Scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft has launchedIndividual-based Ecology (IBE), a new peer-reviewed, diamond open-access journal established to promote an individual-based perspective in ecology.
IBE aims to bridge the gap between individual-level responses and broader ecological patterns. In the face of global challenges, the journal is looking to contribute to both a better understanding and new sets of predictions of how ecological systems will respond to anthropogenic change. It aims to support the development of appropriate mitigation and restoration measures by focusing on the entities that actually and directly respond to change, i.e. individual organisms.
The journal embraces basic and applied, theoretical and empirical research in terrestrial and aquatic ecology. It welcomes contributions that incorporate data or novel insights about individual organisms and their interactions that are relevant to explaining system-level dynamics. IBE will publish a wide range of articles, including empirical, experimental, and modeling studies, as well as reviews, perspectives, and methodological papers.
As a diamond open-access journal, IBE is currently free to publish and free to read, ensuring that all published research is freely accessible to the global community.
The journal will utilise Pensoft’s innovative ARPHA platform, known for its robust support of academic publishing and efficient dissemination of research. Thanks to its fast-track publishing solution, the new journal offers a seamless, end-to-end publishing experience, encompassing all stages between manuscript submission and article publication, indexation, dissemination and permanent archiving. The publishing services provided by ARPHA also include a variety of human-provided services and integrations with third-party providers, intended to maximise the reach and usability of scholarly knowledge published in IBE.
IBE will be led by four editors-in-chief: Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm and Prof. Dr. Karin Frank of Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Prof. Dr. Mark E. Hauber of The City University of New York, and Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch of the University of Potsdam.
A banner of IBE presented at the German Ecological Society’s 53rd annual conference
„We are excited to launch Individual-based Ecology, a new, promising journal that will contribute to a better understanding of ecological systems and how we interact with them,” said Prof Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA and Pensoft.
“The time has come to establish individual-based ecology as an important complement to all other branches of ecology, both because we need it to fully understand and predict the response of ecological systems to change, and because empirical and modelling approaches have reached a level where the collection and use of individual-based data has become possible,” says Prof Volker Grimm, one of the editors-in-chief.
“It is exciting to be able to launch a journal that embraces ecological principles at the level of individuals across any and all lineages of life on our planet”, notes Prof. Mark E. Hauber, also an editor-in-chief.
“This new journal will promote nothing less than a paradigm shift in ecological thinking from averaging approaches to a science focused on the fundamental agents of change, i.e. individual organisms. Systematically recognising the importance of individual variation in ecological systems will transform our fundamental understanding of how biodiversity and its components emerge from individual responses and interactions, and how the emerging levels of organisation will respond to changing environments,” said Prof Florian Jeltsch from the editorial team.
IBE joins a number of open-access ecology journals published by Pensoft.For more information on the journal’s focus and scope and guidelines to authors, visit IBE’s website and follow it on Facebook and X.
The journal aims to serve as a leading platform for scholarly research, discussion, and innovation in the field of natural history collections worldwide and will be published by Pensoft Publishers.
By promoting the exchange of knowledge between museum professionals, researchers, educators, and enthusiasts, the publication aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of natural history and its significance in society.
Natural History Collections and Museomics promoted by Pensoft at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology in Kyoto, Japan.
Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM) encourages interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across fields such as taxonomy, conservation, education, ethics, and museum studies. The editorial team welcomes original research articles, reviews, case studies, methods, letters and perspectives addressing a wide range of topics related to natural history institutions and collections.
The journal is supported by CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), Europe’s leading voice for taxonomy and systematic biology. The support of this European network of scientific institutions ensures a robust and collaborative foundation for the journal’s academic endeavours.
By utilising a Diamond Open Access model, the journal allows free access to published content without any fees for authors or readers. This approach ensures that important research can reach the widest possible audience, promoting inclusivity and global collaboration in the field.
A strong Editorial Board is already in place, co-chaired by two distinguished scholars in the field.
