The CCSD is pleased to announce that it is selected by the third call for projects of the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) for two Episciences projects : Édisciences and nepHAL+. The objectives are to meet the needs of journals for text editing and to propose an innovative solution for peer submission and evaluation.
At the end of November, the French Open Science Committee published the list of the 19 projects selected following the third call for projects of the National Fund for Open Science (FNSO). The two projects presented by the CCSD for the development of the Episciences platform were selected: Édisciences and nepHAL+. We present them briefly.
Strengthening editorial services with Édisciences
In order to better meet the needs of journals, Episciences aims to extend its current offer to include a full editorial service, covering all stages from text preparation (proofreading, standardisation, ortho-typographic corrections) to layout. The Édisciences project aims to bring together approved service providers and create generic templates in LaTeX format compatible with the Métopes structured publishing chain. The aim is to adapt these templates to the specificities of each journal, while bringing them together under the Episciences brand. The templates will include all the metadata necessary for high quality indexing of articles in reference databases and will comply with standards allowing accessibility for the visually impaired.
Three journals from different disciplines are involved in Édisciences: Recherches en didactique des mathématiques, Les Cahiers scientifiques du transport and Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics (JTCAM).
The duration of the project is 12 months. The service developed will later be offered to all journals on the platform.
Innovating with nepHAL+
The nepHAL+ project, on the other hand, is a 3-year project with partners such as DARIAH, Inria and Software Heritage. Its objective is to create an efficient solution for the peer review of preprints, datasets and software, whether related or not, and for the management of their specific metadata.
The aim is to develop an autonomous submission and evaluation module that will allow peer review not only of preprints, but also of research datasets and software available in dedicated repositories, thus enriching the editorial offering of Episciences. It will also include a workflow for publishing open peer review reports related to the evaluated documents.
The nepHAL+ project will be based on the modularisation and updating of the Episciences code: the developed module will replace the current submission and evaluation functionalities of the platform. HAL will use the module for referencing open peer review reports and Sciencesconf for peer review of conference papers.
Finally, the developed module will be available as open source software and can be reused by other actors in the scientific publishing community. It will provide a concrete and practical solution to promote reproducibility of the scientific approach, transparency and continuity between publications, data and software.
The project is supported by the HAL+ research infrastructure, which relies on the complementarity of the three CCSD platforms.
Supported by the FNSO, the Édisciences and nepHAL+ projects demonstrate that they are in line with the ambitions of the French National Plan for Open Science. They are also fully in line with the objectives of Episciences, which has been supporting bibliodiversity and changes of scholarly publishing for over 10 years.
The CCSD team wishes you all the best for 2024!