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Most book and monograph publications still lack visibility within an electronic environment due to missing digitalized and persistent bibliographic data and/or fragmentary portability or interoperability based on the variety of formats, resulting in a more error-prone, non-standardized communication between various indexing systems and platforms. But books that cannot be discovered will not be read. OA metadata for books is essential for the transformation of the whole scholarly landscape, and one of its greatest advantages is full, immediate accessibility. 1 The point of origin for the OA META project was the realization that available book metadata (i.e. ONIX/MARC records) was not primarily created for the usage of indexing within an electronic research environment. Consequentially, both detail and focus of elements tagged in datasets are not necessarily selected to output solidified and persistent book records. The question was how to enrich or edit available metadata so that it can unfold its greatest impact in an e-context.

Watch the VIDEO.The big story in scholarly publishing of the last years was the preprint revolution. Researchers demanded a faster channel for the early communication of their results, journal editors revised their policies to accept manuscripts also published as preprints, there was an explosion of new platforms and infrastructure, and Crossref gave the old/new species of not-really published articles a DOI. Funders even jumped into the fray, allowing researchers to use their preprints in grant proposals. The non-profit Center of Open Science launched a platform for new preprint servers, and publishers are jumping into the arena with preprint repositories like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press’s bioRxiv, PeerJ Preprints, ACS’s ChemRxiv, MDPI’s Preprint.org and Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN. These developments create new challenges for content aggregators and discovery platforms, librarians, publishers, and readers, including persistent identification of the version of record, aggregation of citations and metrics across article versions, and questions around copyright. The wide proliferation of preprint repositories across different sources also makes it difficult for researchers to reach their peers with their early results. As an aggregator and interactive discovery platform, ScienceOpen has been working to place preprints in the context of the published literature with quick preprint-filters on keyword searches and first efforts to aggregate metrics. We further provide a framework to peer review preprints in a portable system with a Crossref DOI for each peer review report, as well as editorial management of preprints in thematic collections. By showing how preprints fit in to the academic record in a broad discovery database, we are able to bring them to the attention of those searching for the newest research and more clearly highlight their status as open for peer review. Increased visibility through contextualization is our value proposition for publishers, authors and readers of preprints in 2018. We explore the disruptive potential of preprints from our experience with ScienceOpen’s discovery platform.

The increasing momentum towards opening up various dimensions of society is discussed in this article, and the authors consider whether ‘open’ is now an unstoppable force for change in the world. Various topics within research communication, such as open access (OA) and post-publication peer review (PPPR), are considered from the perspective of the authors as participants in the scholarly communication community of more than 20 years’ standing, with both for- and non-profit credentials. The authors explore how harnessing the wisdom of the crowd in rating everyday services manifests itself by improving our ability to make choices in our daily lives. They explain how this network effect can be applied to scholarly communication and how it provided some of the inspiration behind the launch of ScienceOpen, the research and OA publishing network, in May 2014. This publishing platform is then described as an example of democratizing publishing. The increasing importance of software development in publishing and the need for stand-alone expertise in this space (as opposed to a publisher-centric approach) is also discussed. Finally, the authors consider the role that the impact factor and the promotion/tenure system play in holding back progress in scholarly communication and they highlight the efforts of early career researchers to break the stalemate by taking ‘open’ pledges.