ScienceCentral is an archive of free or open access

ScienceCentral is an archive of free or open access, full-text scientific scholarly journal literature at KOFST. It is in testing, with eight journals from Korea and one from Croatia as of September 2013. Out of the eight journals, two are in the Korean language. The Korean government supports scientific, technological, and medical journals through KOFST and social science, humanities, and arts journals through the NRF of Korea. Although KOFST is the federation of independent scientific societies in Korea, it has been funded by the Korean government for supporting societies’ work. KOFST supports journal publishing through a number of initiatives for both local journals not indexed in international databases and international journals, usually in English. Special tailored support for limited number of journals is available, including consulting or funding to create a journal masthead and instructions for authors; publication ethics training; style and format development; design of the cover page; layout of text pages; journal policy development; manuscript editing; English proofreading; a manuscript management system; a journal Web site; production of JATS XML and CrossRef XML; establishment of ORCID, CrossMark, and Fundref; and regular training for editors or editorial board members.After extensive experience providing journal support, KOFST realized that a full-text, open access platform like PMC is necessary for scholarly journals from Korea to broaden their visibility; therefore, it decided to construct ScienceCentral, a clone of PMC for all the fields of science. The three prominent differences from PMC are as follows: first, it includes all scientific fields including technology, engineering, life science, and multi-disciplinary science; second, it includes journals in all languages in the world if the abstract, tables, figures, and references are also provided in English; third, it accepts only society or non-profit institutional journals [2]. It is a new experiment in full-text, open access databases. It is still uncertain how many open access, non-profit, society or institutional journals will participate in ScienceCentral. Since the cost of JATS XML production is very reasonable nowadays, the burden on publishers will be manageable. KOFST can fully fund JATS XML production for scientific journals from Korea. Another purpose of ScienceCentral is to help local or regional languages to survive in scientific writing. It is well-known that the language of science is English; however, if the full-text of other languages is presented in JATS XML format, readers with other mother tongues should be able to access the content as the technology for computerized translation develops, and thus the local language of both the authors and the readers can survive as tools for propagating scientific information for humanity.