Dr Franco Andreone: Serving as the zoology curator at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin, Italy, Dr Andreone is a renowned herpetologist with a profound impact on amphibian taxonomy, roles of natural history museums and conservation, particularly in Italy and Madagascar. His experience as a former Chair of the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group – Madagascar and his current role as a special advisor underscore his life-longdedication to preserving biodiversity.
Prof Shuqiang Li: A prominent Chinese arachnologist, Prof Li brings his vast expertise in zoological systematics to the journal. Among many accomplishments, he led the construction of 29 natural history museums for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of which is an 8,800 square metre collection building to preserve more than 10 million specimens and another a 6,600 square metre public museum in the Zoological Institute in Beijing. As leading taxonomist and the Editor-in-Chief of Zoological Systematics, Professor Li has described more than 2,000 new species. His work on how Tethyan changes shaped diversification is most notable. His research has also revealed the origin of spider webs based multi-omics analyses.
The Board expects the team of subject (associate) editors to soon expand further, as they have been actively recruiting colleagues from diverse professional and geographical backgrounds. Experts in fields within the scope of the new journal are also invited to apply to join the NHCM team as either editors or reviewers. Conveniently, the respective application forms are made accessible from the journal website’s homepage.
“The journal Natural History Collections and Museomics will serve as a perfectforum and place to publish cutting-edge research.
“Natural history collections are gargantuan resources and tools to discover and preserve global diversity. We need to treat them as immense treasures to discover and describe new species and understand Earth’s marvels.”
Dr Franco Andreone and Prof Shuqiang Li, Editors-in-Chief.
“We are thrilled to launch Natural History Collections and Museomics on the ARPHA Platform. The importance of natural history collections cannot be overstated and we look forward to publishing valuable research to a wide audience.”
Prof Dr Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers.
Submissions to the journal are now open. Researchers, scholars, and practitioners are invited to contribute articles to Natural History Collections and Museomics.
For more information and submission guidelines, please visit the Natural History Collections and Museomics website.
You can also follow the journal on X and Facebook.
About ARPHA Platform:
ARPHA is a full-featured, end-to-end publishing platform for journals, books, conference materials and preprints. ARPHA offers flexible operating and business models, and a wide-range of automated and human-provided services. The ARPHA team places a special focus on its scholarly communication solutions designed to leverage the visibility and outreach of academic output, while promoting inclusivity and engagement.
About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomics and many others. Over the past 30 years, Pensoft has built a reputation for its innovations in the field, after launching ZooKeys: the very first digital-first scientific journal in zoology and the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a biodiversity article. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
Contrary to the popular expression, diamonds do not shine. Instead, they reflect, refract and disperse light to the fascination of the onlooker.
Similarly, even though Diamond Open Access (OA) offers a stellar publication and dissemination route for both readers and authors, some of the biggest actors in the scholarly publishing industry have been trying to deflect the concept behind it. While they might be moving from reader-facing charges, they seem to be billing libraries, institutions and consortia the same money they would have received in subscription fees.
National library consortia are paying for read-and-publish / publish-and-read ‘transformative agreements’ (also known as ‘transitional agreements’ or ‘big deals’), which include clauses for “non-APC” quotas of Open Access publishing for authors based in their country’s institutions. As a result, authors need to only submit their work to journals cited in these agreements, if they wish to avoid APC payments.
Meanwhile, these Transformation Agreements (TAs) are raising increasing concerns about their capability to achieve their very purpose: assisting scientific publishers in flipping their journals from closed- to open-access models in line with the objectives of the global Open Access 2020 Initiative. Back in 2016, the initiative signed by over 150 scholarly organisations posited a deadline for the majority of today’s scholarly journals to transfer from subscription to OA by 2020. While it is obvious that as of mid-2024 this transition is far from complete, a recent report issued by Jisc, estimates that based on 2018-2022 data, “it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA”. Citing “an erosion in confidence that TAs will achieve a transition within an acceptable timescale”, the report also highlights pressing issues concerning transparency on how “OA publishing charges are costed” and how and when the surveyed publishers will achieve their task.
