Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ) is waiving article publication charges (APC) for all authors who provide their unique author ID, known as ORCID, when they submit their work to the online peer-reviewed journal QScience Connect.
Dr Christopher Leonard, editorial director at BQFJ, said: “We are strong supporters of the idea of unique author IDs, as it not only helps now with attributing credit to those who publish, but it also opens up new opportunities for academic evaluation in the future, maybe by taking into account other online activities of researchers. However we didn’t want to sit back and take a passive role in this, so we decided to encourage uptake of ORCID by waiving publication fees for accepted articles for those authors who have registered with ORCID.”
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) provides a non-proprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and scholarly authors. ORCID addresses the problem that a particular author’s contributions to the scientific literature can be hard to discover online as most personal names are not unique and can change due to marriage, spelling preferences or transliteration. ORCID provides a unique and persistent identifier, similar to that created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).
BQFJ made this decision to encourage researchers in Qatar and the Middle East to participate in the ORCID initiative. The APC waiver will present authors with the opportunity to experiment with open access (OA) publishing and in turn contribute to an increase in OA publications, as well as improving their discoverability through use of a persistent identifier.
Laurel Haak, of ORCID, said: “We are excited about QScience’s decision to encourage adoption of persistent author identifiers as part of its OA initiative. We look forward to collaborating with QScience on the outreach and engagement of researchers in Qatar to improve access and
discoverability.”
BQFJ provides a range of academic publishing services to the research community in Qatar, QScience.com is the academic journals portal that is also known as Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. In addition, the online platform, QScience.com, already hosts 14 scholarly journals covering diverse subject areas such as information and library studies, sustainable energy, education, medicine and bio-science, Middle Eastern healthcare, design and Islamic studies. Additional journals are scheduled for launch later this year.
