Hindawi’s open source scholarly infrastructure platform, Phenom, recently received a huge vote of confidence, as it will now power the newly relaunched Lithosphere - the society-run, open access community journal for geosciences. The contract between GeoScienceWorld (GSW) and Hindawi was signed in late 2019 with Lithosphere opening for submissions on January 13th 2020.
Lithosphere has expanded its scope to include coverage of research in all areas of earth, planetary and environmental sciences. Lithosphere will also serve as a venue to publish valuable additions to the research literature, including confirmatory and null findings – helping to meet these largely unmet needs in geosciences.
Phenom combines Hindawi’s new modular publishing system developed using Coko’s PubSweet open source framework with services that draw from Hindawi’s experience in open access publishing to support partners, authors, editors, reviewers and readers. From manuscript submission to publication, Phenom currently underpins over 50 of Hindawi’s journals, with the rest of its journal portfolio to migrate through February 2020. Journals from Wiley and AAAS will also join Lithosphere in running on Phenom in 2020.
GSW acquired Lithosphere from The Geological Society of America in September 2019 and is moving to Phenom to support the drive towards Open Access and Open Science in this research community. As an alliance between GSW and leading nonprofit societies (including the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, The Geological Society of America, The Geological Society of London, Mineralogical Society of America, SEMP Society for Sedimentary Geology, Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the Society of Economic Geologists) the journal will become a unique publishing choice for authors in the geoscience community.
Phenom services are supported by Hindawi’s experienced and knowledgeable team who will oversee screening and publication policies, and production staff who will see accepted papers through the workflow and readied for publication. Ruth King, Managing Editor, and the external academic Editorial team will work alongside the Hindawi team.
Richard Bennett, Chief Commercial Officer at Hindawi says: “We are committed to open publishing infrastructure and are proud of how far Phenom has come in such a short time. To bring an external journal onto the system just a few months after we demonstrated it could support our own publishing is a fantastic achievement. Working with GeoScienceWorld and their partner societies is very exciting and we look forward to supporting this community and their open science mission.”
Ruth King, Lithosphere’s Managing Editor adds: “The Hindawi partnership and the Phenom system are a great match for Lithosphere. A fresh and intuitive system making use of the latest technologies to reduce demands on researchers, built for open science, with a high-quality editorial process – all help Lithosphere to serve the community’s publishing needs.”
This project is the product of collaboration at many levels and showcases the opportunities that are created when parties work together for the good of their relevant communities.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.