Impact on scholars
The above-mentioned approaches to ostensibly free-of-charge scholarly publishing are indeed taking a great burden off the shoulders of many scientists, as long as they are working in top research institutions in certain countries.
In the meantime, independent researchers and smaller or underfunded institutions – typically located in countries that have not signed such expensive agreements at national or library consortia levels – are left out of the equation. If they wish to publish in the very same flashy journals, they need to pay fees in the range of several thousands of dollars either out of their research grants, or their own pockets. The “barriers to access” seem to have simply transformed into ”barriers to publication”.
There are also production costs. After all, quality publication of human knowledge in the vast digital world, which is increasingly powered by smart computer algorithms and Artificial Intelligence, surely costs some money, doesn’t it? Publication platforms comprising continuously evolving workflows and third-party integrations, impeccable user experience, diligent customer support, and far-reaching dissemination and communication, all require specialised staff and equipment. The question is how much does it cost to make science effectively public? The immediate answer is that taxpayers currently pay corporate publishers prices several times as high as actual publication costs.
Impact on smaller journals, societies and publishers
In the past, smaller publishers predominantly launched as open-access academic outlets. After all, they were either run by scientists who saw paywalls as the unthinkable evil that hinders the world’s progress, or they simply realised that their primary audience could not afford to pay to learn about their field. Further, it is the same altruistic and understanding backstory of society and smaller institution-led journals – in addition to their historical legacy and independence from commercial entities – that make them particularly cherished and respected in academia.
The issue here is that, these days, scientific publications and journals abound, which makes it practically impossible for one’s work to reach another researcher, let alone non-specialist audiences, including policy makers, without a lot of dedicated effort. Even if there was a single huge publicly available centralised source for all research outcomes out there, it would be practically impossible for one – expert or not – to navigate the deluge of data and statements without sophisticated tools, infrastructure and workflows capable of discerning what is actually useful.
To ensure scientific output is practically findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), you need much more than a URL that resolves at no additional charge. Instead, a journal needs to provide optimal discoverability and visibility for its content, so that publications are capable of reaching their intended audience via existing search engines and portals.
This can only be achieved through professional publishing platforms (e.g. peer review, publication, hosting, third-party service integrations), tools (e.g. metadata import/export; semantic tagging) and services (e.g. application to indexing databases; in-house editorial services; copy-editing, customer support; science communication), which will inevitably increase the costs of the publication process.
Here comes the tough call for most smaller institutions and journals: whether to seek the services of multiple professional providers and then introduce APCs to cover the expenditure OR to opt for in-house editorial services and open-source infrastructure, but compromise the quality of service, including the discoverability and reach of the content with which their authors entrust them.
Yet, this is a choice that only needs to be made by small- to mid-sized, OA-born publishers and journal owners, since large commercial, originally subscription publishers are covered through deals and agreements, as long as a research paper is submitted by a research team with the right affiliation. The situation begs the question: who is actually being charged?
Impact on equity and sustainability in academia
Suffice to say, the scientific community has gone a long way to prompt public and worldwide access to the latest research at a greater than ever speed and scale. However, there is still a gaping chasm in academia when it comes to inclusivity and equity in scholarly publishing and dissemination of knowledge. Despite the ongoing work and progress coordinated by international funders of research and policy-makers, a vast part of the world continues to be singled out due to a mismatch in funding and unhealthy commercialisation that paves the way to mono-/oligopolies.
Arguably, academia is threatened by its own good intentions and a new status quo, where it is only researchers working at well-funded research institutions that get to publish their work in visible and discoverable journals.
Our way forward
While our team at Pensoft realises there is no easy way to high-quality, open and equitable scholarly publishing, we are firm supporters of an environment governed by transparency, inclusivity and democracy, where researchers are not “limited in their choice of publication channels due to financial capacities rather than quality criteria”, as put by the Council of the European Union in their “Conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing” issued last year.
If scholarly publishers and technology providers remain true to their purpose of being a vehicle for scientific knowledge between the individual scientist and the world, we can collectively contribute to a healthy diversity of continuously developing tools and workflows for researchers, journal owners, learned societies and scientific funders to cater for their own users and audiences in the ever-evolving modern world.
