The research and publishing network, ScienceOpen, and the University of Westminster Press (UWP) have released several collections of open access articles and books in the humanities and social sciences that are now available on ScienceOpen. The publications will be embedded in the discovery environment of ScienceOpen for enhanced visibility and put into context of other relevant collections to further increase the impact of the research.
As the most recent university press to partner with ScienceOpen, UWP publishes multiple peer-reviewed journals and books that are made freely available in digital format, promoting open access scholarly communications. The university press focuses its publications around areas closely related to the research strengths of the University of Westminster which include the social sciences and humanities, science and technology, communications, and more, publishing authors from across the world in its journals and book collections. The timing of the release on ScienceOpen coincides with the launch of a new Journal from the UWP, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, which has been created as an interdisciplinary forum, rethinking major environmental and theoretical themes concerning the anthropocene in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
This cooperation between UWP and ScienceOpen includes four collections of UWP publications to ScienceOpen’s research network, adding to the diversity of ScienceOpen’s indexed content. The first collection is Silk Road: A Journal of Eurasian Development, a journal of social sciences dedicated to evidence-based research and policy studies on Silk Road countries, Central Asia and their international interactions. A second collection houses the journal Anthropocenes –Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, and the third, Westminster Papers in Communications and Culture focuses on UWP’s most established publication. A further collection presents the full portfolio of books published at UWP including chapter-level discovery tools. A super collection presents the full range of content published by UWP, opening it up to exploration with ScienceOpen’s unique search tools based on citations, Altmetric score, views, shares, and much more. Therefore, this collaboration also benefits academics who are interested in high quality, open access publications in non-STEM and interdisciplinary fields.
Andrew Lockett Press Manager is pleased to note the opportunities afforded for open access dedicated community channels such as ScienceOpen: ‘From its inception UWP has worked with digital innovators and published many book titles on digital media. We are pleased – with ScienceOpen – to offer a new discovery channel for potential readers for much of our output and highlight the possibilities afforded by open access for the world’s new university presses in particular’. Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen is encouraged by university presses leading the way on open access. “UWP is offering an excellent service to the academic community and we are proud to support them in their mission by providing an interactive environment for their open access works that encourages community curation, review and sharing as a further dissemination channel. UWP joins other university presses from University College London, Liverpool, Huddersfield,
Tsinghua, Vilnius and more”. The University of Westminster Press and ScienceOpen hope that the addition of the UWP collections will connect researchers and academics from around the world to the UWP network. The expansion of the UWP network will increase the exchange of ideas, exemplifying the advantages of open-access publication models
