SciPost News

We are pleased to announce that the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) has selected SciPost for inclusion in its 6th pledging round for funding.

SCOSS is a network of influential organisations committed to helping secure OA and OS infrastructure well into the future. Established in 2017, it has helped a number of initiatives on their way to financial sustainability.

With this inclusion, SciPost proudly becomes a member of the SCOSS Family of Essential Open Science Infrastructures.

We are thrilled with this recognition, and hope it will help us in our journey towards sustainability.

Today, we are very proud to present our 3000th Diamond Open Access publication,

Tensor network Python (TeNPy) version 1,
by Johannes Hauschild et al.,
SciPost Phys. Codebases 41 (2024)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCodeb.41

This paper is the peer-reviewed documentation for the Python package TeNPy, version 1.0 of which has also been peer-reviewed and published as part of the innovative construction of SciPost Physics Codebases which enables authors to release their research software as fully-fledged scientific publications.

Codebase release 1.0 for TeNPy,
by Johannes Hauschild et al.,
SciPost Phys. Codebases 41-r1.0 (2024)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCodeb.41-r1.0

On this occasion, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to all the authors of SciPost's 3000 publications for the trust they have placed in us and for helping us in our mission to transform Open Access publishing. A big thanks also to all the referees and SciPost's editorial Fellows who, lending us their time and knowledge, have been fundamental to building the high-quality publishing platform that we are today.

And of course, a well-deserved congratulations to the authors of the TeNPy package for their shiny new publications!

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!