Increasing access, enhancing visibility

At IOP Publishing, we believe that scientific results have the biggest impact when they can be seen and read by an interdisciplinary audience of scientists around the world. In 2018, we continued to pursue this aim with expanded publishing options for authors and important enhancements to our online content platform IOPscience.

We are committed to supporting sustainable open access models as a means of promoting global access to high-quality research. IOP Publishing is a pioneer in open access publishing, launching the first fully open access physics journal in 1998, and more recently developing ground-breaking licensing agreements with institutions and funders to facilitate their move towards open access research publishing.

We now publish seven fully open access journals and offer gold and green open access options on the vast majority of our publications. The three proceedings titles in the IOP Conference Series are among the largest open access publications in the world.

In 2018, scientists from 6,618 institutions and 126 countries downloaded research content from IOPscience.

We now publish seven open access journals, having launched four titles in 2018.

The number of open access articles published in our journals increased by more than 30% in 2018

Journal of Physics Communications, our multidisciplinary open access publication, increased the number of published articles by 300%.

The IOP Conference Series published more than 40,000 open access papers.

Austria offsetting agreement

IOP Publishing negotiated the first offsetting agreement with Austrian institutions in 2014. We are now publishing more than 90% of articles by Austrian corresponding authors in our journals on a gold open access basis.

Open access

IOP Publishing is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and a sponsor and member of the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Content platform development

We continue to invest in our online content platform, IOPscience, to maximise visibility and accessibility. In 2018, new features included:

  • Enhanced search and browse features, including filtering by open access.

  • New subject categorisation for our ebooks to enable readers to find the most relevant content

  • Dimensions badges on journal articles to recognise highly cited papers

  • Enhanced protection for users when adding personal data to the platform

Accessibility

The IOPscience platform achieves exceptional levels of web accessibility and security for users while maintaining the highest standards of performance and stability.

  • Complies with the AA-level of the Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines

  • Awarded the Cyber Essentials Certificate of Assurance from the National Cyber Security Centre

Citation metrics

We added Digital Science’s Dimensions Badges to IOPscience to make it easier for authors and readers to see the academic impact of a publication.

Performance

High performance levels and guaranteed stability are defining features of our IOPscience content platform. System uptime was 99.8% in 2018 – the equivalent of just 10 minutes offline each week.

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We aim to create excellent digital products and services for our customers. Improvements to website functionality, accessibility, performance and security are released continuously. We really listen to feedback from our science communities to steer the design decisions that make IOPscience an amazing content platform.
Bridget Pairaudeau, IT Director

Egyptian Knowledge Bank

Researchers in Egypt are now able to access all our journals and ebooks, thanks to a new agreement with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), Egypt’s online national library and one of the world’s largest digital libraries.

“IOP Publishing is a lighthouse of quality in physics, so this agreement will be of great benefit to Egypt’s researchers, students, and all citizens with an interest in science.” H.E Professor Dr Tarek Shawki, President of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank

Picture above: H. E. Professor Dr Tarek Shawki, Egypt’s Minister of Education and Technical Education (right) and Dr Olaf Ernst, Commercial Director, sign the agreement.