Aperture Soft Launch Underway with Full Launch planned for 1st of October, 2020

Dear OHBM community,

Aperture has achieved several important milestones in the past few months, the most exciting being the announcement of Tonya White as Aperture’s first Editor-in-Chief. What started as a brainstorming session over cocktails a few years ago is slowly, but surely, becoming a fully-realized platform, combining high quality, openness, low cost, and diverse research objects publishing capabilities. 

We were thrilled with the enthusiasm by Annual Meeting participants as many asked the question of “When will Aperture be ready for submissions?” While we hoped to be ready for submissions in time for the 2020 Annual Meeting, there is still work yet to be done on the platform itself to ensure it is intuitive and user-friendly. 

Even though the platform is not quite ready for open submissions to the general public, as part of an OHBM community-led initiative, Aperture would like to open up the platform to site-testers and pre-submission inquiries.

Over the next three months, Tonya will be working with Kay Vanda, the Aperture Journal Manager, and the Aperture Oversight Committee (AOC) to build the editorial team, finalize the submission, review, and editorial policies, and test the platform. During this time we are planning a soft launch, we will be testing the system using different research objects. If you have a research object that is complete and ready to submit, you are welcome to send a pre-submission inquiry to aperture@humanbrainmapping.org. 

We are also seeking members of the community interested in joining Aperture as an editor or a reviewer. If this is of interest, we would love to hear from you! Interested editorial and reviewer candidates are asked to send a CV and cover letter detailing which role they are interested in as well as their publishing experience or expertise to the Journal Manager at aperture@humanbrainmapping.org. 

There has been significant progress made over the past few months with Aperture, and we can’t wait to bring this platform to the neuroscience and brain mapping community. A full-launch to the public is planned for October first, 2020 so keep an eye on OHBM’s communications!

During the Annual Meeting, the roundtable discussions just further emphasized the important role that Aperture has in creating an innovative open-access, inclusive, publishing framework that sets a high bar for transparency and innovation in scientific publishing. We look forward to your support and submissions! 

Sincerely,
The Aperture Oversight Committee