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.

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.

Rebranded Social Psychological Bulletin opens up to the world with PsychOpen GOLD & ARPHA

Formerly known as Psychologia Spoleczna, the scholarly journal is now publishing exclusively in English and is free to both readers and authors after joining the PsychOpen GOLD platform based on ARPHA

Social Psychological Bulletin (SPB), formerly known as the Polish-born Psychologia Spo?eczna, has rebranded and evolved to reflect its new international outlook and dedication to social psychological research and open science practices.

In line with its renowned legacy, the peer-reviewed journal welcomes original empirical research, theoretical review papers, scientific debates, and methodological contributions in the field of basic and applied social psychology.

However, from now on, accepted articles are to be exclusively in English and openly accessible from day one of publication. Furthermore, authors are able to publish with SPB free of charge in the name of socially committed and responsible research.

The journal places special emphasis on what its Editors-in-Chief Drs Michal Parzuchowski and Marcin Bukowski call “the updated FOCI” – an abbreviation for Focused on people, Open, Committed and Integrative.

The changes meant to lead up to the journal’s long-term progress, also outlined in the latest Editorial, come as a result of SPB joining two prime movers in the open science field – the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) with its unique publication platform, PsychOpen GOLD, and Pensoft with its innovative journal publishing and management system, ARPHA.

Since 2012, PsychOpen GOLD – The European Open Access Publishing Platform for Psychology – allows for both journals and authors to increase the visibility and accessibility of novel psychological research in the spirit of open science practices free of charge.

In the new pilot project, ZPID’s PsychOpen GOLD also collaborates with the technologically advanced academic journal and book publishing platform ARPHA in order to further facilitate and increase visibility of the novel findings of societal value.

As a result of the partnership, SPB will make use of the long list of high-tech and user-friendly innovations, provided by ARPHA, which go far beyond the brand new sleek look and feel of the journal.

“We proudly present the new SPB journal to the scientific community, representing a major breakthrough in open access publishing in psychology,” says ZPID director Prof. Dr. Michael Bosnjak. “SPB on PsychOpen GOLD assisted by ARPHA is now up and running at record speed.”

“It’s really exciting to announce our partnership with ZPID, PsychOpen GOLD and SPB, in this collaborative venture to advance accessibility and visibility of research with such an impact on our own society,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA Platform and its developer – Pensoft Publishers. “At ARPHA and Pensoft, we have always worked towards next-age innovations in Open Science – be it improved accessibility, findability, usability or collaboration – so it only makes sense to join in this amazing initiative to open up the latest fine research in psychology.”

The journal’s first thematic issue comprises 10 forum papers (by Dariusz Doli?ski, Arie Kruglanski, Adam Factor & Katarzyna Jasko; Leonel Garcia-Marques & Mario Ferreira; Wolfgang Stroebe; Karl Halvor Teigen; Jolanda Jetten & Alexander S. Haslam; Miros?aw Kofta; Bogdan Wojciszke & Konrad Bocian; and Klaus Fiedler) dedicated to discussions on behavior and its measurement as triggered by Prof. Dariusz Dolinski’s article “Is Psychology Still a Science of Behaviour?”.

In his paper, Dolinski calculates that the number of articles in a recent volume of the flagship Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2017) presenting studies in which the dependent variable consisted of a real behavior was 4 out of 49 (8.2%). Out of a total number of 290 studies presented in this volume, a mere 18 (6,2%) addressed behaviour.

He argues that in addition to studying phenomena like stereotypes, attitudes, and values – which he dubs the “what, how, and why people think”, social psychology needs to also remain dedicated to the “what, why and how people act”, i.e. things such as aggression, altruism, and social influence.

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Follow the discussion in the second 2018 issue of Social Psychological Bulletin on the journal’s new website.

Follow SPB on Twitter and Facebook.

ScienceOpen indexes >1,000 articles from ARPHA-hosted journals RIO & Check List in a trial

Two scholarly journals published on ARPHA – Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) and Check List – now have their articles freely available via the community-focused search and discovery platform ScienceOpen.

