Episciences is pleased to welcome Compositionality, the open-access journal for the mathematics of composition. This journal publishes English-language research articles in the field of the mathematics of composition across all disciplines. Examples of fields include computation, logic, physics, chemistry, engineering, linguistics and cognition.
This is a new journal on Episciences, but not for its research communities: it was founded in 2017 by the Compositionality Charitable Incorporated Organisation, and its first articles were published in 2019. From the outset, it has operated according to the overlay model, that is, a publishing service built on top of open archives, in this case arXiv.
The journal has chosen to take advantage of the platform’s services, which allow it to manage the entire editorial workflow: from preprint submission to article publication, including peer review. The members of the editorial team were already familiar with Episciences as authors, editors and reviewers for another journal distributed on the platform (LMCS). Their choice of Episciences was motivated by its ease of use and editorial support, as well as its economic model and principles, which are seen as a means of ensuring the sustainability of open access and guaranteeing the journal’s independence.
The overlay model makes it easy to migrate a scholarly journal from one platform to another, as the articles do not need to be moved to the new site as they are hosted by the open archive.
The Episciences team used the arXiv and Crossref APIs to migrate the 20 articles already published by Compositionality. The arXiv API allowed the retrieval of preprint metadata (title, author, abstract, etc.), while the Crossref API provided the metadata of published articles, such as publication date and references. The journal could therefore be migrated simply by creating its structure on the new site with the existing metadata. The final step was to update the existing DOI links with the new URLs. It is important to highlight that the journal owns its title and is not dependent on a commercial publisher, which greatly facilitates its migration to Episciences.
The journal also benefits from the automatic enrichment of metadata provided by Episciences through the OpenAIRE services (OpenAIRE Research Graph, ScholeXplorer, OpenCitations) to which the platform is connected: the authors’ ORCID identifiers, the identifiers of research projects, the DOIs of datasets or of documents citing the article can be added to the initial metadata, improving the discoverability of the content.
Compositionality is supported by the Scientific Publishing Department of the IES Inria service, which manages a portfolio of computer science and applied mathematics journals under the aegis of the epi-IAM Scientific Committee.
The team provides personalised editorial support, assistance in presenting best practices and editorial policies, indexing the journals in academic databases, monitoring the development of the platform’s functionalities, and supporting editorial boards to ensure the quality and visibility of the publications.