In January 2021 Pluto Journals took the step of flipping all 21 of their Journals into Open Access, which means that all articles are free to read. By the end of January 2022, the usage statistics of the portfolio of Journals had increased by a staggering 650%, over the figures in 2020 and by 850% over the figures for 2019.
“We are very pleased to announce our new partnership with Pluto Journals to host their 21 academic journals on the ScienceOpen platform. We have provided open access hosting services for all journals, and each journal has access to ScienceOpen’s peer review and manuscript submission management systems.”
“This letter aims to set out publicly an explanation of the thinking behind the move of the Pluto Journals publications into Open Access. I am sharing this because these are issues of relevance to all writers and publishers in social sciences….”
“In this session we would like to analyze in depth what has worked well and what didn’t in the process of flipping or transitioning a journal portfolio into Open Access. The participants, Vivan Berghahn of Berghahn Journals, Richard Gallagher of Annual Reviews, Prof. Dr. John Willinsky on behalf of Libraria (http://libraria.cc/) and the Public Knowledge Project (https://pkp.sfu.ca/), and Roger van Zwanenberg from Pluto Journals, have all tackled the issues and processes of making this happen and will discuss what to improve going forward….”
“In this session we would like to analyze in depth what has worked well and what didn’t in the process of flipping or transitioning a journal portfolio into Open Access. The participants, Vivan Berghahn of Berghahn Journals, Richard Gallagher of Annual Reviews, Prof. Dr. John Willinsky on behalf of Libraria (http://libraria.cc/) and the Public Knowledge Project (https://pkp.sfu.ca/), and Roger van Zwanenberg from Pluto Journals, have all tackled the issues and processes of making this happen and will discuss what to improve going forward.”
“Pluto Journals, the social sciences publisher based in London, UK, has announced a pilot to transform its complete journal portfolio of 21 titles to Open Access (OA) from 2021 onwards. The project “Pluto Open Journals” will be realised in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched and supported by the conceivers of the ground-breaking Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model Libraria, a group of anthropologists and other social scientists committed to Open Access. Pluto Journals will be asking those libraries and institutions currently subscribing to any of the journals to renew for 2021 on a S2O basis, thus contributing to making these journals completely free to readers and authors all over the world. The flip is furthermore supported by JSTOR, who will continue to provide the hosting service for the project.”
“Pluto Journals, the social sciences publisher based in London, UK, has announced a pilot to transform its complete journal portfolio of 21 titles to Open Access (OA) from 2021 onwards. The project “Pluto Open Journals” will be realised in partnership with Knowledge Unlatched and supported by the conceivers of the ground-breaking Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model Libraria, a group of anthropologists and other social scientists committed to Open Access. Pluto Journals will be asking those libraries and institutions currently subscribing to any of the journals to renew for 2021 on a S2O basis, thus, contributing to making these journals completely free to readers and authors all over the world. The flip is, furthermore, supported by JSTOR, who will continue to provide the hosting service for the project….”
“Gideon Greenspan, the founder of Coin Science, another London-based blockchain technology company, says Scienceroot and Pluto are both elements of the same “universe.”. The company is planning to provide an open-source, decentralized platform dubbed Multichain. Researchers could use the platform to upload data to the publicly shared digital ledger which won’t be controlled by any individual or group.
Greenspan opposes blockchain projects of Scienceroot and Pluto as it can get very costly to record and maintain all data in the long run. According to Greenspan, recording research data can be even more expensive than cryptocurrencies as it produces more data than virtual currencies….”
“According to National Science Foundation, 4000 new papers are published within the scientific community every day and the number of annual publications has increased from 1 million in 2000 to more than 2 million in 2013. On the other hand, the publication fees are skyrocketing in the past few decades… wasting of research resources and leading to ineffective communications.
PLUTO a nonprofit based in Seoul, Korea wants to address this issue by creating a Decentralized scholarly communication platform which makes the scholarly communication reasonable and transparent for the scientific community.
Q. Can you tell us about your founding team members and what inspired you to build Pluto Network?
We’re attaching a separate document describing the founding members. We gathered to develop applications using blockchain technology as we were fascinated with the emerging technology and the consequences it would enable. As most of us are graduates from POSTECH, a research-focused science, and technology university in South Korea, it wasn’t long until our concerns on the implementation of the technology concluded that we must integrate it with Scholarly Communication….”