This new trial between the two high-tech innovators and Open Science proponents presents an important step forward to making research publications not only easier to find and access, but also more inviting to fellow scientists seeking new collaborations and platforms for voicing their ideas and expertise.

Currently, there are 168 and 948 article records fed to ScienceOpen straight from RIO and Check List respectively.

While the articles’ underlying data, such as author names, citations, keywords, journals and more, are automatically harvested and analyzed by ScienceOpen, so that research items can be easily interlinked, readers are encouraged to further provide context to the research items. The user-friendly intuitive interface invites them to add their comments, recommendations or open post-publication peer reviews, and even create their own topical collections regardless of affiliations and journals.

To make sure users land on the most relevant articles in what feels like the blink of an eye compared to traditional methods, ScienceOpen also accommodates an advanced multi-layer search engine relying on a total of 20 smart filters and six sorting parameters.

“We have long worked closely with ScienceOpen, as it only makes sense given our shared vision for the future of academia, so the present trial project happened very naturally,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of ARPHA and its developer – scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft. “Nowadays, we are well aware that scientific findings are of little merit if ‘living’ in a vacuum. Therefore, we need research articles to be as discoverable as possible, and, no less importantly, to be open to feedback and further work.”

“We are thrilled to add this new content to the ScienceOpen as we have both strong researcher communities in zoology and in scholarly communications within our broadly interdisciplinary content. The ARPHA platform is a natural fit to deliver rich metadata to our discovery services and we are very much looking forward to working with their team,” says Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen.

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About ScienceOpen:

ScienceOpen is an independent start-up company based in Berlin and Boston, which explores new ways to open up information for the scholarly community. It provides a freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context. Smart filters, topical collections and expert input from the academic community help users to find the most relevant articles in their field and beyond.

ARPHA reaches further out! Dr Matthias Wahls assigned as the platform’s new Business Development Manager

The Netherlands-based independent publishing consultant Dr. Matthias Wahls has recently joined ARPHA Journal Publishing Platform as the venture’s new Business Development Manager.

Bringing in extensive expertise from his previous appointments with key players in the academic publishing market, alongside experience accumulated through years of independent consultancy, Dr Wahls will be working on expanding ARPHA’s reach towards Western Europe, Greater China, and other Asian countries.

“I’m more than enthusiastic to join the team of ARPHA Publishing Platform and Pensoft Publishers, effective 2018,” says Dr. Matthias Wahls, the Hague, NL“Bringing this cutting-edge software platform to as many academic publishers will be my key priority. Our focus is to supply an end-to-end solution answering the needs of individual society journals and small to mid-sized publishers alike on their way to entering the Open Science publishing era and switching to the technologically advanced workflows of the future. We equally welcome stand-alone and new journals eager to become ready for the future of Gold Open Access publishing, within the greater context of the EU’s Horizon-2020 program.”

“Making academic research accessible to everyone around the globe has been a key priority for Pensoft from the very start. Having always been exclusively Open Access, in the last couple of years we’ve been aiming to go beyond and supply cutting-edge technologies that tick all boxes on the way to Open Science. With ARPHA we want to provide small publishers and society and institutional journals with a technologically advanced and affordable solution that allows them to enter the era of Open Science, while sitting strong on an increasingly demanding global publishing market.” adds Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and CEO at Pensoft and ARPHA.

Dr Wahls invites editors, publishers, and individual academics who are facing the multiple transition hurdles on their way to adopt Gold Open Access, to take their journals to a next technological level with ARPHA, while staying independent under their own identity.

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What is ARPHA?

Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving, all in one place for the first time, this is what stands behind the innovative fully integrated journal publishing solution ARPHA, a product of Pensoft.

Fully equipped to cater for a successful transition to a next-generation, technologically-advanced publishing, ARPHA is specifically designed to meet the needs of small and mid-sized publishers and individual society and institutional journals on their journey to entering the era of Open Science, armed with a top-notch publishing technology. Alongside its journal-based module, ARPHA offers solutions for advanced open access book and conference proceedings publishing.

More than just software
ARPHA offers an end-to-end journal publishing platform, in combination with a range of technologically advanced and human-provided services.

