What is Opscidia?

Opscidia is a novel platform for free and Open Access scholarly communication. 

The principle of our platform is to host scientific journals led by an academic editorial  committee. 

Hence, the journal is run by its editorial board while Opscidia provides the software infrastructure, host the journal and assist the communication of the journal free of charge. 

Opscidia was created in 2019 and started hosting its first journals during the spring 2020.

Why is it free and how is it funded?

We believe that research articles written by academics have a value, not only for academics but also for R&D and innovation, for public decision making and for the interested citizen. We believe that Open Access is the best way to promote the reuse of research results, but also that the reuse of research results is the best way to fund Open Access! 

Concretely, we build tools to automate the analysis of full corpuses of research articles. Our tools allow to sum up a research corpus much quicker than what a human would be able to do. Based on these principles, we sell tools and services to corporate R&D, engineering centers, public decision makers, journalists.

Our publishing activities and our commercial activities are very complementary: the publisher activity provide us with the proximity with the research ecosystem and the specific technical knowledge to create better technological intelligence solutions and our technological intelligence solution allow us to fund our publishing activities.

How to submit an article?

Submitting an article on Opscidia’s platform requires is very simple!

It requires three short steps :

• Create an account on Opscidia’s platform.
• Hit submit an article on the page of the journal of your choice, and fill the corresponding online form.
• Submit your article in your format of choice : LaTeX, Word, Google doc etc.

We hope that we have made it as simple as possible. If you have questions or suggestion to improve the simplicity of the process, feel free to drop us a line at contact[at]opscidia.com

How to create a journal?

Most important of all, whatever the stage of your journal, from the mere idea to the already existing journal, please do get in touch with us to discuss your project! We are here to help!

For the creation of a new journal or for the transition of an existing journal to Opscidia’s platform, our process is quite simple:

• We have made a list of the criteria of the journals that we host, you can check it here.
• Someone from Opscidia’s team will discuss your project with you, and help you, if needed, to make sure that all the criteria are filled.
• Finally, once everything is ready, we will send a brief to our scientific advisory board, that will review that the criteria are filled and to give their agreement to the creation of the journal.

What would happen if Opscidia was to disappear?

Opscidia’s solution is designed to be highly reversible, and the journals are still strongly academic led. Hence, if Opscidia was to disappear, it would be easy for the journals to continue their activities with a different OJS instance. 

In particular, the following precautions have been taken :

• For each journal hosted on Opscidia’s platform, we set-up a long term preservation with CLOCKSS as soon as they are eligible (2 issues published). 
• The contract that we sign with each journal plans that if the partnership between Opscidia and the Journal was to end, Opscidia shall deliver a data dump for the journal to be able to continue its operation without disruption.
• Part of our offer includes to set-up a protocol to write automatically in local repositories (HAL, OpenAIRE, Zenodo, etc.) and /or disciplinary repositories (Pubmed, ArXiv etc.)
• Our platform is set up on an OJS instance. OJS (Open Journal System) is an open source framework, maintained by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). It has an active community. This means that the journal are not technically locked-in by Opscidia: anyone, in the PKP community or elsewhere would be able to take over the OJS instance of any particular journal to continue its operations.  

We are very committed into the improvement of the reliability of the scientific literature. We believe that our funding scheme is virtuous in that sense, as the more trustable our publications and scientific publications in general, the more value we can create outside of academia. 

Hence, we use the highest standard in terms of publication ethics and conflict of interest avoidance.  In particular, we require from our editorial committees, authors and peer-reviewers to follow strict guidelines, that we review regularly.

How do you deal with conflict of interest?

On the topic of conflict in interest, as well as on other topics related to publication ethics, we use the material provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and we suggest to the editorial committees of our journals to do the same. 

Mainly: 

• the authors have to declare their potential conflicts of interest as well as those of their funders. 
• We demand to our journals that the editor and the peer-reviewers handling a manuscript are not in the same research group as the authors of that particular manuscript.
• We demand to our journals that the editor and the peer-reviewers handling a manuscript did not publish together in the previous two years.

In case of doubt on the applications of these guidelines by one of Opscidia’s journal, the issue will be discussed with the journal’s editorial board and Opscidia’s scientific advisory board in order to resolve the issue.