Tag: peer review

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Now launched: ARPHA Preprints to fast-track research submitted to ARPHA-hosted journals

Having long considered how to help authors at our client journals get their work out in the open as early as possible, and prompted by the current research ecosystem, we came up with a new landmark feature, the ARPHA Preprints, where the preparation and posting of a preprint would be as much of a hassle as ticking a couple of check-boxes. Posting a preprint is an optional service for both journals and authors. 

ARPHA Preprints in short

ARPHA Preprints is a new platform designed by ARPHA and Pensoft to host pre-review manuscripts submitted to participating ARPHA-hosted journals. The key here is that it only takes a few clicks for the author to submit a preprint, and no more than a few days before the preprint becomes accessible on ARPHA Preprints, thus open to feedback and contribution by fellow scientists.

Once the associated manuscript successfully completes peer review in the ARPHA-hosted journal and gets published, the preprint will be conveniently linked to the formal paper, thus facilitating and prompting citation of peer-reviewed research.

ARPHA Preprints publication workflow in participating ARPHA-hosted journals.

Visit ARPHA Preprints website to see the growing list of ARPHA-hosted journals integrated with ARPHA Preprints to date.

Manuscript submitted to ZooKeys (currently under review) and posted as a preprint (DOI: 10.3897/arphapreprints.e69376) on ARPHA Preprints. If published in the journal, the text will change to “Published in ZooKeys”. If rejected, the preprint will be disassociated from the journal to prevent potential issues with future resubmission.

ARPHA Preprints in practice

During submission at any of the journals that have been integrated with ARPHA Preprints, an author will come to a question asking them whether they wish to post a preprint. If they check that box and agree to the terms and conditions of posting a preprint, the platform will use the files uploaded to compile a preprint in PDF format. Here, the author will be able to preview the file and either agree they are happy with how it looks, or, alternatively, replace it with their own copy. The bottom line is, the manuscript and the preprint are submitted simultaneously.

Having confirmed they wish to post a preprint while submitting to the journal, ARPHA lets the authors review and, if needed, replace the preprint with their own PDF file. This is the version that will be posted as a preprint on ARPHA Preprints in a few days’ time – once it successfully completes the in-house screening.

At this point, it is only one to a few days keeping the preprint away from public knowledge. This time is needed for the submission to undergo a basic screening, meant to verify that it complies with the journal’s focus and scope, and does not contain offensive language, pseudoscience, plagiarism or any other unethical content.

When posted, preprints indicate the name of the journal, where the associated manuscript has been submitted. If published in that journal, this status changes to Published, while a link and citation details to the formal publication are provided via DOI and the Citation tab, respectively. This means that whenever a reader finds information in the preprint he/she would like to cite in their own work, he/she will have easy to spot, intuitive access to the peer-reviewed paper. If the manuscript is rejected on this occasion, the preprint is disassociated from the journal to prevent potential issues with future resubmission.

Preprints are open to public as well as private comments, in order to encourage constructive feedback and contribution well before the formal publication sees the light of the day.

ARPHA Preprints extra perks

Preprints posted on ARPHA Preprints are:

  • Registered with CrossRef and assigned with their own digital object identifier (DOI) to ensure scientific record and permanent availability;
  • Indexed in several indexing services covering preprints to increase findability;
  • Easy to track for viewership (via ARPHA Platform-provided views counting tools), and citation (via integration with Dimensions) rates;
  • Promptly shared on social media to increase visibility and outreach.

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Got further questions about ARPHA Preprints? Visit our FAQs page or email us at info@arphahub.com.

Much like an author of a preprint, we will be happy to hear some constructive feedback from you!

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Follow ARPHA Preprints on Twitter.

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Register with Pensoft to customise your email alerts from ARPHA Preprints and ARPHA-hosted journals by title and/or topic.

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Pensoft partners with ReviewerCredit to certify and reward peer review

Following recent API integration with ReviewerCredits, Pensoft – the scholarly publisher and technology provider – has launched a pilot phase with one of its peer-reviewed, open-access journal: Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ). Reviewers, who create an account on ReviewerCredits, will automatically record their peer review contributions, which will be certified via the platform and receive rewards and recognition within the scholarly community and fellow scientists. 

Apart from a seamless system to showcase their peer review activity, reviewers will also be assigned virtual credits, which can be redeemed for benefits provided by selected partners, including discounted APCs. 

The registration on ReviewerCredits is free. While a reviewer can register any of his/her peer reviews on the platform, reviews for journals partnering with ReviewerCredits earn additional redeemable credits.

