the team behind the proposed project has already put in considerable efforts, resulting in a unique idea with the potential to make a great stride towards the resolution of an outstanding problem in science, if only given the chance. However, too many of these ideas are bound to remain locked away in the archives of those funders, not because they are lacking in scientific value, but due to limited funds.
So, with its launch back in 2015, RIO Journal made it possible to publish and shed light on grant proposals and research ideas in general, similar early research outputs regardless of whether they are eventually funded or not, a novelty in scholarly publishing which earned RIO the SPARC Innovator Award Winner in 2016. To date, the journal has already published 75 grant proposals.
Then, imagine what a contribution to science it would make to bring together the whole continuum of knowledge and scientific work all the way from the grant proposal to data and software management plans, workshop reports, policy briefs and all interim and final deliverables produced within the span of the project!
On the other hand, funders are increasingly evaluating a prospective project’s impact based on its communication strategy. So, why not publish a grant proposal at the time of the submission of your proposal, in order to prove to the funding body that your project is serious about optimising its outreach to both the public and academia? Furthermore, by having an academic journal host any subsequent project deliverable, as a coordinator, you can rest assured that the communication activities of your project remain consistent and efficient.
In an excellent example of a project collection, the EU-funded ICEDIG (Innovation and Consolidation for Large Scale Digitisation of Natural Heritage), led by several major natural history institutions, including the Natural History Museum of London, Naturalis Biodiversity Center (the Netherlands), the French National Museum of Natural History and Helsinki University, brought together policy briefs, project reports, research articles and review papers, in order to provide a fantastic overview of their own research continuum. As a result, future researchers and various stakeholders can easily piece together the key components within the project, in order to learn from, recreate or even build on the experience of ICEDIG.
Similarly, conference organisers can make use of their own branded collections to overcome the ephemerality of presented research by collating virtually all valuable conference outputs, including abstracts, posters, presentations, datasets and full-text conference talks. For further convenience, a collection can be divided into subcollections, in order to organise the contribution by type or symposium. What particularly appeals to conference participants is the ARPHA Writing Tool, an intuitive collaborative online environment, which practically guides the user through each step: authoring, submission and pre-submission review, within a set of pre-designed, yet flexible templates available for each type of a conference output, thus sparing them the hassle to familiarise themselves with specific and perplexing formatting requirements
For institutions, RIO offers the opportunity to continuously provide evidence of the scholarly impact of their organisation. To better serve the needs of different labs or research teams, an institution can easily organise their outputs into various subcollections, and also customise their own article types, as well as the available usage tracking systems. Furthermore, by making use of the available pre-paid plans, institutions can support their researchers by covering fully or partially the publication charges at a discounted rate.
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Find more information regarding the submission and review process, policies and pricing, visit RIO Journal’s website.