As such, we have accepted it as our mission to provide affordable, compromise-free Diamond OA, empowering smaller journals to deliver top-quality services to their authors, editors and readers. Alternatively, our end-to-end publishing platform ARPHAalso offers several Gold OA and custom-made workflows designed to support particular groups of authors, as they balance affordability, functionality, reliability, transparency and long-term sustainability. In both cases, our client journals enjoy a complete set of highly automated and human-provided services packaged in a way that fits their wants and needs.
Above all, our approach is based on working individually with journal owners, societies and publishers to create their own custom operational and business model, and achieve long-term sustainability for their scholarly titles.
To ensure our utter transparency and trustworthiness for our clients, we actively support and adopt international best practices and standards in scholarly publishing, including cOAlition S’s Plan S requirements regarding full transparency of costs and prices, and the Journal Comparison Service.
Innovations in Agriculture, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing agricultural research, has partnered with Pensoft to transition to the ARPHA publishing platform. This move will enhance the journal’s publishing workflow, content visibility, and elevate the impact of their research within the global agricultural community.
Established in 1970, Innovations in Agriculture is committed to publishing high-quality research that addresses the critical challenges and opportunities in modern agriculture. The journal covers a wide range of topics, including agricultural technology, sustainable farming practices, crop and livestock management, and policy implications.
All the journal’s legacy papers have been successfully migrated to the ARPHA platform, and the first new issue has been published on its new ARPHA-powered website, complete with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) tags on individual articles.
Research articles showcasing SDG tags.
By utilising ARPHA’s white-label solution, Innovations in Agriculture will enjoy several key benefits, including a streamlined submission and review process, automated workflows, advanced authoring tools, and robust archiving and indexing.
During the journal’s launching phase, authors may benefit from a yearly quota covering the free publication of 25 standard articles (up to 20 published pages).
“We are thrilled to welcome Innovations in Agriculture to ARPHA’s family of next-generation scientific journals. ARPHA’s publishing solutions will help Innovations in Agriculture thrive and continue disseminating important research.”
said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.
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For more information, visit the Innovations in Agriculture website.
For the first time, the Journal Citation Reports™ – released by Clarivate in late June 2024 – features the open-access scientific journal One Ecosystem. The inaugural Journal Impact Factor for One Ecosystem stands at 1.8.
The 2024 report reflects how many times content published in a particular journal in 2021 and 2022 was cited in the last complete year: 2023. Then, this total count is divided by the number of “citable” (i.e. research and review) articles to estimate the JIF for 2023.
The news comes shortly after the journal specialised in ecology and sustainability data received a Scopus CiteScore of 4.6. In comparison to Clarivate and the Journal Impact Factor, Scopus uses data from its own database and calculates its CiteScore based on publications and citations from the last four complete years.
Amongst the unique features of the journal are the collaborative writing and review environment integrated within the manuscript submission workflow to allow for heavily automated structured data import; semantically enriched publications; and field-specific article formats, such as Ecosystem Service Mapping; Ecosystem Service Models; Ecosystem Accounting Table; Monitoring Schema.
“Since day one, One Ecosystem has been widely praised in the community for its novel and data-driven approach to ecology and sustainability science, coupled with a straight-forward and low-cost open-access scholarly publishing strategy for any researcher in the world. Now, the recognition by Web of Science and Scopus provides the journal with further proof of its top quality and research integrity that – I expect – will attract even more researchers in the field to submit their work to the journal”
This collaboration underscores the society’s commitment to maintaining high-quality, high-visibility and low-cost open-access publishing for the biogeographical community.
“This switch of our journal to a cutting-edge platform, and its committed team of editors, should continue to raise the journal’s visibility and impact,”
Established by TIBS in 2009, Frontiers of Biogeography serves as an independent forum for research dissemination, and publishes studies on all geographical variations of life at all levels of organisation. The journal adheres to rigorous academic standards, reflecting the mission of TIBS to promote and advance public understanding of biogeographical sciences.
