ScienceOpen Research

About ScienceOpen Research

Researched profile — Batch 382. Verify current fees, deadlines and editorial details on the official journal site before submitting.

About ScienceOpen Research

ScienceOpen Research is the journal imprint of ScienceOpen, the Berlin-based research discovery and publishing platform launched in 2014. Its online ISSN is 2199-1006, recorded in the ISSN Portal with Berlin as the place of publication, ScienceOpen as publisher, English as the language, and publication dating from 2014. The JournalsWorld record for this post carries that single ISSN and names ScienceOpen as publisher, and the two records agree. Where the JournalsWorld page shows the publisher simply as ScienceOpen, the fuller imprint is ScienceOpen Inc., Berlin, Germany — a completion of the record, not a conflict with it.

Understanding ScienceOpen Research requires understanding that it is not a conventional journal that happens to have a website. It is the publishing arm of a platform built around a large, open discovery network of article records drawn from many publishers, organised into topical Collections curated by researchers, enriched with citation context, and opened to public discussion and post-publication review. The journal was the platform's original publishing experiment: a multidisciplinary, open-access outlet in which articles could be published rapidly after an editorial check and then evaluated openly, in public, after publication.

That model made ScienceOpen Research historically significant out of proportion to its size. Launched in the first wave of open-peer-review experimentation alongside a small number of peers, it tested in practice ideas that were then mostly debated in theory — signed and published reviews, author-invited reviewers, versioned articles, review articles carrying their own DOIs, and the treatment of peer review as a continuing public process rather than a private gate passed once. Scholars of scholarly communication cite it as a case study for that reason, and this profile explains the model in detail because an author who does not understand it will misjudge both its strengths and its risks.

The practical summary is as follows. ScienceOpen Research is a multidisciplinary, English-language, open-access journal from Germany, published since 2014, built on transparent post-publication peer review, with a historically reported publication charge of 400 US dollars after at least two independent favourable reviews in the process described by the platform, and with very small publication volumes by design of its experimental model. It is not a Scopus- or Web of Science-indexed megajournal, and authors seeking a conventional pre-publication peer-review credential should read the peer-review section of this profile with particular care before deciding.

The ScienceOpen Platform and the Journal's Place Within It

ScienceOpen was founded in Berlin in 2013 and launched publicly in 2014 by publishing professionals with backgrounds in conventional scholarly publishing who wanted to build a network-based alternative. The platform's core is discovery: it aggregates tens of millions of article records — the figure has grown steadily since launch and the platform itself should be consulted for the current count — and presents each record with its citation network, references, and links to related work, a feature the company calls research context. Any registered researcher can comment on records, and researchers meeting the platform's publication threshold can write formal public reviews of them.

On top of that discovery layer, ScienceOpen built services. Collections allow appointed Collection Editors from the research community to curate articles from many publishers around a topic, giving a field a human-edited front door. ScienceOpen Preprints allows authors to post a manuscript free of charge and receive a DOI immediately. ScienceOpen Posters allows conference posters to be published for a wider audience than the meeting itself. And a hosting business now provides journal and book hosting, indexing and promotion services to other publishers, whose content is showcased inside the discovery platform. The journal, ScienceOpen Research, sits inside that ecology as the platform's own primary-publication venue.

The distinction matters for a submitting author. An article published in ScienceOpen Research does not merely appear in an issue archive; it enters a network designed to surface it next to related work from other publishers, to invite public review and comment, and to track attention through article-level metrics and alternative metrics. Conversely, most of what a visitor sees on ScienceOpen is not ScienceOpen Research content at all, but records of articles published elsewhere. Confusing the platform's total record count with the journal's own article count is the most common error in informal descriptions of this title, and authors should avoid repeating it.

ScienceOpen also built a publicly available citation index from its aggregated records, free for researchers to use and provided at no cost to libraries, which attracted attention in the open-citations movement in the mid-2010s. That infrastructure ambition — index, network, review layer and publisher in one — is the context in which the journal's unusual editorial process was designed, and it explains why the platform describes its articles as having a traceable genealogy through citations, public review and tracked social interaction.

