In recent years, Hindawi has been on an open science and publishing journey, to increase the relationship with our authors, editors and reviewers and to ensure they are at the heart of our publishing endeavors. Since I joined in October 2018, this has led to conversations, conference trips and video calls with academics around the globe who are passionate about our titles, and open science, and has provided us with many ideas about how we improve the publishing process and provide new tools and services for our communities.
In 2020, we have really stepped up our pace, and recently we were the first global publisher to trial a new AI driven writing tool — Writefull — which will help our authors during the submission process improving the language, grammar and scientific accuracy of their manuscripts. We know that it can sometimes be difficult for editors to see the science in papers where the authors might not have English as their first language.
By offering this as a free service to authors during submission we hope to help the science to shine during the peer review process and to prevent papers being returned to authors, or to revision, due to language issues. In our regular editor surveys, we often hear how small changes to the text, through improved grammar, can really help and our trial with Writefull indicates that authors using this tool to improve their papers before submission have an increased rate of moving into peer review. We believe the partnership helps both our Editors with their roles and our authors by ensuring their papers can be understood by a wider audience.
Later in the year we hope to roll this out further across our portfolio and I look forward to hearing what more of our authors, Editors and peer reviewers think of this service. Huge thanks to Writefull for working with us so far.
Another part of the research journey we are keen to engage with is earlier in the cycle before a paper has even been written. A key part of this is the work from conferences, often presented as a poster, and we will soon be the first publisher to work with Morressier to help authors link their conference posters with their published research.
Morressier is the platform for early-stage research with the focus on conference output such as abstracts, posters and presentations, currently hosting a mid six digit number of items from conferences around the world. Working together, we identified 75 previously published Hindawi papers that were also originally posters on Morressier and we will soon be connecting the original conference presentation and the final poster. We know how important posters are in the research life cycle and are working with Morressier to develop this link further - so keep watching this space for more exciting news on how we hope to connect the researcher lifecycle more fully.
Preprint servers connect published research papers with original work and during 2020 we will be setting up a pilot with ChemRxiv to encourage direct submissions into six of our chemistry titles from this rapidly growing pre-print server. Another trial is underway with PubSure and another five of our titles to determine if working with communities who collate and store work before formal publishing will help our Editors find new paper submissions or encourage more authors to submit to HIndawi journals. We are continuing to speak with BioRxiv and MedRxiv and hope to start connecting with them in the near future.
Last but by no means least is connecting with the associated data and images around published content, making sure all relevant information is linked and easy to find for researchers around the globe. We’ve long had a relationship with CCDC encouraging our authors to link chemical concepts with the database and over the coming months we will be implementing that more formally.
Data around published papers includes a myriad of things, not just chemical structures, so over the coming months we will use Dryad to help curate, support and publish our authors data sets for six titles in earth sciences and geosciences space. This will enable our authors in these titles to fulfil their FAIR requirements and help drive forward open science; our aim is to make this service available to all authors in all Hindawi journals over the course of the coming year.
All of these initiatives are running alongside the rollout of our new open source peer review system, Phenom, which many of you will now be interacting with on a day to day basis. This replaces our previous in-house system and by continuing to build our own infrastructure we are able to move quickly to pilot new services. Where we see benefits for authors, reviewers and editors from these trials, we can react quickly to apply them broadly across our portfolio. Phenom has been developed alongside the CoKo Foundation and will be continually developed to support our authors, editors and peer reviewers over the months and years to come.
As you can see we’ve been busy, but we remain committed to supporting our authors, editors and reviewers. We are also proud to be working with our open access colleagues at PLOS, PeerJ, eLife and the Royal Society to find new ways to support the publication of COVID-19 papers - reacting quickly to the needs of the research community and providing new solutions to getting key work published as quickly as possible.
We remain open during this unprecedented time and look forward to working with you all as we look to develop or launch new initiatives to help support the research community.
Sarah Greaves
Chief Publishing Officer