Future-proof
This platform offers an option for smooth transition from the conventional, document-based, to the forthcoming, fully XML-based publishing workflow.

White label
ARPHA supports both individual and multiple journal platforms under their own logo, customised design and imprint.

High-level integration
ARPHA is integrated with leading indexing and archiving platforms via web services.

Semantic publishing
ARPHA provides generic and domain-specific markup to enhance and facilitate dissemination, machine-readability, harvesting and reuse of published content to improve readers’ experience.

Tailored publishing models
Publishers or individual journal editors can customise their own preferred workflow across ARPHA’s modules.

 

Contact Dr Wahls at:

matthias2fotoSlavenaAddress: M.Wahls Publishing Services, Plesmanlaan 88, 2497CB The Hague, The Netherlands

Tel: +31 644310818

Email: wahls@arphahub.com

WeChat: matthiaswahls1206

 

For more information and resources:

Visit: http://arphahub.com

Twitter: @ARPHAplatform

Video: https://youtu.be/pzTRc-zvfA8

Faster, Better, Stronger: New batch of updates now available in ARPHA Writing Tool

Only a couple of months ago, we announced a whole set of exciting features newly applied to ARPHA Writing Tool, based on the feedback we received from our users. Now, we are delighted to announce that we are back with a fresh batch of updates.

Here’s what we recently got in store for all authors in Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), Biodiversity Data JournalOne Ecosystem and BioDiscovery, all powered by the innovative end-to-end journal publishing platform ARPHA and making use of the new-age ARPHA Writing Tool:

  • We have become faster. ARPHA has been optimised, so that it is even easier to prepare your manuscript. Enjoy your references and whole datasets being delivered straight into your draft in the blink of an eye!
  • Speaking of references, we have updated our Reference Parser. Simply copy-paste a reference in the box and click Parse – ARPHA Writing Tool will have it ready to go on your list momentarily!      

parser

 

parser2

 

  • Yet, there’s even more to the reference-related updates! To double-check an in-text citation in your manuscript, all you need to do is hover over it to see the full-text reference it is linked to.

hover

 

  • Our new toolbar and re-arranged functionalities make up for the better intuitivity of the ARPHA Writing Tool that welcomes you the moment you open a new manuscript.

toolbar2

 

  • Hover over the new toolbar and you will notice another new perk we have added for your convenience. Keyboard shortcuts are now implemented to the ARPHA Writing Tool to let you add smart objects as you type.
  • Get a stronger grip on your figures! Two new buttons let you re-order your figures either by number, or by order of appearance. Alternatively, enter editing mode and simply drag and drop any figure wherever you wish.

drag and drop figures

 

We thank you for your continuous feedback which helps us focus on tailoring the ARPHA Writing Tool according to the needs and taste of our clients.

We are already working hard on the next updates, so keep an eye on us!

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In the meantime, please feel welcome to test our new features and let us know what you think. We will be happy to address any comments and requests on info@arphahub.com.

Articles published in journals on ARPHA indexed by ReadCube for easier discoverability

While research outputs are being published at a rate greater than ever, it is becoming more and more likely to simply pass by the study that is most relevant to your particular interest. This is where ReadCube comes to aid. Now, thanks to the new partnership between ARPHAand ReadCube, all articles in the journals published on Pensoft‘s ARPHA platform, have been indexed and therefore, easily discoverable via ReadCube’s free web, desktop and mobile apps.

“Our mission is to ensure that scholarly literature is not only easily discoverable but also that each article itself is seen as a conduit for deeper discovery, not simply an endpoint,” said Robert McGrath, CEO at ReadCube. “This collaboration with Pensoft supports both these objectives, and we are thrilled to have them as a partner.”

zookeys

In addition to advanced searchability, all Pensoft articles are also available in ReadCube’s Enhanced PDF format. While maintaining the simple and clean look of a standard PDF at first glance, Enhanced PDFs offer interactive feature connecting the reader to relevant information around the article including supplements, article metric, annotation tools, clickable in-line references and even hyperlinked author names which redirect readers to the author’s historical publications.