Aims, Scope and Subject Coverage

ScienceOpen Research is multidisciplinary in the full sense: it was designed to accept research from across science, medicine, the humanities and the social sciences, rather than to serve one discipline. The ISSN Portal classifies the title under general knowledge and culture, reflecting that breadth. The platform's publishing offer historically covered all article types and all disciplines, and its author services explicitly welcomed formats that conventional journals often refuse, including posters, short reviews and reports of negative results — work that is scientifically useful but hard to place in selective, novelty-driven outlets.

Recent content visible through the journal's Crossref record illustrates the breadth and also the current character of the title. Articles appearing under the journal's DOI pattern in 2025 and 2026 range across archaeology and geoscience topics, computing and machine-learning studies, and public-health and policy subjects connected with the platform's Sustainable Development Goals collections. A set of 2024 platform articles carrying the journal's identifier are not conventional research papers at all, but guidance and rubric documents for editors, librarians and academic readers about publishing costs, equity in research and publishing, and the platform's SDG assessment rubric. A prospective author should therefore read the recent archive carefully to see what the journal is actually publishing now, rather than relying on launch-era descriptions alone.

Fit, for this journal, is less about subject and more about disposition. The ideal ScienceOpen Research author wants speed, openness and public dialogue, is comfortable with reviews that anyone can read, and values a DOI, open licensing and network discoverability over a journal brand or an indexation line. The poor-fit author needs a confidential, anonymous, pre-publication verdict from a recognised disciplinary journal for a promotion or accreditation file. Both are legitimate needs; the journal serves the first far better than the second.

The platform's Collections add a second route to visibility that authors should factor into their decision. Work published elsewhere can be drawn into a curated Collection and gain readers, and work published in the journal can be contextualised by collections in its field. For early-career researchers building a public scholarly profile, that network layer — profiles, collections, public reviews given and received — can be worth as much as the single publication, provided they have the time to participate in it rather than merely depositing an article and leaving.

How Peer Review Works Here — Read This Before Submitting

ScienceOpen's review model differs from the conventional journal model in three ways: timing, openness and who initiates it. In the model described by the platform and by independent accounts of its first years, an author first posts a manuscript to ScienceOpen Preprints free of charge, receiving a DOI at once. The author then invites potential reviewers. Reviews are public and signed. Once a manuscript has received at least two independent reviews recommending acceptance, the author may revise in light of them and opt to publish the revised version formally in ScienceOpen Research, for a reported charge of 400 US dollars. Earlier platform descriptions also described rapid publication after an editorial check of roughly a week, followed by open post-publication review initiated by the editors, with a typeset version following the author PDF.

Post-publication review on the platform is open-ended and eligibility-gated. Content on the platform is available for formal post-publication peer review by scientific members with five or more peer-reviewed publications recorded on their ORCID, while members with at least one publication can comment publicly. Reviews themselves can receive CrossRef DOIs and are published openly, with a structured rating approach described in platform materials. Because reviews are public and permanent, they form part of the article's scholarly record: a strong public review strengthens a paper's credibility in a way readers can inspect, and a critical one remains visible alongside it.

Authors must weigh three consequences of that transparency honestly. First, the process depends substantially on the author's own network: an author who cannot persuade two qualified colleagues to review publicly may stall before formal publication is even possible. Second, public review is a reputational act for reviewers too, which can make reviews franker in substance but sometimes more diplomatic in tone than anonymous review; readers should read them as signed expert statements, not as anonymous verdicts. Third, many universities, funders and assessment panels still define peer-reviewed publication as the conventional pre-publication model, and may not count a platform publication of this kind in the same way. That is not a judgement on the journal's integrity — its process is transparent and its reviews are inspectable, which is more than can be said for many conventional outlets — but it is a practical fact an author must check against their own institution's rules before, not after, publishing.

