image: GigaScience Press’ journal GigaByte has been awarded one of the first CrossRef Excellence for MetaData Awards.
Credit: Metadata Award
GigaScience Press is a winner of the inaugural Crossref Metadata Awards, recognising efforts in scholarly publishing metadata completeness and enrichment in their journal, GigaByte. Thanks to River Valley Technology’s state-of-the-art publishing platform, the journal was selected amongst over the nearly 150,000 journals from 22,000 members using Crossref infrastructure for having the highest metadata completeness in the small publishers category.
Presented for the first time at the Crossref Midyear community meeting, the award recognises a commitment to high-quality metadata for the works published and leadership in this domain among Crossref members. Now celebrating its 25th year, Crossref is a not-for-profit organization that helps the global scholarly research community record and connect knowledge through managing metadata for various research objects like articles, books, and datasets. With the primary goal to make research easier to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
As an Open Science publisher, GigaScience press has worked hard to provide open, rich and reusable metadata to address the broader goals of open science and promote a more transparent research ecosystem. Richer metadata makes content more useful, improving discoverability by humans and machines. Making their high-quality peer-reviewed content more ready for artificial intelligence tools in this manner, GigaScience press also sharing their open content via a data mining portal to facilitate and encourage text and data mining (see: https://gigabytejournal.com/text-and-data-mining)
These features have only been possible thanks to River Valley Technologies' novel XML-first platform which is able to better capture richer metadata and content. This is linked to machine readable text and persistent identifiers (PIDs), along with the supporting research data and the code to dynamic features in the published papers such as interactive figures. As well as improving the readability and accessibility for machines. The platform improves this for humans with integrated multi-lingual support and the ability to view the article in dyslexic-friendly fonts.
To enable these many features metadata quality is an area GigaScience Press have been particularly focussed on, and they are honoured by this recognition. In his acceptance speech at the prize announcement, GigaByte Chief Editor Scott Edmunds saying, “I would particularly like to thank our technical partners at RiverValley Technologies for their very hard work in addressing our exacting standards, their novel publishing platform has been key to all of this.”
Maryam Bazargan, CEO at River Valley Technologies commented, “We are proud to have contributed to GigaScience Press's success in winning this award. Our partnership with GigaScience Press has enabled us to push the boundaries of scholarly publishing. Together, we have delivered a fast, accurate, and cost-effective publishing solution.”
There were six categories in these first Crossref Metadata Awards, with GigaScience Press winning the most competitive small members category (organisations of less than 1 million USD of publishing revenue or expenses). GigaScience Press won thanks to its 82% coverage of key metadata elements across their records for their GigaByte journal, this being higher than any other small publisher, and second highest over all the categories.
This focus on high-quality metadata has meant GigaByte has also achieved the DOAJ Seal for journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing, and was quickly and easily mirrored and listed in publishing indexes such as PubMed Central, Scopus and Web of Science. This high quality metadata has also enabled easier integration with numerous third-party technical platforms, including OA Switchboard. GigaByte was also a winner of the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Scholarly Publishing.
Building upon this award and recognition and furthering its partnership with River Valley, GigaScience Press is planning the launch of further journals. The team will also be offering a cost-effective and interactive solution for other journals that want to benefit from GigaScience Press’s expertise to improve their own publication workflows in a similarly high-quality and Open Science friendly manner.
About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI’s Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two award-winning data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched in 2012), which won the 2018 American Publishers PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing, and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020), which won the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. It also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research and to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made openly available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository.
About GigaByte
GigaByte provides a way to rapidly and cost-effectively share research, making the scientific process more inclusive and accessible to the broader community. It uses an exclusively XML-based publishing system that automates the production process and makes it effortless to change views, languages and embed interactive content. Enabling readers to directly interact with the underlying data and software allows immediate use of published research, improves reproducibility, and increases trust. Upon acceptance this system converts manuscripts to online – and PDF-ready articles within hours with minimal human intervention, dramatically reducing production time and cost to provide an equitable solution to publish open science. https://gigabytejournal.com/
About River Valley Technologies
For over 35 years, River Valley has been dedicated to enhancing research communication through innovative technology, including the world’s first fully XML-based end-to-end system. Our mission is to transform the journey from research to publication into an efficient, transparent, and accessible process. By empowering publishers and societies to reduce publishing time and costs, River Valley aims to accelerate the dissemination of research while upholding the highest standards of integrity. Our cloud-based platforms are designed to streamline every stage of the publishing process - from author submission and peer review to production and hosting - with adaptable and XML-first workflows that meet the evolving needs of the publishing landscape. With head office in London and offices in India, River Valley supports clients across EMEA, the USA and Asia. Clients include The IET, Emerald Publishing, American Physical Society, and GigaScience Press. www.rivervalley.io
Contacts:
Scott Edmunds, Publishing Director, GigaScience Press, scott@gigasciencejournal.com
Maryam Bazargan, CEO, River Valley Technologies, Maryam@rivervalley.io