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Scholarly Communication: The Sciences

What is scholarly communication? This guide serves as an introduction to open access publishing as well as a guide to facilitate scholarly communication and collaboration.

Science

GigaScience (currently no article-processing or data-hosting charges)

"... aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use..."  and  "...to increase transparency and reproducibility of research, emphasizing data quality and utility over subjective assessments of immediate impact."  Publishes "... 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences."  This journal "...links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources."  The journal "...covers not just 'omic' type data and the fields of high-throughput biology currently serviced by large public repositories, but also the growing range of more difficult-to-access data, such as imaging, neuroscience, ecology, cohort data, systems biology and other new types of large-scale sharable data."

The Geosciences

Copernicus is both a repository and a completely open access geoscience publisher hosting several dozen titles.  In fact, it is one of the oldest open access publishers, operating as such since 2001.

Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics & Astronomy

Probably the biggest, oldest and most active of the disciplinary repositories, arXiv now houses three-quarters of a million open access research publications and communications.

SciELO - agriculture, engineering, health, social sciences, and more ...

Visit SciELO for scientific journals offering original, peer-reviewed research on a variety of topics in agriculture, social sciences, engineering and health.  The respository even includes journals in literature and the arts.  Organized much like DOAJ, article content is viewable at the journal level and is both searchable and browsable via journal volume and issue.  Content is published mostly in Spanish and Portuguese but the website offers an interface option between these languages, as well as English.

This repository is unique in that performance of a journal (usage) plays a part in the permanence of its listing in the collection.  Therefore its content is always kept up-to-date and meaningful to researchers.

SciELO's "criteria for admission" page states that "the general goal of the SciELO Project is to contribute to the development of the national scientific research by improving and expanding its means of dissemination, publication, and evaluation through the intensive use of electronic publishing."

Most content that appears in SciELO is indexed or abstracted in major international A&I databases such as ISI, Medline and APA Psycinfo.

The newest participant in this online indexed platform is South Africa.

Scholarly Communications Librarian

Profile Photo
Lucy Duhon
Contact:
The University of Toledo
Carlson Library
2801 W. Bancroft St. (MS #509)
Toledo, OH 43606 USA
VM: (419) 530-2838
University webpage
Website