The volume figures underline the experimental scale. A count recorded in 2022 listed 115 reviews, of which only two were negative, and 77 publications on the platform's own publishing track. Those are small numbers for a platform of ScienceOpen's reach, and they tell an author two things: the journal has never been a high-throughput outlet, and its community of active public reviewers is intimate rather than vast. Current authors should confirm the live submission route and terms on the ScienceOpen site, because platform services have evolved since the launch model, and only the present-day author pages can state what is offered now.

Open Access, Licensing, Fees and Versioning

ScienceOpen Research is an open-access journal: published articles are freely readable, and the platform's wider philosophy treats open licensing, open review and open citation data as parts of a single openness programme. Reviews on the platform are published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence in platform descriptions, so that they can be reused and cited as scholarly objects in their own right. For article licensing, authors should confirm the exact licence attached to the version they publish, on the article page itself, since platform terms have been revised over the journal's life and the article-level statement is authoritative.

The historically reported economics are simple by industry standards. Posting to ScienceOpen Preprints is free of charge, with a DOI assigned. Formal publication in ScienceOpen Research, after the required favourable public reviews, was reported at 400 US dollars — a figure well below the article charges of large commercial megajournals at the time, reflecting a lean, platform-based cost structure without print, and a founding argument that the price of publication should fall when review is organised as a network activity. Earlier promotional materials quoted different figures at different stages of the platform's development, including higher launch-period prices and discounted humanities and social-science rates with needs-based partial or full waivers, which is precisely why this profile reports the 400-dollar figure as the documented point in the best-known description of the model rather than as a current price list. The only safe procedure is to read the current fee page before committing.

Versioning is a genuine feature, not a slogan. Because an article begins as a preprint version, is reviewed publicly, and is then revised and published, and because post-publication comment can prompt further author versions, the platform maintains linked versions with a visible history. Authors should cite the formal journal version, check that their own profiles point to it rather than to the preprint version alone, and understand that earlier versions remain part of the open record. For research where a method or dataset was corrected after review, that visible correction history is a mark in the work's favour; for authors hoping an early draft will quietly disappear, it will not.

No subscription or reading charge applies to readers, and the platform's discovery and networking functions — browsing, searching, commenting, maintaining a profile — have been offered free, with revenue coming from publishing services, hosting and promotional services for publishers. That business model matters to authors for one reason: the journal's incentives are aligned with visibility. A platform that sells discovery services succeeds by making content findable, and a journal article inside it benefits from that machinery.

Indexing, Metrics and Recognition

ScienceOpen Research benefits from platform-level discoverability rather than from the classic citation-index route. Its articles carry Crossref DOIs — recent DOIs follow the pattern visible in the journal's Crossref feed, built on the journal's ISSN — are openly crawlable, and sit inside a citation index that the platform itself maintains and offers freely. Scholarly search engines index the open full texts, and the platform tracks article-level usage and alternative attention measures, which it presents as part of each article's context.

No Scopus listing, SCImago ranking or Web of Science Journal Impact Factor for ScienceOpen Research was verified from the sources consulted for this profile, and the JournalsWorld record shows no verified quartile, SJR or impact factor for this post. Authors must not claim such credentials for the journal. Where an employer or funder maintains a whitelist of recognised journals, the author should check whether this title appears on it and, if the answer matters financially or professionally, obtain that answer in writing before submitting.

This positioning is best understood as a deliberate trade rather than a failure. The platform was built as an experiment in replacing private, journal-centred evaluation with public, network-centred evaluation: signed reviews with their own DOIs, public ratings and comments, citation context and altmetrics, all inspectable by any reader. Whether that trade serves an individual author depends entirely on their audience. A researcher communicating with an open-science-minded, international, online readership may be better served here than in an obscure conventional journal. A researcher whose next appointment depends on a panel counting indexed publications will usually not be.

