Tag: Academia

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Bulgaria’s publishers and scholars gathered to discuss the move of the national scientific journals to the global scene

The event was co-organised by Pensoft and the Bulgarian National Science Fund (BNSF) at the Ministry of Education and Science

Over one hundred representatives of Bulgarian scholarly journals and academic institutions attended a seminar, organised by the scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft and the Bulgarian National Science Fund (BNSF) at the Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria. The meeting, themed “The Bulgarian scholarly journals in the global scientific environment – advancements in the publishing model, technological modernisation, indexing, dissemination and promotion,” took place in Sofia in September. 

In his speech, Prof. George Vaysilov, Director of the BNSF, highlighted the crucial role of scholarly publishing reformation in Bulgaria. He also answered various questions concerning the funding available to scientific journals.

“These events are useful for the Bulgarian scientific journals and the Bulgarian National Science Fund” will continue to participate in their organisation,” he said.

Prof. George Vaysilov gave a welcome speech before answering various questions from the attendees.
Photo by Pensoft.

In their talks, the Pensoft team addressed key topics and innovations related to journal publishing, management, dissemination and marketing in the digital era. They also showcased how these challenges are approached at the journals published via the scholarly Pensoft-developed ARPHA Platform. 

Main topics in the discussions were „Plan S”, the ongoing initiative for a global transition to immediate Open Access (Gold Open Access); exclusive digitisation; interoperability, findability and accessibility to online research items and data; traditional and alternative metrics for tracking journal impact; as well as the specifics about journal indexing. 


“Technological modernisation of the publishing process in an Open Access and Open Science environment” was the theme of Prof. Lyubomir Penev’s presentation. 
Photo by Pensoft.

Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Director and founder of Pensoft and ARPHA, added:

“In our own lifetimes, we’ve been the witnesses of a tremendous technological breakthrough on a global level. Not only does academia need not be left behind – its place is at the very forefront of such a revolution. This is exactly what we intend to do with ARPHA: to provide an all-rounded platform coupled with all the associated services, in order to provide the technological backbone needed by historical, as well as recently launched journals to make a stand on the international scene. Having listened to the questions and concerns of the Bulgarian publishers, I am able to confirm that the situation is not that different to what we see everywhere: there is the evident understanding of the situation and desire for a change. What is necessary is only a bit of practical know-how.”

The revolution in scholarly publishing in recent years. A part of Prof. Lyubomir Penev’s presentation.
Photo by Pensoft.

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As transparent as it gets! Four pricing plans & operating models from ARPHA available to OA academic journals

One size to fit them all? At ARPHA, we are well aware that it does not work like that in academia, let alone when it comes to accommodating individual scholarly journals from across the tremendously varied publishing landscape. 

This is why we have prepared four options to account for the specific aims and needs of ARPHA’s potential clients, while bearing in mind their resources and sustainability. 

In the spirit of transparency and openness, along with a comprehensive list of services that clarifies how each plan compares with the rest, we have provided the associated pricing ranges, where the total expenditure is easy to calculate, as it is based solely on the volume of published content. To support emerging publishers and prolific institutions, and express gratitude for their trust, we offer discounts for multiple journals joining ARPHA’s community.

Visit our website to see a detailed list of the services provided in our LITE, BASIC, ADVANCED and PREMIUM plans.

While Open Science initiatives, including OA2020 and Plan S, have clearly become the major talking points, academic institutions, societies and small-to-medium publishers from around the world are increasingly looking to chip in the growing community and make their own stand for science becoming truly efficient, responsible and inclusive by ensuring openness, transparency and FAIRness. But how do they do that when capped budgets, scarce human resources and lack of know-how in specific areas come into play? 

While one may be struggling with bringing together the right in-house expertise, another might be unable to keep track of the ‘top wanted’ integrations and services required for any state-of-the-art publication venue, and yet another might be encountering difficulties in communicating their otherwise ground-breaking published research to the public. In our experience, all of them are most likely experiencing difficulties with either the development of an advanced and user-friendly technological backbone or covering the associated costs.


ARPHA provides a highly automated, end-to-end publishing platform to ALL clients by default, which ensures that the research in their journals is just as easy to prepare and publish as it is to discover, access and reuse later on.

Here are the good news! ALL journals published on ARPHA Platform take advantage of our signature high-tech and easy-to-operate full-featured platform by default. What we mean, is that any journal benefits from an end-to-end, entirely online publishing solution, which takes care of the manuscripts all the way from submission and peer review to editing, publication, dissemination, indexing and archiving (see “The 5 Most Distinct Features of ARPHA”), while the annual maintenance could easily cost as little as a few thousands euros.

