Cuckoo in the nest: challenges for smaller journals and publishers in the push towards Diamond Open Access

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 publishingissued 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 ARPHA also 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.

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Get in touch with the Pensoft and ARPHA teams at info@arphahub.com

Find more on the ARPHA platform website. You can also follow ARPHA on Twitter and Linkedin.

Innovations in Agriculture moves to the ARPHA Platform

A green scientific journal next to crops being watered by a robotic arm.

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.

First Journal Impact Factor for One Ecosystem

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.

One Ecosystem was launched in 2016 by open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft in collaboration with Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Benjamin Burkhard (Head of the Physical Geography & Landscape Ecology section at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany), and Deputy Editors-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Davide Geneletti (Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Italy) and Dr. Joachim Maes, (Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission). Since the beginning it has been associated with and endorsed by the global Ecosystem Services Partnership.

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”  

says Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Burkhard.

Content published in One Ecosystem can be found in over 60 leading academic indexing databases, including Scopus, Research Gate, DOAJ, Cabell’s Directory, CABI, ERIH PLUS, CNKI, Unpaywall and OpenAIRE. It is also archived in CLOCKSS, Zenodo, Portico and Zendy.

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Visit the One Ecosystem journal website at: https://oneecosystem.pensoft.net.

You can also follow One Ecosystem on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

The International Biogeography Society relaunches flagship journal Frontiers of Biogeography on ARPHA Platform

The International Biogeography Society (TIBS) has relaunched its flagship open-access scientific journal, Frontiers of Biogeography (FoB), on the ARPHA platform, where it will be co-published with Pensoft Publishers.

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,”

comments Prof. Dr. Susanne Renner, TIBS President.

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.

Journal of Biomedical and Clinical Research starts publishing on ARPHA Platform

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.”

ARPHA 2023: A year in review

ARPHA 2023 Review

2023 was a fantastic year for ARPHA, marked by a series of significant milestones and innovations in our scholarly publishing mission. As we reflect on the past year, we are excited to share the major strides taken by our dedicated in-house team to provide the best customised, end-to-end services for our clients.

Expansion of the ARPHA journal family

ARPHA welcomed new and diverse titles into its fold, demonstrating a commitment to promoting open-access research across many disciplines.

The Aquatic Invasions journal

This journal found a new home on ARPHA, enhancing its visibility and impact in the scientific community. Focused on biological invasions in both inland and coastal water ecosystems from around the world, Aquatic Invasions is an official journal of the International Association for Open Knowledge on Invasive Alien Species.

Atomic Layer Deposition

Catering to cutting-edge research in the field of material sciences, this journal launched on ARPHA in March. Atomic Layer Deposition targets scientists specialising in all aspects of Atomic Layer Deposition and related alternating vapour phase technologies.

Estuarine Management and Technologies

Another significant addition to our platform, this journal focuses on the technological facets of researching, managing, and preserving estuarine environments.

The addition of these titles is indicative of things to come, with more exciting entries expected to join ARPHA in 2024.

ARPHA’s strategic partnerships and integrations

ARPHA’s commitment to increasing the reach and impact of scientific research led to noteworthy collaborations in 2023.

ResearchGate integration

Our partnership with ResearchGate significantly boosted readership and visibility for our open-access publications; we saw a 2-5 times increase in article views for journals that opted in to have their context indexed. 20 Pensoft journals were indexed, including the flagship titles ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal and Research Ideas and Outcomes.

Scite.ai collaboration

This integration enhances the understanding of articles’ scientific impact and reuse, offering valuable insights to both readers and authors. With scite.ai, every citation is categorised as Supporting, Contrasting, or Mentioning, based on the context of surrounding sentences within the citing publication.

Enhancements and accolades

Our continuous efforts in tech infrastructure and design services yielded notable achievements and recognitions.

ARPHA PDF layout revamp

New ARPHA PDF layout
Research papers published in ZooKeys demonstrating the former (left) and the current (right) article layout seen in the PDF format. 