“I am pleased to see all journals published on ARPHA, which is to say not only the ones published by Pensoft, but also those that use our white-label journal publishing platform, being indexed by ReadCube,” said Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev. “As a strictly open-access publisher and technological provider with a strong background in semantic content enrichment, Pensoft has always strived to keep research as accessible and discoverable as possible. We are very pleased to collaborate with like-minded people who have their own innovative view on science to be on hand to anyone who asks for it.”

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Additional information:

About ReadCube:

ReadCube develops software to make the world of research more accessible and connected – serving researchers, publishers, academic and commercial organizations.

ReadCube’s web, desktop, and mobile reference management apps, including the ReadCube and Papers brands, dramatically improve the ways researchers find, organize, read, share, and cite research literature

ReadCube’s publisher solutions, adopted by over 70 partners to date, include indexing via Readcube Discover, enhanced PDF viewing and sharing via ReadCube Connect, and article-level ecommerce via ReadCube Checkout.

As Good as Gold: Publishing platform ARPHA is proud supporter of Peer Review Week 2016 and Gold star sponsor of Publons’ Sentinels of Science

In the heat of this year’s Peer Review Week, themed “Recognition for Review”, we would like to express how and why we are so proud to be part of it and Publons’ initiative Sentinels of Science, meant to recognize the true guardians of quality science, or in other words, the peer reviewers.

Being a high-tech and modern publishing solution, developed by Pensoft with the mindset that to adapt to the future, means to innovate, ARPHA itself was set to take the quite stagnant current peer review practice forward from day one.

This is why and how we provide a range of peer review options for every author submitting their work to any journal, published on the ARPHA platform. For example, here are the four-stages of the open peer review process operating in our flagship Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) Journal:

  1. Author-organised, pre-submission review, available to all journals that make use of our ARPHA Writing Tool, which is our way to take the common get-a-friend-to-proofread-your-work practice to a whole new, transparent and technologically facilitated level. The review happens in real time with the author and the reviewers being able to work together in the ARPHA online environment. It is not mandatory, but we encourage it strongly. All pre-submission reviews provided on authors’ request in RIO can be published along with the article, bearing DOI and citation details.
  2. Pre-submission technical and editorial check is another benefit, provided by the journal’s editorial office to those who are using the ARPHA Writing Tool. If necessary, it can take up several rounds, until the manuscript is improved to the level appropriate for direct submission to the journal.
  3. The community-sourced, post-publication, open peer review is the next review stage provided to all articles published in RIO and all other ARPHA journals.
  4. In addition, RIO also provides journal-organised, post-publication open peer reviewupon author’s request. In all other ARPHA journals this review stage happens mandatory before publication.

To facilitate peer review in any journal published on the platform, ARPHA consolidates every review automatically into a single online file, which makes it possible for reviewers to comment in real time, even during the authoring process. Once posted, the whole peer review history is archived along with the associated files.

To recognize peer review even further, ARPHA registers automatically each of our peer reviewers, along with their work, on Publons, thanks to the integration of all Pensoft journals with the platform, created to credit reviewers and their contributions.

With this vision of peer review, we simply could not stay clear of the aspiring Sentinels of Science initiative, started by Publons. It only made sense for us to step in, which logically led to the ARPHA logo appearing in the Gold star sponsors list.peerrevwk16-sentinels-of-science

New journal One Ecosystem: Innovation in ecology and sustainability research publishing

Focused on the fields of ecology and sustainability, One Ecosystem is an innovative open access scholarly journal that goes beyond the conventional research article publication. Launched in January 2016, the new journal is now open for submissions ranging across the entire research cycle, including data, models, methods, workflows, results, software, perspectives and policy recommendations.

Ecosystem services, Ecology and Sustainability are research areas that address highly relevant scientific and societal topics. One Ecosystem aims to respond to the newest developments in scholarly publishing, adapting them for and applying them to these fields.

The journal offers a wide set of article templates, including domain-specific ones, such as Ecosystem services mapping, Ecological models or Environmental monitoring, allowing scientists to publish and get credit for their work at any stage of the research cycle. Through the technologically advanced ARPHA publishing platform and innovative publishing model, all data that underpin a given study will be made free to everyone and integrated into relevant and domain-specific global data repositories.

