The innovative and collaborative, peer-reviewed, online publishing platform, QScience.com by Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press) has attracted striking attention in the region and beyond. About one million new users have been active in the past four years, with the majority residing in the US, followed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, and Qatar, said Head of Academic and Journals Publishing at HBKU Press, Dr. Rima Isaifan. “Annually, an average of 370,000 new users navigate our platform to read, download content, or submit new manuscripts. Moreover, we have a diverse pool of authors from all the continents of the world, which reflects the popularity of QScience regionally and internationally,” she told The Peninsula.
The open access publishing model QScience has adopted is in line with the global trend and Unesco’s call to promote unconditional access to information. “The success of creating such a platform in the region has been proven by the significantly increased traffic being recorded yearly. Moreover, considerable interest has been garnered recently from potential authors and institutes alike in having their scholarly content published on the new platform. This value-added tool further acknowledges the critical role of HBKU Press in disseminating research and making it visible on the global scene,” said Dr. Isaifan.
“The open-access publishing model on QScience.com allows authors to share their work freely, with higher rates of access, downloading, and sharing, while ensuring that intellectual property rights are not violated when quoting, taking into account international standards that concern the authors and their interests as a cornerstone. It also provides the employment of information extracted from publications about the region in the broader branches of the knowledge economy,” she added.
Since its inception in 2010, QScience has passed through several transitions to preserve its position as Qatar’s first open-access academic publishing platform.
“At QScience, we follow every global publishing standard from the submission stage to the point where the article goes live online. Initially, our team performs a plagiarism check for the similarity index once the article is received. Then, every single submission to any journals hosted at QScience undergoes a double-blind peer review process,” said Dr. Isaifan.
HBKU Press is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adheres to the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. “Hence, we take publication ethics very seriously. For example, we ensure at an early stage of submission that the manuscript has not been published before and is not a duplication of another published work. In addition, we conduct content quality control for each submission to ensure that we publish accurate, verifiable, and complete work with sound outcomes.”
According to Dr. Isaifan, QScience has published around 7,000 items including articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters.
“Users tend to download and access original research articles more frequently than conference proceedings as they are more comprehensive in terms of detailed methodology, results, and discussion. On the other hand, conference proceedings are composed of abstracts with a 500-word limit which implies that the reader might need to contact the author for more details if needed. However, we frequently receive emails from authors interested in specific health-related abstracts published in conference proceedings when the author affiliation has changed over the years,” said Dr. Isaifan.
