Help - Scipedia: Communicating Science

Scipedia is a scientific and technical digital publisher and professional social network. Scipedia aims to connect researchers and professionals in science and technology and facilitate the sharing of knowledge, expertise and the outcome of their work. For this purpose, Scipedia offers an innovative platform providing free publishing and open access services (e.g. no open access fees are payable by the authors and no fees are required to read the published articles) to disseminate the results of the scientific and technical work.

Scipedia offers free content so that the published papers and other public documents are available under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This means that Scipedia content can be distributed and linked in accordance with the provisions of this license. Scipedia must not incorporate materials that violate the rights of their authors or works with a licensing scheme incompatible with the Scipedia scheme.

An integral part of Scipedia's mission is to publish journals of the highest quality and with the greatest impact. Scipedia's journals will follow standard or collaborative peer-review processes as a way to ensure the overall quality and integrity of the research presented.

Scipedia embraces new technologies to effectively generate and provide enriched content. Scipedia offers a superior online platform for visual edition of papers, including importation utilities from LaTeX or Microsoft Word, comments and discussions support, etc. Furthermore, Scipedia's platform accepts supplementary material to enhance your publications. This includes video material, animation sequences, datasets, spreadsheets, computational models and more.

Getting started with Scipedia is easy. The first step is to customize your profile and add your publications and research experience to it. On top of this, adding your institution and department will help Scipedia to connect you with your colleagues. And, do not forget to add your photo. Once you've set up your profile, you can start to find people to follow.

Even if you have not completed your profile, you can still browse Scipedia contents, read all Scipedia publications and discussion pages, and (if your email is confirmed) add comments on published papers.

Once your profile is completed, you can enjoy the main features of Scipedia. In particular, you are entitled to publish your papers in Scipedia's publications. Click on the 'CREATE A DOCUMENT' button of your profile to start the process. For more information on how to publish a paper, take a look at the corresponding help section.

Scipedia is a professional network where scientists, researchers and professionals in science and technology can share and access knowledge, expertise and the outcome of their work. Users are required to sign up with a professional email address in order to verify that the user is a researcher or technologist. The email address can be changed after sign-up.

If you have an institutional email address that we don't recognize, please follow the normal registration procedure to request an account. The request should be processed within one working day. In the meantime, you will have access to Scipedia as a guest user.

If you're a researcher or technologist but don't have an institutional email address, please follow the normal registration procedure to request an account and you will be granted access to Scipedia as a guest user. If you want to obtain the privileges of a registered user, please complete your profile with details of your present and past institutional affiliations, field of research, and publications, preferably with supporting links. Then, email us and we will be happy to look into your account request manually.

Unregistered (not logged in) or Anonymous users
An unlogged or anonymous (profile pending verification) user can still browse Scipedia contents and read all Scipedia publications and discussion pages.

Guest users
A guest user is a verified user registered with a personal email (e.g. "gmail.com"). Guest users can still browse Scipedia contents, read all Scipedia publications and discussion pages, and add comments on published papers.

Registered users
Registered users are entitled to use the main features of the site, including creating papers, asking questions, answering, reviewing articles and suggesting edits, etc. However some advanced features require the user to have a certain degree of reputation in the community.

Reputation is a rough measurement of how much your contribution to Scipedia is esteemed among the community (how the community thanks you). Reputation is earned by demonstrating your expertise to your peers (publishing papers, answering questions, adding comments as reviewer, etc.).

The basic list of privileges acquired with the reputation points is:

  • 100 reputation points: the user can make public and publish papers (author)
  • 1000 reputation points: the user can request the creation of new journals (editor)
  • 5000 reputation points or percentile above 98: the user is qualified to be a member of the Scipedia Advisory Board (advisor)

For more information on how to earn reputation points, take a look at the corresponding help section.

The Scipedia Advisory Board (SAB) is an honorary position held by up to ten Scipedia registered users who have a special interest in the growth and health of Scipedia. They are the liaisons between the community and Scipedia staff, bringing community concerns to the forefront and helping to guide new features and platform enhancements.

The SAB has early access to upcoming features and meets with staff to brainstorm and speak for the community. They also meet with member groups to bring questions, concerns and ideas back to Scipedia. The goal is to ensure that the community has a strong voice about the future of Scipedia.

The SAB will have additional privileges, such as the ability to create new journals or binding surveys on Scipedia policies.