The journal’s editorial leadership includes Prof. Robert J. Whittaker (University of Oxford, United Kingdom), Dr. Janet Franklin (San Diego State University, USA) and Prof. Mark J. Costello (Nord University, Norway), all esteemed figures in the field.
Frontiers of Biogeography was launched on the ARPHA Platform on the 1st of July 2024. The platform is now open for new submissions and offers a robust review and publication process. Articles and supplementary materials published on ARPHA will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), ensuring wide accessibility and reuse. All previously published issues on the e-Scholarship platform will remain freely accessible, ensuring the continuity of knowledge dissemination.
Frontiers of Biogeography has recently been selected for inclusion in the Web of Science™. Beginning with volume 14(1), articles will be indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index, Zoological Record, Biological Abstracts, and BIOSIS Previews, significantly enhancing the journal’s visibility.
Furthermore, the journal’s latest Scopus CiteScore of 4.3 places it in the Q1 category for Ecology and Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Systematics, and elevates it from Q3 to Q2 in the Global and Planetary Change category.
“I am looking forward to working with the new platform and to the start of a new partnership with our colleagues at Pensoft Publishers. This arrangement underlines the commitment of The International Biogeography Society to the growth and success of Frontiers of Biogeography as a service to our members and the broader scientific community,”
stated Prof. Dr. Robert J. Whittaker, Editor-in-Chief.
“In these days of sometimes exorbitant costs to pay publication charges by some of the big publishers, TIBS and Pensoft are joining forces to make it possible for all authors to be able to publish their work at reasonable costs while maintaining the high scholarly standards of peer-review and editorial management which are the foundation of good science,”
added Prof. Dr. Mark J. Costello, Co-Editor-in-Chief.
“We are excited to welcome Frontiers of Biogeography to the ARPHA Platform and look forward to a successful, open-access future. This partnership aligns with our mission to support scientific research through innovative publishing solutions,”
said Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft Publishers.
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Visit the Frontiers of Biogeography’s new website at https://biogeography.pensoft.net/. Use the Email alert field on the homepage to follow the latest publications, news, and highlights from Frontiers of Biogeography.
You can also follow the journal on X (formerly Twitter) at @newbiogeo.
Keep up to date with the latest from TIBS by following them on X (@Biogeography) and joining the society’s Facebook group.
The Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research (JBCR), the peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary scientific journal of Medical University Pleven, has moved to Pensoft’s ARPHA platform. Enjoying an improved publishing infrastructure, the journal has already published its first issue after the move on its new ARPHA-powered website.
Open to scientists from all fields of medicine and related areas, JBCR welcomes interdisciplinary scientific results and articles presenting diverse pathologies from various clinical perspectives. It publishes reviews, original articles, and communications relevant to biomedical, clinical, and public health, medical education, and case reports.
Published since 2008, JBCR is a diamond open-access journal, meaning it requires no article submission charges, and is free to both authors and readers. The journal currently publishes two issues per year.
Opting for ARPHA’s white-label solution, JBCR joins a number of academic journals in medicine already hosted on the ARPHA platform, such as Folia Medica and Pharmacia. It will take advantage of ARPHA’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. By leveraging the innovative platform, JBCR enhances the visibility and impact of the published research, providing a better experience for its authors, readers, and editors.
“We are excited to welcome the Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research to ARPHA’s family of next-generation scientific journals,” said Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft, the company behind the ARPHA platform. “With the help of ARPHA’s publishing solutions, JBCR can ensure efficient, high-quality dissemination of important medical research.”
Late May 2024 saw the whole content ever published in VCS added to the Core Collection of the renowned academic platform, further boosting its discoverability, accessibility and reliability to researchers and other stakeholders alike, confirms the Indexing team of Pensoft and the ARPHA scholarly publishing platform.
“Many thanks to IAVS as owner and Pensoft as publisher, who made this success story possible. However, most of all, this early inclusion into the Web of Science Core Edition is due to the good articles of our authors and the great volunteer service our Associate Editors, Guest Editors, Linguistic Editors, Editorial Review Board members, and other reviewers did and do for VCS,”
the Chief Editors comment on the latest success.
