Open for Business: Open Access, Open Science, and the Silverchair Platform 

At Silverchair, we are intentional about approaching all publisher solutions in a business-model-agnostic manner, ensuring that we’re able to satisfy those customers who are on the leading edge of open access innovation, those who rely on traditional subscription revenue, and those who manage publications with access models spanning the spectrum.. 

“The Silverchair Platform provides us with ample flexibility for the wide variety of journals published by UC Press." —Erich van Rijn, Director of Journals & Open Access, UC Press 

Silverchair hosts hundreds of Open Access journals, including: 

• JAMA Network Open 
• IWA Publishing’s H2Open Journal 
• ARVO’s Journal of Vision  
• OUP’s Nucleic Acids Research 
• GSA’s Geosphere 

In addition to these titles, we host publishers whose missions and strategic plans revolve around increasing openness, including Portland Press and Rockefeller University Press.   

By maintaining business-model-agnostic infrastructure, Silverchair also affords our publishers the flexibility to adapt and change with the ever-shifting publishing landscape. In the last three years alone, the publishing marketplace has experienced significant market changes in the shape of industry initiatives, Open Access (OA) mandates, changing library budgets, and public health crises that have pushed publishers to not only think twice about their paywalls, but to also ask more from their hosting platform.  

These asks have come out of the increased importance of:

• rich article metadata  
• connections to upstream/downstream and secondary/tertiary publication objects 
• compliance with FAIR [findable, accessible, interoperable, (machine) readable] principles  
• information about the users of content 
• improving the discovery of OA content 
• shoring up other revenue streams with the dwindling of subscription revenue 

 

Features of the Silverchair Platform that satisfy these needs include: 

• Auto-filtered search, recommendation widgets, and topic collections to ensure that users accessing OA content are only presented with other OA content (eliminating the disruption of paywalls to a seamless OA user experience) 
• Accommodation of various and custom OA license types in the metadata
• Robust deposit services to meet OA indexing needs 
• Personalized content widgets presenting users with exclusively OA content from across a publisher’s catalog 
• Powerful and flexible advertising options to support revenue needs on OA content 
• Additional features and tools for engaging OA users and directing traffic toward other revenue-generating avenues 
• Support for Scite badges to represent article reproducibility (Scite.ai is a partner in the Silverchair Universe) 

 

Upcoming developments that target OA and open science needs include: 

• Implementation of the FigShare Viewer widget (FigShare is a partner in the Silverchair Universe) 
• More granular author and funding data provided upstream following emerging best practices/standards. This will include multiple layers of institutional affiliation, Ringgold or GRID identifiers, FundRef, ALIs, data availability statements, etc.  
• Supporting the publication of peer review reports following JATS4R recommendations 
• Drafting and implementing Silverchair standards and best practices for text and data mining in concert with recommendations from our Text and Data Mining Publisher Working Group 

As a hosting partner, Silverchair doesn’t want to merely provide our publishers with a one-size-fits-all box to fit their content in and only two options to keep it locked or open, just as having free-to-access PDFs doesn’t satisfy the motivations behind the open science movement. By continually developing and maintaining a flexible platform informed by publisher requests, market trends, and industry initiatives that can plug into best in class software partners when necessary, Silverchair is committed to being a strategic partner that will meet publishers’ current and future open access and open science needs.  

Want to know more?

• Learn about how our development plan is informed and structured, giving our teams and clients flexibility and continuous improvements 
• Read a case study about how Silverchair and ARVO collaborated to transition their journals to a full Gold OA business model and to drive traffic, cross-promote content, boost impact factor, and encourage submissions 
• Hear from our community about the ways they were able to quickly open content when the pandemic hit, leaning on Silverchair tools and teams 

 

Open Access is a key issue for our clients, and we’re always ready to engage with you in these discussions. Reach out to us to learn more.