All articles published by ISCI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. This means:
- everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in ISCI journals, and
- everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given.
- open access publication is supported by the authors’ institutes or research funding agencies by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles
For Authors and Readers Open Access Means:
- free availability of the literature on the Internet without any subscription or price barriers
- immediate open access once an article is released (no embargo period)
- authors retain all copyrights – authors will not be forced to sign any copyright transfer agreements
- permission of re-use the published material if proper accreditation is given (Creative Commons Attribution License
)
Authors and Readers Benefit from ISCI’s Pledges to:
- publish thoroughly peer-reviewed journals of high scholarly impact
- maintain a quick publication procedure — manuscripts are published within 6-8 weeks of submission, provided that no major revisions are required
- publish full open access journals — readers can access all articles published on this platform for free, including state-of-the-art review articles
- publish citation-tracked journals — ISCI is working towards quick coverage and citation-tracking of all of its journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)
- for biomed titles, ISCI is working towards quick coverage in PubMed Central and PubMed
Meaning of Open Access
In accordance with major definitions of open access in scientific literature (namely the Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda declarations), ISCI defines open access by the following conditions:
- peer-reviewed literature is freely available without subscription or price barriers,
- literature is immediately released in open access format (no embargo period), and
- published material can be re-used without obtaining permission as long as a correct citation to the original publication is given.
This means that all articles published in ISCI journals, including data, graphics, and supplements, can be linked from external sources, scanned by search engines, re-used by text mining applications or websites, blogs, etc. free of charge under the sole condition of proper accreditation of the source and original publisher. ISCI believes that open access publishing fosters the exchange of research results amongst scientists from different disciplines, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research. Open access publishing also provides access to research results to researchers worldwide, including those from developing countries, and to an interested general public. Although ISCI publishes all of its journals under the open access model, we believe that open access is an enriching part of the scholarly communication process that can and should co-exist with other forms of communication and publication, such as society-based publishing and conferencing activities.
Important Note: some articles (especially Reviews) may contain figures, tables or text taken from other publications, for which ISCI does not hold the copyright or the right to re-license the published material. Please note that you should inquire with the original copyright holder (usually the original publisher or authors), whether or not this material can be re-used.
Advantages of Open Access for Authors
The High Availability and Visibility of our open access articles is guaranteed through the free and unlimited accessibility of the publication over the Internet. Everyone can freely access and download the full text of all articles published with ISCI: readers of open access journals, i.e., mostly other researchers, do not need to pay any subscription or pay-per-view charges to read articles published by ISCI. Open access publications are also more likely to be included in search engines and indexing databases.
The Higher Citation Impact of open access articles results from their high publicity and availability. Open access publications are demonstrably more frequently cited.
Lower Publishing Costs: Open access publishers cover their costs for editorial handling and editing of a paper by charging authors’ institutes or research funding agencies. The cost of handling and producing an article is covered through the one-time payment of an article processing charge (APC) for each accepted article. The APCs of open access publishers are only a fraction of the average income per paper earned by traditional, subscription-based publishers. ISCI’s article processing charge (APC) is the same, irrespective of article length, because we wish to encourage publication of long papers with complete results and full experimental or computational details.
Faster Publication in ISCI’s open access journals is achieved by online-only availability. Accepted articles are typically published online more rapidly in ISCI journals than those of traditional.