Once a reviewer signs in BDJ using their own reviewer account, a pop-up window will recommend that an account on ReviewerCredits is created by using an ORCID ID or an email address. Once the registration is complete, each completed peer review contribution will automatically appear as certified on ReviewerCredits, as soon as the editor submits a final decision on the reviewed manuscript. In line with peer-review confidentiality, the entry displayed on ReviewerCredits will not contain the content of the review, nor the particular paper it is associated with.

“We are happy to partner with ReviewerCredits to further recognise, encourage and reward the contribution of reviewers in BDJ. No one should forget that, at the end of the day, it is up to reviewers to ensure that only good and quality science makes its way in the world. Unfortunately, though, their role in scholarship has traditionally been overlooked and we all need to put in effort to change the status quo,”

comments Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of Pensoft.

“We are excited by the collaboration with Pensoft on this project and to acknowledge BDJ among our prestigious partner journals. Pensoft has proved an extremely competent partner, well aware of the importance for journals to state the value of their peer review process. We work together to strengthen the collaboration between journals and reviewers and we are looking forward to a growing collaboration with Pensoft publications,”

Prof. Giacomo Bellani, co-founder and president of ReviewerCredits, underlines the value and enthusiasm for this new partnership.

Additional information:

About ReviewerCredits:

ReviewerCredits is a startup company, accredited to the University of Milan Bicocca, launched in 2017 by enthusiastic active researchers and scientists. ReviewerCredits is an independent platform dedicated to scientists, Journals and Publishers addressing the peer review process.

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Official EASE journal European Science Editing goes diamond OA with ARPHA

Starting from 2020, European Science Editing (ESE), the official journal of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE), has been relaunched as a fully Open Access journal with all content freely available and published as soon as accepted, on a new journal website hosted on ARPHA Platform.

This move is part of a strategic relaunch of the journal to provide greater focus on research and expert commentary that will inform and support editors working in the scholarly environment. The relaunch comes after several months of planning by a small working group of EASE Council members and ESE editors. Much of the non-research content previously published in the journal will now be published in the newly-created member magazine, the EASE Digest; for example, News notes, The editor’s bookshelf, Resources, and interviews.

The journal is being relaunched with a new editorial board, but retaining the same Chief Editor, Ksenija Bazdaric, managing editor Dado Cakalo and associate editor associate editors Hrvoje Jakovac, Tom Lang and Joan Marsh. An introductory editorial published in the journal explains the changes.

Introductory editorial by ESE’s Chief Editor, Ksenija Bazdaric. Openly available from https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2020.e50566.

The new editorial board comprises distinguished members from all over the world: Eva Baranyiova (Czech Republic), Lisa Colledge (UK), Moira Hudson (UK), Olga Kirillova (Russia), Zafer Kocak (Turkey), Rachael Lammey (UK), Vladimir S Lazarev (Belarus), John Loadman (Australia), Herve Maisonneuve (France), Ana Marusic (Croatia), Arjan Polderman (The Netherlands), Maria del Carmen Ruiz Alcocer (Mexico), Karen Shashok (Spain), Cem Uzun (Turkey), and Quan Hoang Vuong (Vietnam).

Ever dedicated to be a source of peer-reviewed information on all aspects of scholarly editing and publishing (i.e. research integrity, peer review, scientometrics, open science, predatory publishing, statistics), writing, translation and ethics, ESE welcomes editorials, original research articles, reviews, viewpoints and correspondence items.

ESE has moved to its new website, provided by the open-access scholarly publishing platform ARPHA (developed by scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft), for all new articles, although the archive content will remain on the old website. This new website provides better delivery of the journal content and will help to make the journal easier to discover.

“I am happy to be working with the ARPHA team and that ESE has moved to a completely new platform which will raise the profile of editorial research and topics,”

Ksenija Bazdaric, ESE’s Chief Editor.

“At EASE we are delighted to be working with ARPHA and Pensoft to publish the journal in its new format. There has been considerable work invested in relaunching the journal with a new focus so that we can raise the profile of research about editing and the value that editors provide in the scholarly environment. An important part of the relaunch was ensuring greater visibility of the journal content and we are confident that ARPHA can help us achieve this,”

Pippa Smart, President, EASE.

“It could only make us proud at ARPHA that such a pillar in the world of scholarly communication has chosen our publishing platform to make the crucial step towards Open Access. I am certain that by opening up and digitalising its content right away, EASE will greatly facilitate and expedite the improvement of quality and integrity of science on the global scene,”

ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “

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Follow European Science Editing on Twitter.

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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.

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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