ARPHA stands for much more than a publishing platform.
It also comprises an extensive collection of services brought together in order to attend next-to-all demands associated with scholarly publishing.

On top of ARPHA’s user- and collaboration-friendly platform that allows for authors, reviewers and editors to easily and conveniently manage and track the progress of manuscripts, thereby ensuring that no technological pitfalls stand in the way to rapid and efficient distribution of scientific knowledge, our platform is continuously expanding its suite of services and features. This is also where one can find the major differences between the four plans offered by ARPHA.


With so many services and functionalities at hand, it was not that difficult for us to come up with four thought-through alternatives, and still ensure that ALL clients of ARPHA have their journals’ content published in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable manner. ga

As you can notice, even the lowest-priced LITE Plan features a plenty of useful and advanced perks, including a one-stop API end-point for distribution to 30+ international databases, metadata export to 12+ machine-readable formats, article sharing and usage statistics tools.

Assignment of DOIs to individual images is one of the perks exclusive in ARPHA’s PREMIUM plan (see pictured, available in Alpine Entomology). 


At the other end of the spectrum, ARPHA’s PREMIUM Plan adds top-notch features, such as assignment of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to individual images, which in turn allows for the delivery of real-time usage metrics for each one of those.

Extensive marketing and promotional support, including an unlimited dissemination of press releases via the major global science news release platform Eurekalert! (AAAS), is also available to PREMIUM clients. Thus, a journal’s authors will not have to worry about their groundbreaking discoveries failing to reach the global public (e.g. news story “Scientists discover new Chinese firefly species” on SKY News, covering one of the latest publications in ZooKeys journal, and the associated press release on Eurekalert!).

News story via SKY News.

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Curious about how ARPHA could accommodate your journal(s)? 

Scroll down our pricing plans and operating models, and fill out the Get a Quote form. Shortly, we will be back in touch to discuss the best options for ARPHA to fit the specificity of your publishing project.

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All ARPHA-hosted journals indexed in Transpose to support transparency in journal policies

All open-access, peer-reviewed academic titles of Pensoft‘s, as well as those using the white-label publishing solution provided by the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, have their journal policy data fed into the Transpose database, in order to increase their discoverability and transparency.

Thanks to the recent integration with the community-sourced initiative Transpose, details about each journal’s approach to peer review, co-review and preprint publication can be easily accessed, navigated and compared through a user-friendly interface. Visitors can also query the data by journal title, publisher, ISSN or DOI, and apply several filters.

Having estimated that almost 1/3 of the top-cited journals across disciplines do not provide clearly basic information about their editorial policies, including whether they operate blind peer review or not, the team behind Transpose launched the forward-thinking community-sourced initiative with the aim to advance practices in academia and increase awareness and transparency amongst authors, editors and many other stakeholder groups. To highlight the essentiality of free and easy access to editorial policies for a wide range of actors, Transpose have published user testimonials on their website coming from various points of view, including early researchers, supervisors, project investigators, funders, publishing staff, and others.


Recent integration of the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA and Transpose results in the editorial policies of all ARPHA-hosted journals being fed into the associated database. Thus, various stakeholders from across the academic landscape are provided with an easy access to details about the peer review, co-review and preprint policies at each journal via a user-friendly interface.

Pensoft and ARPHA’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev says:

“Having been Open Science advocates from the very beginning, at Pensoft and ARPHA, we have always supported our clients and users in being as transparent as possible. Favourite examples are the open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), welcoming continuously updatable publications from across the whole research cycle, and Rethinking Ecology, launched to voice innovative and even bold ideas for the purposes of taking swift actions towards the conservation of the environment. The former operates public pre- and post-publication peer review to support efficient collaboration in research, while the latter relies on double-blind peer reviews, in order to encourage researchers of various experience and background to share their inventive ideas in ecology. Obviously, journal policies are and should be crucial when it comes to picking a specific journal over another regardless of the perspective. This is why I am certain that joining Transpose is doing good for all ARPHA-hosted journals, as well as the academic community.”

ASAPbio‘s Executive Director and member of the team behind Transpose, Dr Jessica Polka adds:

“We’re thrilled to incorporate data from Pensoft into Transpose. Making policy information clear and easy to find ensures that authors and reviewers can work with journals that best align with their values — and that scholarly work can be fairly interpreted by everyone, including general readers.”

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Additional information:

About Transpose:

Transpose is an initiative to build a database of journal policies. It focuses on three areas: open peer review, co-reviewing, and detailed pre-printing policies. It welcomes contributions from anyone, but seeks verification from journals and publishers. The goal of Transpose is to foster new practices while increasing awareness among authors, editors, and other stakeholders, and we seek to provide resources to assist journals in setting, sharing, and clarifying their policies.