ScienceOpen Technology
The technical backbone of ScienceOpen
The ScienceOpen platform provides a unique, advanced indexing, hosting, and publishing environment that is freely accessible and embedded within an interactive discovery and communication environment. The platform contains tens of millions publication records—including journal articles, conference papers, open peer reviews, books, & preprints—and offers free poster and preprint publication (incl. versioning) for researchers.
Our architecture not only reflects state-of-the-art technological publishing solutions in adherence with industry best practices and standards but is also built on open source modules embedded in a framework that ensures scalability for future developments. The core of our platform—our policies and infrastructure developments—is founded on principles of openness and transparency, data persistency and portability, privacy and security. Thus, interoperable taxonomies were central to its structural make-up from the beginning:
Cloud-based platform
ScienceOpen technological infrastructure is hosted on an internal private cloud using the VMware vSphere platform. The cloud infrastructure uses a cluster of servers that are each running vSphere Hypervisors and are centrally managed by a vCenter Server. This kind of cloud infrastructure provides greater scalability and resiliency for the ScienceOpen platform.
The system also relies on a cluster of servers for the private cloud and a set of a NAS devices for hosting terabytes of data. The NAS devices are configured with multiple levels of redundancy and data mirroring for consistency and scalability. The NAS is used for storage of file data, search index, and databases. Platform hosting is provided by Ovitas, Inc., USA.
Open Source Technologies
ScienceOpen is a multi-tiered application that is organized into functional components. Each of the different tiers utilizes different Open Source technologies to create a robust and scalable architecture:
Open and standardized data and metadata formats for simple data transfer
Our XML data and metadata are created based on current versions of the NCBI standardized JATS and BITS DTDs. ScienceOpen is a member of Crossref, Metadata2020, and the initiatives for open abstracts and citations, all working to provide support and guidance on best-practice rich metadata generation. Wherever available, we work with standardized identifiers such as Crossref and Datacite DOIs, ORCID or PubMed IDs, or FundRef for persistent datasets and easy exchange between platforms. This is also facilitated by direct user data export in standard reference formats for BibTeX, Reference Manager (RIS), and Endnote.
Data portability between systems and user authentication
The website contains essential metadata of publications in meta-tag which are compatible with Google Scholar and Google. Google and Google Scholar, Baidu and Baidu Academic are currently harvesting data from the ScienceOpen environment. We have further interfaces with Crossref, ORCID, PubMed, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Datacite, Zenodo, and others. All our published preprints and articles are registered with Crossref DOIs, including rich metadata deposits and machine-readable Creative Commons licenses. Open Access full-text XML data and/or pdfs may be downloaded directly from the platform.
ScienceOpen user identification is based on ORCID. Registered user profile details are drawn directly from publicly available ORCID data. Data added to ScienceOpen may be copied directly to the user’s ORCID profile to ensure maximum portability and reduce redundancy.
Ovitas: ScienceOpen developer and technical lead
The architecture behind the ScienceOpen platform is built upon Ovitas’ design and development, such as in use for the global portal platforms by two of the big four accounting conglomerates and the authoritative source of the US GAAP. The latest two software generations were developed by Ovitas Hungary. Ovitas provides outstanding, internationally acknowledged products and services in the field of content lifecycle management (CMS and workflow solutions, including bridge processes for dynamic multi-channel publishing and information/communication portals). As a global market leader within the sector, the company offers cutting edge customizable standards-based solutions for enterprises handling vast amounts of dynamically changing, long-lasting information. Given the many years of experience and excellence in working with databases and taxonomy software, Ovitas is the perfect match as ScienceOpen’s development partner.
The head developers of the ScienceOpen Budapest team are Technical Lead Péter, Senior Web Developer Bálint, and Tihamér, Senior Data Conversion Analyst.
Technical requirements for uploading your published content to ScienceOpen
If you are interested in working with ScienceOpen, then the following information may be helpful for you regarding the uploading process on ScienceOpen.
For the uploading process, ScienceOpen will need your articles to be prepared in a certain way. The preferred format is full text XML. You can upload your content through our FTP server. Your articles should be organized in ZIP folders, following this format:
- On your local computer, create a folder structure with the following structure:
- Today’s date: YYYY-MM-DD format. (i.e. 2016-04-01)
- Article1 content (XML file and any other relevant files in a zip file)
- Article2 content (XML file and any other relevant files in a zip file)
- Article…
- Today’s date: YYYY-MM-DD format. (i.e. 2016-04-01)
- Example:
- Root Level : 2014-04-01
- zip (containing file 1234.XML, image.jpg)
- zip (containing file 5678.XML, image.png)
- …
- Root Level : 2014-04-01
In cases where the Publisher does not have full text XML version of the articles, please provide PDF file for each article, together with its XML metadata.
If you do not have XML metadata, yet your articles do have DOIs assigned, you will be asked to prepare a list of articles with their corresponding DOIs.
We can also work with RSS feed, and you can use our API. If your articles have no DOIs and you are unable to provide any XML metadata, please talk to us individually.