“We need better incentives for scientists who want to share their data. One Ecosystemprovides such incentives by linking peer review to open data” adds Joachim Maes, European Commission – Joint Research Centre.

“We believe that open access to all the relevant products of the scientific cycle is key to both scientific advancement, and innovation in the real world. With One Ecosystem we aim at fostering open exchange of information to address sustainability challenges.” – Deputy Editor-in-Chief Dr. Davide Geneletti, University of Trento.

Open access to content and data is quickly becoming the prevailing model in academic publishing and research funding schemes. By making research outputs public, the new journal opens up new mechanisms for integration of information, collaboration, appraisal, and dissemination. Committed to openness and innovation, One Ecosystem offers a novel community-based peer-review introduced for the first time in these academic disciplines. The journal gives authors and reviewers the opportunity to opt for an entirely open review process.

Making use of the unique ARPHA Writing Tool, One Ecosystem does not only enable authors to prepare their manuscripts directly within the system, but also allows to submit pre-submission reviews from the very start. These reviews or supporting statements from experts in the subject will facilitate the manuscript evaluation and speed up the publishing process.

“With One Ecosystem we want to accelerate scientific progress in the frontier research fields of ecology and sustainability. We are convinced that this new format of writing, reviewing and open access publishing of scientific findings is the future”, explains the Editor-in Chief of One Ecosystem – Dr. Benjamin Burkhard, University of Kiel.

“At Pensoft we have been committed to innovating scientific publishing for years. In One Ecosystem, we have collected all our knowledge and experience to provide scientists in the fields of ecology and sustainability with a conceptually new journal that will give them the opportunity to publish outcomes and collaborate with the community in a new open and more efficient way”, comments Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and Managing Director at Pensoft.

Follow One Ecosystem on Twitter | Facebook

Research Ideas & Outcomes: New open-access journal to publish entire research cycles

Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO), a new open access journal, is formally announced. The new journal represents a paradigm shift in academic publishing: for the first time, RIO will publish research from all stages of the research cycle, across a broad suite of disciplines, from humanities to science.

Traditional journals accept only articles produced at the end of the research continuum, long after the core work has been completed. RIO will publish ideas and outputs from all stages of the research cycle: proposals, experimental designs, data, software, research articles, project reports, policy briefs, project management plans and more.

The journal takes another step ahead with a collaborative platform that allows all ideas and outputs to be labelled with Impact Categories based upon UN Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) and EU Societal Challenges. These categories provide social impact-based labelling to help funders, journalists and the wider public discover and finance relevant research as well as to foster interdisciplinary collaboration around societal challenges.

These game-changing ideas come packed with technical innovation and unique features. The journal is published through ARPHA, the first publishing platform ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript: from authoring to submission, public peer review, publication and dissemination, within a single, fully-integrated online collaborative environment. The new platform will also allow for RIO to offer one of the most transparent, open and public peer review processes, thus building trust in the reviewed outcomes.

These features come à la carte: RIO will offer flexible pricing where authors can choose exactly which publishing services fit their needs and budget. All its contents – including reviews and comments, data and code – will receive a persistent unique identifier, will be permanently archived and made available under open licenses without any access embargo.

“RIO is not just about different kinds of submissions, though that is a crucial feature and certainly unique for publishing ongoing or even proposed research: it is also about linking those submissions together across the research cycle, about reducing the time from submission to publication, about collaborative authoring and reviewing, about mapping to societal challenges, about technical innovation, about enabling reuse and about giving authors more choice in what features they actually want from the journal.” said Dr. Daniel Mietchen, a founding editor of RIO.

I’m proud to pioneer the first journal which can publish research from all stages of the research process,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Co-Founder of RIO and Pensoft. “For the first time, researchers can get formal publication credit for previously ‘hidden’ parts of their work like written research proposals. We can publish all outputs in one journal; the same journal – RIO.

RIO is scheduled to start accepting manuscripts in November 2015.