ReadSocial Powers Open Access Publishing with QScience
ReadSocial is excited to announce a new partner, QScience! QScience is working to make open access, peer reviewed content richer and more interactive, using ReadSocial as the basis for contextual discussion.
QScience.com launched in September 2011 (so they've got some cutting edge ideas). It's technically a peer-reviewed online publishing platform that offers a collaborative research environment for scientists. The platform publishes a range of peer reviewed, high quality, open access journals, databases and repositories which adhere to international publishing standards.
As for ReadSocial, we now have paragraph-level commenting and groups working in a number of different environments (web, iPad, inside EPUBs). Since groups are created using hashtags, it's possible to create very specific, subject-based discussions on top of articles as well. QScience was looking for something that offered powerful discussion features and was easy to implement (and scale), and thus the partnership was born.
With ReadSocial, QScience readers can add commentary to any paragraph of any research article on the site (much more valuable than adding it at the end, where the context of a comment is often lost). This means that when other researchers come to the article they’ll see comments made by others adjacent to the relevant paragraph, and they can respond with a comment, link or image. QScience is the first academic publisher to deploy this technology.
In the official announcement, Paul Coyne, Technical Systems Director at QScience, said, “ReadSocial fits perfectly into the QScience vision that research should be open, transparent, shareable and social. We are very excited about this new development and believe that it will demonstrate to our authors our commitment to making their works highly visible, read and cited.”
See an example of it being used on QScience here.