We introduced a modernised layout for the PDF format of articles, enriching the reading experience. The new format focuses on readability and accessibility, implementing many changes requested by the scientific community.

ARPHA Writing Tool and nanopublications

Our innovative XML-based authoring tool now supports a novel workflow for nanopublications in biodiversity research, piloted at the Biodiversity Data Journal.

European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS)

Six of our journals proudly joined this index, including four Pensoft journals: Nature ConservationNeoBiotaNeotropical Biology and Conservationand Fossil Record. The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society and the Amsterdam University Press’ Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC), which use ARPHA’s white-label publishing solution, were also accepted.

New on Scopus

The Bulgarian Society of Cardiology’s journal’s inclusion in Scopus marked a significant achievement. The journal met several criteria, including: immaculate peer review and editorial processes; a good and consistent yearly publication volume; high-quality and user-friendly website and infrastructure; well-pronounced internationality and inclusivity; and considerable readership and citation rates.

New on Web of Science

One Ecosystem‘s selection for inclusion in this index was a testament to its quality and integrity. The news means that One Ecosystem might see its very first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as early as 2024, following the latest revision of the metric’s policies Clarivate announced last July. According to the update, all journals from the Web of Science Core Collection are now featured in the Journal Citation Reports, and thereby eligible for a JIF.

Keeping pace with scholarly publishing trends

Staying at the forefront of scholarly publishing, we continuously adapted to the latest best practices and addressed our clients’ needs.

ARPHA’s advisory role in journal comparison service

Pensoft’s involvement in developing the Journal Comparison Service by cOAlition S reflected our commitment to shaping the future of open-access publishing. The service freely and securely enables libraries, library consortia, and funders to understand if the fees they pay are commensurate with the publication services delivered.

EU’s conclusions on OA scholarly publishing

Our official statement aligned with the EU’s stance, emphasising our support for open-access initiatives. We highlighted the need to promptly address existing issues in the publishing system, so that healthy competition can thrive and contribute to a reality safe from monopolies and corporate capture.

Addressing ARPHA client needs

Our feature blog piece, “6 Common Mistakes at Society and Institutional Journals,” showcased our understanding and proactive approach to addressing the concerns of our clients.

As we progress into 2024, ARPHA remains dedicated to enhancing the scientific impact and visibility of our journals, leveraging technology and collaborations to serve the ever-evolving needs of the scholarly community. We thank our partners, clients, and contributors for being part of this exciting journey as we look forward to another successful year.

For news from & about ARPHA and the journals using the platform, you can follow us on Twitter and Linkedin.

Pensoft partners with ResearchGate to drive readership and visibility of open access journals

ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and Pensoft, an independent open access academic publisher known worldwide for its cutting-edge publishing tools and workflows, today announced a new partnership that will see a set of Pensoft’s open access journals increase their reach and visibility through ResearchGate – increasing access and engagement with its 25 million researcher members.  

Pensoft is a fully open access publisher, providing high-quality end-to-end services to its own and third-party scientific journals via its in-house developed scholarly publishing platform ARPHA.

As part of this new partnership, 20 journals published by Pensoft – including the publisher’s flagship titles ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal and Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) amongst others – will now have their content automatically added to ResearchGate upon publication to benefit from enhanced visibility and discoverability through ResearchGate’s innovative Journal Home offering. These journals will all have dedicated profiles and be prominently represented on all associated article pages on ResearchGate, as well as all other relevant touch points throughout the network.

As part of this new partnership, 20 journals published by Pensoft will now have their content automatically added to ResearchGate upon publication to benefit from enhanced visibility and discoverability through ResearchGate’s innovative Journal Home offering.

Journal Home provides a unique opportunity for Pensoft to connect its authors with their readers. The new journal profiles on ResearchGate will provide a central location for each journal, enabling researchers to learn more, discover new article content, and understand how, through their network, they are connected to the journal’s community of authors and editors. Authors of these journals additionally benefit from having their articles automatically added to their ResearchGate profile page, giving them access to metrics, including who is reading and citing their research. These rich insights will also enable Pensoft to build a deeper understanding of the communities engaging with its journals. 