The SAB is also empowered to impose resolutions on disputes that may arise in the article review process, in the development or application of policies and guidelines, or any other matters that may arise in the community. As part of its responsibilities, the SAB may assign special editing privileges to trusted users.

To qualify for the SAB, a person must be an active Scipedia user with a good reputation in the community (at least 5000 reputation points or percentile above 98). In exceptional cases, Scipedia members that do not meet those conditions, but do enjoy a great prestige in their research field, can also be appointed to the Scipedia Advisory Board by consensus of the SAB and representatives of Scipedia staff.

Qualified users of Scipedia may apply for admission to the SAB during the open application period. Selection of the applicants to the SAB will be based on the votes of the community and representatives of Scipedia staff.

Scipedia operates on six fundamental principles:

  • Scipedia is a means of dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge that incorporates elements of scientific journals. Scipedia guarantees immediate (without embargo) free access to the published documents.
  • Scipedia publishing services are provided for free (i.e. no open access fees are payable by the authors).
  • Scipedia is free content that anyone can read (i.e. no fees are required to read the published articles) use and distribute in accordance with the content license. Scipedia users must respect copyright laws, and never plagiarize from sources. Borrowing non-free media is sometimes allowed as fair use.
  • Scipedia strives to maintain high-quality content, based on collaborative review and discussion of the published documents.
  • Scipedia users should treat each other with respect and civility. Users should act in good faith, and assume good faith on the part of others. Should conflicts arise, they should be discussed calmly on the appropriate forum pages.
  • Scipedia will respect the standard principles of transparency and good practice for scientific publications.

Scipedia's policies and guidelines are developed by the community to clarify these principles and describe the best way to apply them. Essentially, policies explain and describe standards that all users should normally follow, while guidelines are meant to outline best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense. Scipedia will have specific discussion fora for policies and guidelines.

Scipedia is hosted and operated by Scipedia S.L., which implements Scipedia's policies and reserves certain legal rights. Nevertheless, Scipedia intends to be a self-governing project run by its community. Its policies and guidelines are intended to reflect the consensus of the community.

Open Access (OA) refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions on access and free of many restrictions on use. OA is fast becoming the norm in the dissemination of research outputs.

Scipedia embraces OA as a means to fulfill its mission. Scipedia offers free content so that the published papers and other public documents are available under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This means that Scipedia content can be distributed and linked in accordance with the provisions of this license.

Exceptionally, a document or publication in Scipedia may have a more restrictive OA license. Please confirm the conditions of the license in the document page before transforming, or building upon the material

Scipedia must not incorporate materials that violate the rights of their authors or works with a licensing scheme incompatible with the Scipedia scheme.

Scipedia offers an innovative platform providing free publishing and open access services to disseminate the results of the scientific and technical work. This means that:

  • No fee is payable as a publishing cost
  • No embargo period is applicable to the published work
  • Free public and immediate access is granted to the published article

The published articles in Scipedia will be licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Though the Terms of Use have the final say, in essence the CC BY-NC-SA license allows:

  • Anyone to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these.
  • Anyone to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
  • Anyone to distribute derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work.

Please note that, exceptionally, a document or publication in Scipedia may have a more restrictive open access license. Please confirm the conditions of the license in the document page before transforming, or building upon the material.

Scipedia's 'collections' offer the possibility to create repositories of technical and scientific documentation, including self-archiving papers. Self-archiving means making publicly accessible online an electronic version of a previously published document. Self-archiving can increase the visibility and impact of your work. You can self-archive your work on Scipedia by uploading full-text versions of your published papers.

Many journal policies allow you to make the full-text pre-print (i.e. manuscript submitted document for publication) of your published article publicly available. Furthermore, most journals allow sharing the accepted manuscript after an embargo period. But self-archiving permissions vary between publishers and journals. You can find details of many publisher copyright policies on Sherpa/RoMEO. You should always check your publisher conditions to make sure you are not going to breach copyright conditions before publishing your article in Scipedia.

Scipedia allows updating the citation of any self-archiving paper published in collections, by including its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). We encourage authors to include the URL to Scipedia in the citations of the paper, in order to help researches to find the supplementary material and discussion pages available in Scipedia.com.

Scipedia must not incorporate materials that violate their author's rights or works with a licensing scheme incompatible with the Scipedia scheme.

Scipedia respects the intellectual property rights and copyright of others. If you believe that a copyrighted work that you own (or a work of a third party who you represent) has been infringed on this website, please notify us.