SciPost News

Today we are launching SciPost's Sustain Our Services Campaign.

This campaign has the following primary objectives:

• to ensure continuity of support for our services
• to engage organizations which have benefitted from our activities, but not yet supported us
• to reduce our financial uncertainty, by building reserves to cover at least 12 months of operations and by vying for longer-term support agreements
• to empower our growth and widen the positive impact we have in terms of publishing practices, including countering today's publishing costs hyperinflation, by making our business model more widely known and adopted as an alternative to APCs

Secondary objectives include:

• to engage with and raise awareness of scientists (whose livelihoods are most impacted by current failings) in the reform of the publishing business
• to extend our business model to like-minded initiatives, thereby forming a larger lobbying group for Diamond

In the coming times, look out for the following:

• blog posts
• information sessions / webinars
• direct discussions with individual stakeholders

To kickstart the campaign, we offer you the following two blog posts:

• Things you should know about SciPost
• Being honest about the reform of publishing, a personal opinion piece from J.-S. Caux

We look forward to engaging with you during the course of this campaign!

We've just published a blog post looking back at our operations in 2023. Without being exhaustive, we hope it nonetheless can give you an accurate picture of the current state of our initiative.

In brief, in 2023 we decided to scale up the team to tackle growing backlogs due to increasing demands on our services, despite the lack of financial certainty. This strategy certainly helped address the most pressing delays, but depleted our financial reserves. Our growth is stunted and long-term financial sustainability remains a distant perspective without a more engaged support from academic organizations which benefit from our activities.

Today, we are very happy to publish a very special paper:

Universality class of the mode-locked glassy random laser
by Jacopo Niedda, Giacomo Gradenigo, Luca Leuzzi and Giorgio Parisi
SciPost Phys. 14, 144 (2023)

For you, this paper should be special due to its scientific quality.

For our initiative, it's a milestone because it is the 2000th paper published since our beginnings in 2016.

We would like to mark this event by expressing once again our deep gratitude to all authors, referees, Fellows, readers, advisors, supporters and sponsors who have made SciPost the successful Genuine Open Access publisher it is today.

This event also reinvigorates us to further improve and broaden our services, fulfilling our mission of providing a quality-focused, community-driven publishing solution for academics worldwide. The embrace of the community, driving the recent rapid growth we have experienced, is a convincing validation of our approach. On the one hand, this has put great strain on our currently severely limited resources; on the other hand it re-motivates us to expand our efforts to convince academic institutions and funding agencies to increase their support, so that we can bring the benefits of our activities to wider communities.

We welcome the University of Bristol as our latest supporter. Their library contributes to the development of SciPost through Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework, that enables Jisc members to support various open access initiatives. We are delighted with this support, as that will enable SciPost to further develop its platform and publish more diamond open access papers. Thank you University of Bristol and thank you Jisc.

We want to thank the Library of the University College London for their generous support covering 2022-2024, through Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework program. We also thank the researchers from UCL for the many papers they submitted to SciPost journals. The support from libraries and scientists enables SciPost to further develop its journal publishing infrastructure, publish diamond open access journals and modernise the way scientific knowledge is shared.

SciPost is very happy to welcome the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz as supporter. We are delighted because the scientists of this university belong to the most prolific contributors to the SciPost journals. SciPost is developing a community-led, fully open science publishing infrastructure and the support of leading academic organisations is crucial. We look forward to receiving more papers from Mainz!

The University of Sheffield is our latest supporter. The university library contributes to the development of SciPost through Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework, a wonderful program that enables Jisc members to support various open access initiatives. We are delighted to see that increasingly funding of open science activities (such as SciPost) is organised at a national level. Thank you University of Sheffield Library and thank you Jisc.