“Pensoft is delighted to be working with ResearchGate to provide an even greater service to our authors and readers. ResearchGate offers an innovative way for us to grow the reach and visibility of our content, while also giving us a way to better understand and engage our author and reader audiences,”

said Prof Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.

“We couldn’t be happier to see Pensoft embark on this new partnership with ResearchGate. Journal Home will not only enable Pensoft authors to build visibility for their work, but provide them and Pensoft with greater insights about the communities engaging with that research. I look forward to seeing this new collaboration develop.”

said Sören Hofmayer, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate.

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About ResearchGate:

ResearchGate is the professional network for researchers. Over 25 million researchers use researchgate.net to share and discover research, build their networks, and advance their careers. Based in Berlin, ResearchGate was founded in 2008. Its mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.

FAIRer knowledge about biodiversity with AI-friendly nanopublications at Biodiversity Data Journal

Earlier this year, in a pilot project, the teams of high-tech startup Knowledge Pixels and open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft released a novel workflow to publicly share and future-proof scientific findings by means of nanopublications.

Nanopublications complement human-created narratives of scientific knowledge with elementary, machine-actionable, simple and straightforward scientific statements that prompt sharing, finding, accessibility, citability and interoperability. By making it easier to trace individual findings back to their origin and/or follow-up updates, it also helps to better understand the provenance of biodiversity data.

These semantic statements expressed in community-agreed terms, openly available through links to controlled vocabularies, ontologies and standards, are not only freely accessible to everyone in both human-readable and machine-actionable formats, but also easy-to-digest for computer algorithms and AI-powered assistants.

Now, the collaborators – also partly supported by the Horizon 2020-funded project BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) – have built up on a pilot workflow already launched in the Biodiversity Data Journal – to create a specialised nanopublication solution to address the need for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data in the biodiversity science domain. 

In their studies, researchers need to use and refer to extensive and diverse biodiversity data at once, e.g. information about groups of organisms and their classification, collections, authors and genetic sequences. However, those would normally be scattered across a vast number of articles or belong to dissociated databases. This is a major and widely recognised issue in biodiversity science, which is currently stagnating progress not only in building up the world’s knowledge about the natural world around us, but also impeding biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.

Using the newly released nanopublication workflow, biodiversity researchers can now incorporate nanopublications within their manuscripts to future-proof their most important assertions on biological taxa and organisms or statements about associations of taxa or organisms and their environments. 

In addition, the authors can also create standalone nanopublications that comment or derive from already existing research journals published in an academic journal or another citable source (e.g. expert database), regardless of the author of the source. 

“With the nanopublication format, authors make sure that key scientific statements – the ones underpinning their research work – are efficiently communicated in a machine-actionable and FAIR manner. Thus, their contributions to science become future-proof for a reality driven by AI technology,”

explains Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft.

“Biodiversity is the ideal field for this pilot exploring the next steps in scientific publishing. Biodiversity and its neighbouring fields have produced a remarkable number of high-quality resources, such as controlled vocabularies and databases, which we can now build upon. Moreover, many Biodiversity researchers have shown to be very open to such new methods and are enthusiastic about working together to build a more powerful ecosystem for scientific knowledge sharing, and we share their enthusiasm,”

says Tobias Kuhn, CTO and co-founder of Knowledge Pixels. 

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You can find more about the nanopublication workflow and its advantages to biodiversity scientists on the Pensoft blog and the Biodiversity Data Journal website.

ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s statement on the European Union’s Conclusions on OA scholarly publishing

On behalf of ARPHA Platform and Pensoft Publishers, we express our support for the Conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing, recently published by the Council of the European Union. We do share all concerns articulated in the document that highlight major inequities and outstanding issues in the scholarly publishing environment.

In our opinion, it is of utmost importance to promptly address the existing issues in the publishing system, where healthy competition can thrive and contribute to a reality safe from potential mono-/oligopolies and corporate capture.

We firmly believe that only an industry that leaves room for variously-scaled pioneers and startups is capable of leading a long-awaited shift to a high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing landscape aligning with the principles of FAIRness.

