Episciences: diamond open-access overlay journals
Episciences is a platform to publish diamond open access overlay journals. The ambition is to provide the scientific communities with the technical means to produce high quality scientific journals, at an efficient cost, compliant by design with FAIR principles. The main content (preprints/published articles/open peer review reports/datasets/softwares) of our overlay journals is hosted on open repositories (arXiv ; Zenodo ; HAL). The model allows for immediate open access and single blind or open access peer review of scientific content. Episciences provides a community-driven and academic-led publishing platform open to any disciplines and supported by leading funders in the scientific community. Authors retain all their rights through the use of Creative Commons licences.
The objective of this demonstration is to introduce several key aspects of the Episciences overlay journal workflow and the new features recently developed. We will cover the submission system and the final stages of publication.
Episciences offers 3 alternative ways to submit preprints, datasets or softwares:
- With metadata automatically retrieved from compatible open repositories
The procedure is to submit a preprint to a compatible repository. This step is as simple as copying and pasting the preprint ID into the journal submission page. The metadata is then automatically retrieved and the submission process is complete for the researcher.
- With an all-in-one Zenodo submission gateway
The process allows researchers to submit a document at the same time to Zenodo and to the journal, without leaving the Episciences user interface. It simplifies the submission process for researchers.
- With the COAR notify protocol and Signposting for the scholarly web
This new submission process will demonstrate how a researcher can submit a preprint on the HAL repository and then automatically submit it to an Episciences journal without leaving the HAL user interface.
The latest key aspect is the final steps happening when a document is published.
When a preprint has been reviewed and accepted by a journal, the latest step is the publication. Upon publication the goal of the overlay journal is to update the bibliographical references of the initial document to advertise to readers that it has been reviewed, endorsed and published by a journal. Several solutions are available dependending on the original repository.
Given that both HAL and Episciences have implemented the COAR Notify protocol, we will show how it works for documents hosted on HAL. The publication of a preprint involves a notification sent by the journal to HAL. The notification is sent with the protocol COAR Notify and immediately treated by HAL. It triggers several automatic updates on HAL, including, for example, the change of the type of document from "Preprint" to "Article", the addition of the references of the journal and the DOI of the article, etc.
After the publication, a final layer of services is added to the published articles. The metadata of the documents are periodically enriched with several open science services supported by OpenAIRE. These final steps will contribute to enhancing the quality and comprehensiveness of the documents’ metadata published by the platform.