Citation expectations should be set accordingly. Articles here are citable, DOI-bearing, openly accessible scholarly objects, and individual articles can and do attract citations through search-engine and collection discovery. But the journal has no impact-factor halo, its own publication volume is small, and its readership arrives through the network rather than through a discipline's subscription bundle. Authors who publish here should plan to promote the work themselves — through collections, their own profiles, repositories and scholarly networks — rather than assuming the journal brand will carry it.

Article Types and Formats

The platform has historically published all formats, and that breadth remains the best guide to what belongs in ScienceOpen Research. Full research articles are the core. Reviews, including short and mini-reviews, are welcome. Conference posters can be published through the platform's poster route so that work presented once to a room becomes a permanent, citable, discoverable object. Reports of negative or null results — competently conducted studies whose outcome was that an effect was not found — were explicitly encouraged in the platform's author outreach, on the sound ground that unpublished negative results distort every literature that depends on them.

Alongside research content, the journal's recent record includes platform and community documents: guidance for academic journal editors, for authors, editors and publishers on publishing costs and waivers, for librarians, and explanations of the platform's Sustainable Development Goals rubric and its work on equity in research and publishing. Those items show the journal also functioning as the platform's own scholarly noticeboard. An author browsing the archive should therefore distinguish research articles from platform documents when judging whether their own manuscript resembles what the journal publishes as research.

Whatever the format, the platform's expectations are consistent: a complete, honestly reported piece of work, with methods sufficient for others to judge and build on it, data and materials described transparently, and an author willing to engage with public comment and review after publication. Authors unwilling to engage should not choose an open-review venue; silence in the face of a public critical review harms a paper more here than in a conventional journal, because the exchange — or its absence — is visible to every future reader.

Technical preparation follows platform instructions rather than print-era conventions: the manuscript is uploaded through the platform, metadata and disciplinary keywords are added to make the record discoverable, and authors are encouraged to enrich their article records with images, a non-specialist summary and links to related work. Those enrichments are not decoration on this platform; they are the mechanisms by which collections, recommendations and search results surface a paper, so time spent on them is time spent on the article's actual readership.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Not

ScienceOpen Research fits authors who value speed, openness and dialogue over brand and indexation. It fits researchers with a solid, useful result — including a replication, a negative result, a dataset-oriented paper or a poster — that deserves a DOI and a public record without a year of sequential rejections at novelty-driven journals. It fits open-science practitioners who want their reviews, revisions and data practices visible. It fits authors in fields poorly served by conventional journals, and authors whose readership is global and online rather than subscription-based. It also fits scholars who want to practise public reviewing themselves, since the platform's review community is its living core.

It does not fit authors who need, for a specific bureaucratic purpose, a conventional anonymous pre-publication verdict from a Scopus- or Web of Science-listed disciplinary journal. It does not fit authors who cannot recruit reviewers from their own network, or whose topic is so contentious that signed public review is unlikely to be forthcoming. It does not fit authors who want to publish and never engage again. And it does not fit authors who have not checked the platform's current publishing offer, since a platform business can change its services, prices and routes in ways a print journal cannot, and the live site is the only reliable statement of what is offered today.

Early-career researchers should take one extra step: ask a mentor or a research-office adviser to look at the journal with them. The model is legitimate and transparent, and its reviews are more inspectable than those of many conventional journals, but its very novelty means evaluators unfamiliar with it may undervalue it — or, occasionally, mistake it for something it is not. A short conversation before submission, armed with the journal's ISSN record, its Crossref output and examples of its public reviews, prevents a long argument after publication.

Authors considering the preprint route alone should also be clear about the distinction. A ScienceOpen Preprint has a DOI and is publicly posted and reviewable, but it is the subsequent step — revision in light of at least two favourable independent public reviews and formal publication in ScienceOpen Research — that constitutes journal publication here. Citing a preprint as if it were the journal article, in a CV or a report, misrepresents the record and is easily detected, because the platform keeps the versions visibly distinct.