Yet, we shall acknowledge that the industry has so far failed to eradicate the most fundamental flaw of the past. In the beginning, the main aim of the Open Access (OA) movement was removing the barrier to access to publicly funded scientific knowledge and scrapping costly subscription fees.

Recently, however, the industry’s biggest players merely replaced it with a barrier to publication by introducing costly Article Processing Charges (APCs) and “big deals” signed between top commercial publishers and academic institutions or national library consortia. 

As a result, small and middle-sized open-access publishers, which have, ironically, been the ones to lead the change and transition to OA by default and oppose the large commercial publishers’ agenda, were effectively pushed out of the scene. Further, we are currently witnessing a situation where OA funds are mostly going to the ones who used to oppose OA.

So, we strongly support measures that ensure an inclusive and FAIR competition, which could in turn prompt quality, sustainability and reasonable pricing in scholarly publishing. In our opinion, an environment like this would actually foster equality and equity amongst all publishers, either small, large, non-profit, commercial, institutional or society-based. 

One of the main points of the conclusions is a recommendation for a general use of the Diamond OA model, where no charges apply to either researchers or readers. While we fully support the Diamond OA model, we wish to stress on the fact that considerable concerns about the sustainability of existing Diamond OA models remain.

On the one hand, there are OA agreements (also known as read-and-publish, publish-and-read, transformative agreements etc.), typically signed between top publishers and top research institutions/consortia. This OA model is often mistakenly referred to as “Diamond OA”, since authors affiliated with those institutions are not concerned with providing the APC payment – either by paying themselves or applying for funding. Instead, the APCs are paid centrally. Most often, however, journals published by those publishers are still directly charging authors who are not members of the signed institutions with, in our opinion, excessive APCs. Even if those APCs are covered by a signed institution, these are still considerable funds that are being navigated away from actual research work. 

On the other hand, there are independent researchers, in addition to smaller or underfunded institutions, typically – yet far from exclusively – located in the developing world, who are effectively being discriminated against. 

In conclusion, this type of contracts are shutting away smaller actors from across academia just like they used to be under the subscription-based model. Hereby, we wish to express our full agreement with the Council of the European Union’s conclusion, that “it is essential to avoid situations where researchers are limited in their choice of publication channels due to financial capacities rather than quality criteria”.

There are also several alternative OA models designed to lessen the burden of publication costs for both individual researchers, libraries and journal owners. However, each comes with its own drawbacks. Here – we believe – is where the freedom of choice is perhaps most needed, in order to keep researchers’ and publishers’  best interests at heart. 

One of those alternatives is open-source publishing platforms, which – by design – are well-positioned to deliver actual Diamond OA for journals, while maintaining independence from commercial publishers. However, the operational model of this type of publishing and hosting platforms would most often only provide a basic infrastructure for editors to publish and preserve content. As a result, the model might require extra staff and know-how, while remaining prone to human errors. Additionally, a basic technological infrastructure could impede the FAIRness of the published output, which demands advanced and automated workflows to appropriately format, tag semantically and export scientific outputs promptly after publication.

Similarly, large funders and national consortia have put their own admirable efforts to step up and provide another option for authors of research and their institutions. Here, available funds are allocated to in-house Diamond OA publishing platforms that have originally been designed according to the policies and requirements of the respective funding programme or state. However, this type of support – while covering a large group of authors (e.g. based in a certain country, funded under a particular programme, and/or working in a specific research field) – still leaves many behind, including multinational or transdisciplinary teams. Additionally, due to the focus on ‘mass supply’, most of these OA publishing platforms have so far been unable to match their target user base with the appropriate scale of services and support.

What we have devised and developed at Pensoft with the aim to contribute to the pool of available choices is an OA publishing model, whose aim is to balance cost affordability, functionality, reliability, transparency and long-term sustainability. 

To do so, we work with journal owners, institutions and societies to create their own business and operational model for their journals that matches two key demands of the community: (1) free to read and free to publish OA model, and, (2) services and infrastructure suited for Diamond OA at a much lower cost, compared to those offered by major commercial publishers.

