From Open Access to Open Science from the viewpoint of a scholarly publisher

Abstract

The open access publishing model led to dramatic changes in the way scientists communicate their results. Open access also challenged the traditional business models of academic publishers that have been maintained for hundreds of years. Open access to article content, however, soon appeared insufficient as far as access to underlying data was concerned. Opening research data came as the logical second stage of this challenge which was soon put on the agenda of scientific communities, funding organisations and governments. Open data, by itself, raised the question how we can re-use data and reproduce research results, how transparent is the peer-review and, more generally, how scientific evaluation is being performed. Over time, these and other similar developments morphed into what we now call "open science" or, in more general terms, transforming research into a primarily collaborative rather than a primarily competitive endeavour. The present lecture summarises the key milestones of the movement from open access through open data to open science from the viewpoint of an academic publisher. It is also illustrated by the ARPHA Biodiversity Data Publishing and Dissemination Toolbox (ARPHA-BioDiv) which is a set of standards, guidelines, tools, workflows and journals, developed by Pensoft within its ARPHA Journal Publishing Platform. The history of development of ARPHA-BioDiv largely resembles the evolution of the open access to open science which started with the pre-publication semantic markup of important domain-specific terms and relationships between them, as implemented in 2010 by the ZooKeys open access journal and then followed by others, for example: PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Nature Conservation, NeoBiota, Journal of Hymenoptera Research, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, Zoosystematics and Evolution. The next stage of integrated narrative and open data publishing was pioneered in 2013 by the Biodiversity Data Journal and its associated authoring tool, the ARPHA Writing Tool (AWT), launched as the first ...