The news means that VCS is soon to receive its very first Journal Impact Factor (JIF): allegedly the most popular and sought after journal-level metric, which annually releases the citation (or “impact”) rate of a given scholarly journal over the last period. By the end of next month, for example, we will know how different journals indexed by WoS have performed compared to each other, based on the number of citations received in 2023 (from other journals indexed by WoS) for papers published in 2021 and 2022 combined.
In 2022, VCS and its all-time publications were also featured by the largest and similarly acclaimed scientific database: Scopus, thus receiving its very first Scopus CiteScore* last June. At 2.0, the result instantly gave a promise of the widely appreciated content published in the journal.
In an editorial, published in the beginning of 2024, the Chief Editors assessed the performance of the journal and analysed the available data from Scopus to predict the citation rates for the journal in the next few years. There, the team also compared the journal’s latest performance with similar journals, including the other two journals owned by the IAVS (i.e. Applied Vegetation Science and Journal of Vegetation Science). Given that as of May 2024 the Scopus CiteScoreTracker for VCS reads 2.5, their optimistic forecasts seem rather realistic.
“The VCS articles of 2023 were on average even better cited than those in Applied Vegetation Science of the same year and had reached about the same level as Journal of Vegetation Science and Biodiversity and Conservation,”
they concluded.
In a recent post, published on the IAVS blog, on behalf of the four VCS Chief Editors, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler further comments on the latest achievements of the journal, while also highlighting particularly valued recent publications.
The team also uses the occasion to invite experts in the field of vegetation science to submit their manuscripts in 2024 to make use of the generous financial support by the IAVS. Given the increasing interest in VCS, the journal also invites additional linguistic editors, as well as reviewers who wish to join the Editorial Review Board.
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Keep yourself updated with news from Vegetation Classification and Survey on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. You can also follow IAVS on X and join the Association’s public group on Facebook.
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*Note that the Scopus database features a different selection of scientific journals compared to Web of Science to estimate citation metrics. The indexers are also using different formulae, where the former looks into citations made in the last two complete years for eligible papers published in the same years.
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About Vegetation Classification and Survey:
Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) is an international, peer-reviewed, online journal on plant community ecology published on behalf of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). It is devoted to vegetation survey and classification at any organisational and spatial scale and without restriction to certain methodological approaches.
The scope of VCS is focused on vegetation typologies and vegetation classification systems, their methodological foundation, their development and their application. The journal publishes original papers that develop new typologies as well as applied studies that use such typologies, for example, in vegetation mapping, ecosystem modelling, nature conservation, land use management, or monitoring. Particularly encouraged are methodological studies that design and compare tools for vegetation classification and mapping, such as algorithms, databases and nomenclatural principles, or are dealing with the conceptual and theoretical bases of vegetation survey and classification.
VCS also includes two permanent collections (or sections): “Ecoinformatics” and “Phytosociological Nomenclature”.
About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomics and many others. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
About ARPHA Platform:
Pensoft publishes its journals on its self-developed ARPHA publishing platform: an 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 heavily customised by client journals not necessarily linked to Pensoft as a publisher, since ARPHA is specially targeted at learned societies, research institutions and university presses. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models. Alongside its elaborate and highly automated publishing tools and services, ARPHA provides a range of human-provided services, such as science communication and assistance in indexation at databases like Web of Science and Scopus, to provide a complete full-featured publishing solution package.
Launched in 1989 to cover the areas of agriculture and food science, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, the open-access scientific journal has already begun publishing its 2024 contenton its new ARPHA-powered website. The move comes as a result of a new partnership signed between the United Arab Emirates University and Pensoft: the scholarly publisher and technology innovator.
Since 2013, EJFA is also indexed by Web of Science. Its latest Journal Impact Factor is 1.1, while its Scopus CiteScore reads 1.9.
