Editorial Policies Overview

As a global open access publisher, Tech Science Press is dedicated to disseminating cutting-edge scholarly research among scientific community by advocating an immediate, world-wide and barrier-free access to the research we publish. To ensure all publication meeting our ethical and scientific quality standards, each submission goes through a rigorous review process, including pre-peer-review by relevant editorial board, a single-blind peer-review process by scientific experts, revision following reviewers’ comments as well as final approval by the editorial board.

Being an Open Access Publisher

In this episode, we are talking about what it's like to be an open-access publisher and what the future might bring. Our guest is Paul Peters, chief executive at Hindawi publishing - one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed, fully Open Access journals. Peters sheds some lights into how Hindawi made the transition to Open Access, and how the company has grown. He also talks about current policies within the EU and how this will affect his company. He also briefly touches upon the topic of how Open Access is perceived outside of Europe, and how there is a different motivation for being Open Access in Asia and in North America. The host of this episode is Erik Lieungh.

Publishing in “Aircraft Design” with a Continuous Open Access Special Issue

The article looks at publishing options in the field of aircraft design to find that no dedicated journal on aircraft design exists. For this reason, a Continuous Special Issue Aircraft Design of the well established journal “Aerospace” at the Open Access publisher MDPI is started. Often special issues of a journal are introduced for “hot topics”. Here, the subset “special issue” is used for a scientific domain—in this case “aircraft design”. Recurring single special issues are numbered in sequence and are identified by the year of the deadline for manuscript submissions. This allows for the delivery of several single special issues over time in a row without the need to define a publishing schedule up front. Together these single issues form the Continuous Special Issue Aircraft Design and offer a new publishing home for the aircraft design community.

How commercial publishers play a role in developing a sustainable model for Open Access publishing

One of the objectives of the open access movement has been to upend the traditional model for scholarly publishing by making research findings freely available to anyone, anywhere. The trend emerged partly in response to the major publishing houses having become the gatekeepers of the dissemination of research findings and setting high prices for access to this material via subscriptions to scholarly journals.On the face of it, this state of affairs suggests that commercial actors have no place in the realm of open access publishing. However, an argument can be made to the effect that commercial companies have a part to play in transforming the way scientific publication works and contribute to making research freely available. Having numerous interested parties in the OA domain may contribute towards making research accessible, leading to a general increase in innovation. This is necessary in a field that by and large is in its infancy, technologically, politically and economically. An OA initiative that is part of a profit-driven organization does not preclude it from contributing to a sustainable publishing model, and a commercial approach is not necessarily incompatible with the principles. In this poster we offer NOASP as an example, and part of the wider context of commercial open access publishing. Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing is an open access publisher of scholarly journals and books in Scandinavia and a subdivision of Cappelen Damm Akademisk. NOASP was established in 2015 – and continues to grow. In our experience, meeting the very specific criteria for Open Access publishing requires substantial investments in technology and human resources. Publishers who choose to establish themselves in this niche area must have a long-term strategy and develop specific expertise. Competition between publishing houses and other actors provides incentives for staying abreast of new requirements and standards, technology and infrastructure. These strategic and economic factors directly and positively impact the quality of journals and publishing solutions, and ultimately contribute to innovation in the field. The economics of commercial publishing, by heightening competition between the services publishers provide, therefore leads to improvement of both technical platforms and editorial practices. In turn, this leads to higher quality of the end product and broader distribution of the freely available research, which should ultimately be the goal of the OA movement.