In our opinion, independent small publishers differentiate from both large commercial publishers and publicly funded providers by relying to a greater extent on innovative technology and close employee collaboration.

As a result, they are capable of delivering significantly more customisable solutions – including complete packages of automated and human-provided services – and, ultimately, achieving considerably lower-cost publishing solutions. Likewise, they might be better suited to provide much more flexible business models, so that libraries and journal owners can easily support (subsets of or all) authors to the best of their capabilities.

While we realise that there is no faultless way to high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing, we are firm supporters of an environment, where healthy competition prompts the continuous invention and evolution of tools and workflows

Our own motivation to invest in scholarly publishing technology and its continuous refinement and advancement, coupled with a number of in-house and manually provided services, which is reflected in our APC policies, aligns with the Council’s statement that “scientific practices for ensuring reproducibility, transparency, sharing, rigour and collaboration are important means of achieving a publishing system responsive to the challenges of democratic, modern and digitalised societies.”

Our thinking is that – much like in any other industry – what drives innovation and revolutionary technologies is competition. To remain healthy and even self-policing, however, this competition needs to embrace transparency, equity and inclusivity.

Last, but not least, researchers need to have the freedom to choose from plenty of options when deciding where and how to publish their work!

Bulgarian Society of Cardiology’s journal accepted by Scopus

Following rigorous evaluation at Scopus – one of the world’s most comprehensive literature and citation databases – the official journal of the Bulgarian Society of Cardiology has been accepted, reports ARPHA Platform’s Indexing team.

Amongst the criteria Bulgarian Cardiology has successfully covered in order to prove as a journal that makes a significant and valuable contribution to the scientific community, are immaculate peer review and editorial processes, a good and consistent yearly publication volume, high-quality and user-friendly website and infrastructure, well-pronounced internationality and inclusivity, and considerable readership and citation rates.

The news means that all content published in Bulgarian Cardiology since 2019 will soon be discoverable and accessible from the worldwide popular corpus of scientific publications.

Further, these papers and their citations by authors in other Scopus-indexed journals will be mapped and counted, in order to calculate the journal’s Scopus CiteScore. According to Scopus, Bulgarian Cardiology will be benchmarked against 367 journals in the Cardiology category (data from SCIMAGO, retrieved in June 2023).

Traditionally, the yearly updated journal metric is released in June. To come up with the CiteScore, Scopus counts the citations of five peer-reviewed publication types  (i.e. research /  review / conference / data papers and book chapters) received in the last four complete years, before dividing the number by the same document types published during this period. 

The CiteScore formula explained using 2020 values as an example. See more in the CiteScore Journal Metric – FAQs.

Additionally, Bulgarian Cardiology will be making use of another quite unique metric by Scopus: the CiteScoreTracker. It uses the same formula as in the CiteScore to calculate the current publication/citation performance of a journal based on the data available by the beginning of each month. So, a journal receives a new Scopus CiteScoreTracker value each month, which serves as a preliminary forecast for the next Scopus CiteScore.

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The Bulgarian Cardiology journal was launched in 1995 as the official scholarly outlet for the Bulgarian Society of Cardiology. Ever since, it has been serving as a forum to bring together the cardiology community within the country and beyond.

In 2020, Bulgarian Cardiology signed with Pensoft to move its journal to the scientific publisher’s ARPHA Platform, in order to modernise the academic outlet and provide its authors, readers and editors with a user-friendly environment where they can submit, revise, publish and permanently archive their work.

Back then, the Bulgarian Cardiology became the first ARPHA-powered journal to make use of the platform’s top-to-bottom bilingual publishing solution, which included a bilingual website and the option for authors to publish their work either in Bulgarian and English, or in English-only. 

Further, the Society took advantage of many human-provided services, including assistance in journal indexing. Additionally, the ARPHA website development team led the major revamp of the Bulgarian Society of Cardiology with the intention to align it with the new journal website.  

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