Jon began university life as a geologist, followed by a treacherous leap into the life sciences. He spent several years at Imperial College London, investigating the extinction and biodiversity patterns of Mesozoic tetrapods – anything with four legs or flippers – to discover whether or not there is evidence for a ‘hidden’ mass extinction 145 million years ago. Alongside this, Jon researched the origins and evolution of ‘dwarf’ crocodiles called atoposaurids. Prior to this, there was a brief interlude were Jon was immersed in the world of science policy and communication, which greatly shaped his views on the broader role that science can play, and in particular, the current ‘open’ debate. Jon tragically passed away in 2020.
The ARCS (Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship) have launched a new ‘open scholarship’ competition. The aim is simple: describe your ‘open science story’, and you could win $1000! In particular, the competition is aimed at finding success stories – how has practicing any form of open science helped you advance or enhance your career in some way?
All submissions will be published and archived with The Winnower, an open access platform, and assigned a DOI for free so it will become citeable.
To submit your open success story, simply click HERE. Use ARCS2015 as a keyword, so your submission is included in the project collection and considered for a prize. Articles must be submitted before October 5th to be considered for a prize.
As a junior researcher in the UK, it has given me great pleasure over the last few years to see the dramatic development of open access publishing. Most major research funders in the UK now require public access to published research articles in one form or another, and many other research intensive nations across the globe are following suit.
Along with this global increase in public access to papers, there has been a gear shift in demand for the availability of additional outputs of research, including code, videos, software, and raw data. One of the most recent steps in increasing access to these outputs has been the RECODE project for researchers in the EU, which seeks to develop an open data ecosystem through shifting research practices. With progress being made in the USA too, the wheels are truly in motion towards a global shift towards open access to all research outputs.
Say hello to Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO), a new open access journal, formally open for business today! The new journal represents a useful addition to traditional publishing, in that it will publish research from all stages of the research cycle, across a broad suite of disciplines, from humanities to science.
Traditionally, journals accept articles that are the final product of the research continuum, typically 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.
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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.
This new journal comes 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. This is great for authors who generate a lot of digital research outputs, as they can get credit for more than just manuscripts at the end of the day.
RIO journal publishes all stages of the research cycle – ideas, methods, data, software, and final results.
“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.”
This is a much more welcome advance than journals such as Science Advances or Heliyon, which offer very little to progress research or aid researchers compared to other open access venues. (views of the author, which are totally unbiased..)
RIO is scheduled to start accepting manuscripts in November 2015.
A fantastic new series on Dinosaurs of the British Isles airs tonight on ITV! It stars Dean Lomax, a professional palaeontologist based pretty much everywhere in the UK. It seems to be based off a book of his, published via Siri Press. I’ve seen a copy, and it’s pretty much the best illustrated guides to dinosaurs ever. Here’s a preview below, so at 9pm GMT, kick off your shoes, get the snacks ready and crack open a cold one, because it promises to be awesome!
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