Submission Pathway, Step by Step

The documented pathway runs as follows. First, prepare the manuscript to a standard you would be proud to have read publicly, because on this platform there is no hidden stage at which weaknesses are private: the posted version is public from the start. Second, create or complete your ScienceOpen and ORCID-linked profile, since reviewer eligibility and author identity on the platform are tied to publication records. Third, upload the manuscript to ScienceOpen Preprints, where it receives a DOI without charge, and complete the metadata, keywords and disciplinary classification carefully. Fourth, invite qualified reviewers — colleagues with the expertise to judge the work and the publication record to act as formal reviewers — and engage constructively with the reviews and comments that arrive.

Fifth, revise the manuscript in response to the reviews and post the revised version, explaining the changes. Sixth, once at least two independent reviews recommend acceptance, take the formal publication step into ScienceOpen Research, confirming the current charge and licence terms on the platform at that moment. Seventh, after publication, complete the article's context: add a plain-language summary, link data and related outputs, nominate the article for relevant Collections, and respond to post-publication comments and reviews as they come. Eighth, record the publication accurately — journal title, year, DOI, and the fact of its open-review model where a report format allows a note — and deposit or link it in your institutional repository as your institution's policy requires.

At every step, keep your own copies and records: the submitted files, review invitations, review DOIs, revision notes and payment confirmation if a charge applies. Platform publishing is durable, but an author's own file is the fastest evidence in any later dispute about priority, version or review history. And if the platform's current pages describe a different route from the one summarised here, follow the platform: services evolve, and the live instructions always govern.

Reading and Citing ScienceOpen Research

Readers should approach an article in this journal with the review record open beside it. The public reviews, ratings and comments are part of the evidence for how much confidence to place in a paper, and the version history shows what changed under criticism. A paper that attracted detailed, favourable, signed reviews from identifiable experts, and whose author revised visibly in response, carries a kind of assurance a bare journal name cannot provide. A paper with no public review activity should be read as essentially self-published with a DOI, and judged purely on its internal merits.

Citations should use the formal journal version and its DOI, give the journal title as ScienceOpen Research, and include the year and article details from the article page. Where a review itself is cited — for example in a discussion of open peer review — cite the review's own DOI and its reviewer author, since reviews here are independent citable objects. Researchers studying scholarly communication will find the journal and its platform a rich primary source: launch-era presentations, the public review corpus, the SDG rubric documents and the equity and publishing-cost guidance in the recent archive together document how one platform tried to rebuild evaluation as a public network activity.

The journal's limits as a source are the mirror of its design. Small volume means thin coverage of any given field; the discovery platform around it, not the journal alone, is the comprehensive resource. A literature search should therefore use ScienceOpen's aggregated records as a search venue in their own right, while treating ScienceOpen Research articles as individual primary sources whose review histories form part of their appraisal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ScienceOpen Research? The journal imprint of the Berlin-based ScienceOpen platform, launched in 2014, publishing multidisciplinary open-access research with transparent, public, post-publication peer review. What is its ISSN? Online ISSN 2199-1006, recorded by the ISSN Portal with Berlin, Germany as place of publication. Who publishes it? ScienceOpen Inc., Berlin — shown as ScienceOpen on the JournalsWorld record. Is it multidisciplinary? Yes, across science, medicine, humanities and social sciences, and across formats including articles, reviews and posters. Is reading free? Yes; the journal and the platform's discovery functions are open to readers.

How does peer review work? In the documented model, a manuscript is posted as a preprint with a DOI, the author invites reviewers, reviews are public and signed, and after at least two independent reviews recommend acceptance, a revised version can be published formally in the journal. Public post-publication review and commenting continue after publication, with formal reviewing reserved to members meeting the platform's ORCID publication threshold. What does publication cost? Preprint posting is free; a charge of 400 US dollars for formal journal publication after favourable reviews is the figure in the best-known description of the model. Confirm the current charge on the platform before committing, because platform terms change. Is it in Scopus or Web of Science? No such indexing was verified for this profile, and no Journal Impact Factor is claimed. Should I check institutional recognition first? Yes — especially because its review model is unconventional, confirm in advance that your institution will count it for your purpose.