The company was designated as one of “10 to Watch” by research advisory firm Outsell in its report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”[4] ScienceOpen began in 2013[5] when Alexander Grossmann,[6] a professor of Publishing Management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences and former publishing director at scholarly publishing house De Gruyter, and Tibor Tscheke, president and CEO of the content management system company Ovitas, decided to start a platform that would allow researchers to share scientific information, both formally by publishing articles and participating in post-publication peer review, and informally by reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and by updating their own papers.
ScienceOpen appoints members of the research community as Collection Editors[17] who curate articles from multiple publishers in any topic.
Authors can upload their manuscripts free of charge onto ScienceOpen Preprints, where they immediately receive a DOI number.
[18] There are several other web services in the same market niche as ScienceOpen, but they have been even less successful in attracting customers[citation needed]: Qeios, PREreview.org, Hypothesis, F1000, Publons, PubPeer, PubPub.
ScienceOpen has its headquarters located at Pappelallee 78-79, 10437 Berlin, Germany and its technical hub is at 131 Hartwell Ave, Lexington, MA 02421, USA.