Launched in 2013, ARPHA is Pensoft’s in-house publishing platform, initially developed by the publisher as an all-round solution for its own journal portfolio. In 2016, ARPHA became available as a white-label solution, thereby allowing client journals to retain their owners as exclusive publishers, and keep their identities intact.
The move to ARPHA ensures a seamless, end-to-end publishing solution for EJFA that encompasses all stages from manuscript submission to article publication, indexation, dissemination, and archiving. The publishing services provided by ARPHA also include a variety of human-provided services and integrations with third-party providers, intended to maximise the reach and usability of scholarly knowledge published in EJFA.
“Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities.”
Abdul Jaleel, Editor-in-Chief of EJFA
EJFA publishes original research articles, review papers and short communications. It welcomes studies from a wide spectrum of agriculture and food disciplines, including sustainable agriculture systems, agricultural biotechnology, environmental impacts, food safety, and food engineering.
Submissions to EJFA are subject to single-blind peer review. The journal operates a continuous publication model, which means that once accepted, papers go online as soon as they are typeset and ready for publication.
Due to ARPHA Platform’s technologically advanced and automated dissemination, indexing and archiving workflows, as well as its platform-level integrations with >60 leading databases, content published in EJFA is rapidly exported to dozens of platforms and widely used academic search portals, thereby becoming ever easier to discover, access, reuse and cite by audiences from all over the world.
EJFA has already published its first articles since the move. The journal’s backlist content all the way to the inaugural 1989 journal volume can be accessed from a link on the journal’s new website’s homepage. Conveniently, more recent content has been made available from the Articles space.
“It’s an honour to partner with an esteemed institution like the United Arab Emirates University. We are confident that in ARPHA Platform, our new partners will find a great fit for the immaculate professionalism, integrity and overall appeal of the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Being the first Middle Eastern journal to join ARPHA’s journal portfolio, EJFA has already become a very special client of ours.”
“We are really excited to partner with Pensoft and run the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture on the ARPHA platform. This decision by the UAEU will really help the journal to reach the next level with the experience of the Pensoft team and the high-end technology of ARPHA. We believe that this strategic partnership will boost the visibility and accessibility of our journal globally. Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities,” says EJFA’s Editor-in-Chief, Abdul Jaleel.
Leading scholarly publisher Pensoft has announced a strategic collaboration with R Discovery, the AI-powered research discovery platform by Cactus Communications, a renowned science communications and technology company. This partnership aims to revolutionize the accessibility and discoverability of research articles published by Pensoft, making them more readily available on R Discovery to its over three million researchers across the globe.
R Discovery, acclaimed for its advanced algorithms and an extensive database boasting over 120 million scholarly articles, empowers researchers with intelligent search capabilities and personalized recommendations. Through its innovative Reading Feed feature, R Discovery delivers tailored suggestions in a format reminiscent of social media, identifying articles based on individual research interests. This not only saves time but also keeps researchers updated with the latest and most relevant studies in their field.
One of R Discovery’s standout features is its ability to provide paper summaries, audio readings, and language translation, enabling users to quickly assess a paper’s relevance and enhance their research reading experience significantly.
With over 2.5 million app downloads and upwards of 80 million journal articles featured, the R Discovery database is one of the largest scholarly content repositories.
“At Pensoft, we do realise that Open Science is much more than cost-free access to research outputs. It is also about easier discoverability and reusability, or, in other words, how likely it is for the reader to come across a particular scientific publication and, as a result, cite and build on those findings in his/her own studies. By feeding the content of our journals into R Discovery, we’re further facilitating the discoverability of the research done and shared by the authors who trust us with their work,” said ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
Abhishek Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of Cactus Communications, commented on the collaboration, “We are delighted to work with Pensoft and offer researchers easy access to the publisher’s high-quality research articles on R Discovery. This is a milestone in our quest to support academia in advancing open science that can help researchers improve the world.”
So far, R Discovery has successfully established partnership with over 20 publishers, enhancing the platform’s extensive repository of scholarly content. By joining forces with R Discovery, Pensoft solidifies its dedication to making scholarly publications from its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio easily discoverable and accessible.
