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Editorial

Sci—An Open Access Journal with Post-Publication Peer Review

MDPI AG, St. Alban-Anlage 66, CH-4052 Basel, Switzerland
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Submission received: 3 May 2018 / Revised: 3 May 2018 / Accepted: 3 May 2018 / Published: 4 May 2018
Sci (ISSN: 2413-4155) is a new and innovative open access journal from MDPI. It will combine our efforts for fast publication with open dissemination, and respond to calls from scientific communities for academic publishers to provide more transparency. We recently launched J (ISSN: 2571-8800), which publishes articles that have been peer reviewed solely on the basis of scientific soundness. Most manuscripts are posted as preprints and authors may choose to have their peer review reports published with the final paper. Sci goes beyond this by incorporating a fully transparent post-publication peer review process.
Having always operated as an open access publisher, MDPI believes in offering a trustworthy and reliable service to scholars. We know from our experience of different academic fields that one process does not suit all papers. With Sci, we are expanding our choice to authors, while maintaining the hallmarks of in-house editorial support and rapid publication that have made MDPI journals successful.
There has been much discussion in recent years about opening the black box of peer review. The confidentiality inherent in single or double blind peer review can be an obstacle to trust. Post-publication peer review is a method that can help to rebuild trust in publishers. First, it is a benefit to reviewers, who can more easily receive recognition for the crucial task they perform. Second, authors and editors can provide evidence of the rigorous process a published paper has gone through. Third, it gives the research community confidence that a responsible, accountable process has taken place and helps them to differentiate questionable publishing operations from those that act with integrity and to expected ethical standards.
Fast and responsible publishing are among MDPI’s core values. In recent years, we have decreased our publication times by making all our processes as efficient as possible and predominantly handled by trained, in-house staff working in collaboration with our editorial boards. We have also launched Preprints, a platform for early-stage publication in any discipline. At the same time, more of our journals are being included in indexes such as Web of Science, PubMed, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and we are a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), STM and other industry organizations. Our authors and editors can testify to the success of our approach. We see Sci as a new step forward, a contribution to the future of publishing, and a continuation of the path we have followed since our first journal was launched in 1996.
By launching Sci, we are looking to better serve authors, editors and readers interested in open, accountable scholarly publishing and warmly invite contributions to Sci.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Rittman, M.; Vazquez, F. Sci—An Open Access Journal with Post-Publication Peer Review. Sci 2019, 1, 1. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/sci1010001

AMA Style

Rittman M, Vazquez F. Sci—An Open Access Journal with Post-Publication Peer Review. Sci. 2019; 1(1):1. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/sci1010001

Chicago/Turabian Style

Rittman, Martyn, and Franck Vazquez. 2019. "Sci—An Open Access Journal with Post-Publication Peer Review" Sci 1, no. 1: 1. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/sci1010001

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