SciPost is a no profit foundation for the innovation in scholarly communication, based on the principles of Genuine Open Access and Fair Open Access.
The organization manage the publication platform of the same name, which publishes open access journals concerning Formal Sciences (Maths and Computer Science), Natural Sciences, Social Sciences. Moreover, it releases a multidisciplinary journal collecting the abstracts of the articles appeared in the trade journals. Each area of interest has an Advisory Board. Currently, the subject counting the largest number of publications is Physics.
The organizations exploiting the editorial services of the platform provide for its financing. Volunteers from the scientific communities are responsible for the platform development and its editorial activities.
SciPost publishes Open Access journals only, whose contents are free of charge for both authors and readers.
Useful information about the platform and for the publication of the articles are available below.
Submission
The submitted article must present an original research, should not be published already nor in course of publication in other editorial venues. As a preprint, it may have previously deposited in an institutional or disciplinary archive. Following SciPost guidelines, the manuscript may be submitted via a preprint server or directly to SciPost. The suggested pathway is using the arXiv preprint servers: their APIs guarantee interoperability with SciPost. The platform is not currently interoperable with other preprint servers. Immediately after submission, the article is subject to preliminary check by the editorial team, who verifies its compliance with the terms and conditions for publication and the ethical criteria.
Peer-review
When submitting their manuscripts, authors can indicate the names of the experts that should not be involved in the review process. If the authors' requests do not interfere with the quality of the peer-review, the editorial team takes the proposal into account. Each disciplinary area has a dedicated editorial team and an editor in charge is appointed to supervise the review process. Usually, the selection of the editorial team and the article's preliminary checks take no longer than five days. Afterwards, the open peer-review begins. Reviewers' reports, authors' replies, and possible comments are publicly available. Reviewers may choose to remain anonymous. The duration of the process may vary: for the leading journals it usually lasts four weeks.
Publication
At the end of the peer-review, the editor in charge evaluates the documentation produced by the reviewers and decides about the article's publication or rejection. The whole editorial team is informed and confirms (or not) the decision. If further revision for the article is necessary, the editor in charge contacts the authors, who should submit a new version with the suggested changes. When approved, the article receives a DOI, its version of record is published in the journal, and all the contents produced during the review remain publicly available. If the article is rejected, these contents will be removed, unless differently requested by authors themselves. Articles are published under a CC BY license, which foresees the use, distribution, and reproduction of the artifacts with no restrictions. The authors, or their institutions, maintain the copyright on their works.
Post-publication
SciPost's contents are indexed in Web of Science, Google Scholar, and INSPIRE. Moreover, SciPost participates in I4OC – Initiative for Open Citations, with the purpose of opening all citational metadata for the design of more accessible metrics. The platform reserves the right to substitute or re-index an article if technical issues occurs (e.g., corrupted file, wrong bibliographic reference, etc.). The content of the articles is not subject to any change. The authors or, in particular cases, SciPost itself may retract an article already published. It remains online but an editorial disclaimer will warn the readers about the retraction.
