About Open Access and Open Science

"Open access contributes to scientific excellence and integrity. It opens up research results to wider analysis. It allows research results to be reused for new discoveries. And it enables the multi-disciplinary research that is needed to solve global 21st century problems. Open access connects science with society. It allows the public to engage with research. To go behind the headlines. And look at the scientific evidence. And it enables policy makers to draw on innovative solutions to societal challenges".

Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research Science and Innovation at the STM Annual Frankfurt Conference, October 2016.

Open Access background

The Open Access publishing movement started in the early 2000s when academic leaders from around the world participated in the formation of the Budapest Initiative. They developed recommendations for an Open Access publishing process, “which has worked for the past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers” (reference: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org)

IntechOpen’s co-founders, both scientists themselves, created the company while undertaking research in robotics at Vienna University. Their goal was to spread research freely “for scientists, by scientists’ to the rest of the world via the Open Access publishing model. The company soon became a signatory of the Budapest Initiative, which currently has more than 1000 supporting organizations worldwide, ranging from universities to funders.

At IntechOpen today, we are still as committed to working with organizations and people who care about scientific discovery, to putting the academic needs of the scientific community first, and to providing an Open Access environment where scientists can maximize their contribution to scientific advancement. By opening up access to the world’s scientific research articles and book chapters, we aim to facilitate greater opportunity for collaboration, scientific discovery and progress. We subscribe wholeheartedly to the Open Access definition:

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited” (reference: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org)

Open Access Standards followed by IntechOpen

OAI-PMH

As a firm believer in the wider dissemination of knowledge, IntechOpen supports the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH Version 2.0). Read more

License

Book chapters published in edited volumes are distributed under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). IntechOpen upholds a very flexible Copyright Policy. There is no copyright transfer to the publisher and Authors retain exclusive copyright to their work. All Monographs/Compacts are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). Read more 

Peer Review Policies

All scientific works are Peer Reviewed prior to publishing. Read more 

OA Publishing Fees

The Open Access publishing model employed by IntechOpen eliminates subscription charges and pay-per-view fees, enabling readers to access research at no cost. In order to sustain operations and keep our publications freely accessible we levy an Open Access Publishing Fee for manuscripts, which helps us cover the costs of editorial work and the production of books. Read more 

Digital Archiving Policy

IntechOpen is committed to ensuring the long-term preservation and the availability of all scholarly research we publish. We employ a variety of means to enable us to deliver on our commitments to the scientific community. Apart from preservation by the Croatian National Library (for publications prior to April 18, 2018) and the British Library (for publications after April 18, 2018), our entire catalogue is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive. 

Open Science

Open Science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks.

Open Science is about increased rigour, accountability, and reproducibility for research. It is based on the principles of inclusion, fairness, equity, and sharing, and ultimately seeks to change the way research is done, who is involved and how it is valued. It aims to make research more open to participation, review/refutation, improvement and (re)use for the world to benefit.

Open Science refers to doing traditional science with more transparency involved at various stages, for example by openly sharing code and data. It implies a growing set of practices - within different disciplines - aiming at:

  • Promoting open and publicly accessible education tools
  • Transparency in experimental methodology, observation, and collection of data
  • Reproducible research data and re-analysis
  • Public availability and re-usability of scientific data
  • Public accessibility and transparency of scientific communication
  • Transparent peer-review and publishing practices
  • Using web-based tools to facilitate scientific collaboration
  • Supporting exchange of knowledge and research materials between disciplines
  • Supporting exchange of knowledge and research materials between scientific communities and industry.

We aim at improving the quality and availability of scholarly communication by promoting and practicing:

  • Open Access
  • Open Data
  • Open Metrics and Impact
  • Open Source