IJS Publishing Group has launched IJS Press, a new publishing arm allowing us to publish partner journals in addition to our own.  We are looking to drive forward open access publishing by providing a first-class publishing service to partner organisations.  Partners may be prestigious and ambitious international academic institutions, membership associations and societies, looking to develop their own journal(s).

We will look for our partner journals to maintain high editorial and publishing ethics standards. We will look to review these against key performance indicators on a regular basis.

IJS Publishing Group has a reputation for developing successful journal brands that meet their communities needs.  Our focus is high impact content, open access publishing with first class customer experience and author services.

By driving forward open science and scholarly discourse at rapidly advancing interdisciplinary research fronts, we hope to nurture scientific advances and progress. If you are interested in establishing your journal through IJS Press, please get in touch.

Why open access?

We are passionate about open access for a number of reasons.

• Increased citation and usage
• Wider collaboration
• Greater public engagement
• Faster impact
• Increased interdisciplinary conversation
• Compliance with open access mandates

Increased citation and usage

Open access research is free to read, copy, reuse and distribute. There is now significant research showing that open access articles are viewed more often than articles that are only available to subscribers, and are cited more often.

Steve Lawrence’s letter in Nature provided the first data on how freely available data substantially increases a paper’s impact.  His team analysed analysed 119,924 conference articles in computer science and related disciplines, obtained from DBLP (dblp.uni-trier.de).  The mean number of citations to offline articles was 2.74, and the mean number of citations to online articles was 7.03, an increase of 157%.  Restricting their analysis to the top 20 publication venues by average citation rate gives an increase of 286% (median 284%) in the citation rate for online articles.

Wider collaboration

The Human Genome Project is often cited as an example of how Open access publications and data enable researchers to carry out collaborative research on a global scale. The ability of open access to transform publications and data “into a much more powerful resource for research, education and innovation” (OASPA). This international, collaborative research project was enabled by the use of open data, with all the sequence data made openly available for other researchers to reuse.

Allowing for data to be openly shared it enables greater collaboration between researchers and also creates new research opportunities, as exemplified in the case of the studyforrest project in which a single dataset has generated multiple studies from different labs and resulted in 19 different publications so far.

Greater public engagement

Open research means access to content is not limited to those with journal subscriptions. Many groups that miss out on subscription content – including researchers at institutions with limited access or funds, individual researchers not affiliated with an institution and the general public – find open access content not only available but valuable.

Making research papers freely accessible from the moment of publication can have significant impact, particularly for research in which there is a strong public interest. For example, a Scientific Reports paper exploring the biological impact of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the pale grass blue butterfly was accessed over a quarter of a million times during the first month after publication.

Patient Involvement

Patient involvement in research is now a well-accepted concept with a key emphasis in the community on how we can improve our methods and evidence base. Open access has enabled those outside of research to benefit from new findings. There is now published Guidance for Reporting Involvement of Patients and Public (GRIPP2) as a key way for researchers and patients to understand how they should report involvement and engagement in research papers.

We have launched AMS Protocols on IJS Press – a journal dedicated to the publication of scientific research protocols.  By pre-registering the rationale and proposed methodology behind a research study, research becomes more transparent and reproducible, and can have a direct, positive impact on patients and communities. This journal builds on our more established IJS Protocols, the rationale for which we provided here.

Faster impact

Open research accelerates the pace of scientific enquiry. By opening up research with permissive licences like CC BY, researchers are empowered to build on existing research quickly. A study of articles published in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences between June 8, 2004, and December 20, 2004 supported the view that open access accelerates the process by which researchers built upon existing research, showing that open access articles are cited earlier and are, on average, cited more often than non-open access articles.

Increased interdisciplinary conversation

Interdisciplinary publications foster greater dialogue across discipline boundaries, and often find novel approaches to traditional problems. Open access journals that cross multiple disciplines, such as Annals of Medicine and Surgery and others in our portfolio, are helping researchers connect more easily by providing greater visibility of their research. Open research also means that research can discover relevant research and data outside their main field via search engines, repositories, social media and a variety of other channels.

Compliance with open access mandates

Many funders, institutions and governments around the world require open access. Funders of scholarly research (funding bodies or institutions) are increasingly requiring their grant holders to make publications related to their research available to the public, free and without restrictions on re-use. Our open access journals comply with major funding policies internationally.

Why do we charge article processing charges (APCs)

We keep our APCs as low as possible to encourage people to utilise our services whilst trying to maintain sustainability. Here is what an APC covers:

• Journal support
• Platform development and maintenance
• Promoting open access
• Our business costs
• Editorial office assistance/peer-review
• Content management
• Production costs (copyediting, style editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc)
• Waiver premium
• Publishing, promotion, indexing and archiving
• APC administration fee