The new journal content will be “open access” and free
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ) today announced the launch of QScience Connect on its digital publishing platform QScience.com. QScience Connect is a new kind of peer-reviewed academic and scientific journal that aims to provide a home for all research considered to be valid, ethical and correct. All content in the journal will be ‘open access,’ meaning it is free-to-read on the web while authors retain copyright on their works.
QScience Connect will publish original research papers of interest to specialists in all given fields. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, it will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication.
“QScience Connect will accept submissions from ALL fields and will publish those manuscripts which meet the simple criteria of being conducted in the appropriate manner, and where the conclusions concur with the results (if appropriate). We place less emphasis on perceived interest, instead preferring that our readers determine which articles are interesting be accessing and citing them,” said Arend Kuster, Managing Director, at Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. “QScience Connect leverages the tools, technology and experience of BQFJ, bringing this knowledge and insight to a broad-based, open access publication. Through increased competition and innovation, we hope to give authors great service, functionality and visibility for their research.”
“We believe this is an ideal model for online publishing, as all papers that describe work carried out correctly will be afforded a home in a peer-reviewed journal. It is also intended to capture interdisciplinary work which may fall between the aims and scopes of two journals,” says Christopher Leonard, Editorial Director of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. “QScience Connect adds to our growing portfolio of open access journals as we continue to see an increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access publishing, and interest from authors in this publishing route is growing by the day.”
QScience Connect is introducing a new feature, to emphasize that each article has been peer-reviewed and checked for validity and rigor, we have asked that the peer reviewers give up their anonymity for accepted manuscripts, allowing us to create a ‘Certificate of Acceptance’ for each article, showing the names of the peer reviewers and editor who reviewed the manuscript.
Authors are positively encouraged to make the most of the online environment and welcome submissions which may primarily consist of video or audio. Supplementary files can accompany text files too, and we look forward to authors using this facility to publish datasets which are reported in the main manuscript.
QScience.com’s advanced technology makes research findings readily accessible and searchable using multimedia functionalities to support text, data, audio and video formats. It is also the first scholarly research platform to make journal abstracts available in both English and Arabic and all content will be available via our mobile platform QScience Mobile.
QScience.com already hosts seven scholarly journals covering diverse subject areas such as cardiology, information & library studies, sustainable energy, education, Middle Eastern healthcare, design and Islamic studies. Many other journals are scheduled to be added in 2011.
QScience Connect is accepting submissions from today, and will publish its first articles in September 2011.
