Our Kitchen Essentials interview today is with Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen. With offices in Boston, MA and Berlin, Germany (where Stephanie is based), ScienceOpen was founded in 2013, and now provides a research, networking, and discovery platform for publishers, institutions, and researchers with close to 100 million records.
Please tell us a bit about yourself — your role at ScienceOpen, how you got there, and why you embarked on a career in research infrastructure?
Growing up on a ranch in California I was quite sure I was going to be a cowgirl. But a love of books led me instead to Yale, a stint in a cancer research lab, a PhD in German literature, and a career in scholarly publishing in Berlin. I certainly never envisioned a career in research infrastructure. But, after working at De Gruyter publishers for 12 years, I was frustrated by the way many publishers at the time were copying paper workflows into a digital context. When I was offered the opportunity to join the start-up team at ScienceOpen to rethink journal publishing from a completely digital starting point, I jumped at the chance. We wanted to start an open peer review journal but felt that we needed a new kind of infrastructure for our vision and built ScienceOpen. I have been the CEO of ScienceOpen for nearly 12 years now and have learned an enormous amount about the technology and data streams underpinning scholarly publishing.
What do you like most and least about working in research infrastructure?
Infrastructure requires per se collaboration, interoperability, and a delicate balance between stability and constant innovation. I love the challenge of creating a space where inputs from and outputs to a wide range of stakeholders seamlessly come together. It demands that I pay attention to the smallest detail with the biggest picture in mind. The thing I like least is messy and missing data.
Based on your own experiences, what advice would you give someone starting, or thinking of starting, a career in research infrastructure?
I feel like no one really embarks specifically on a career in research infrastructure, but rather starts off in scholarly publishing, encounters a system that produces the same failure over and over, and sets out to solve it. If you find yourself thinking globally, developing a passion for persistent identifiers because they allow deeper interoperability, looking at the XML to really understand the issue, and joining working groups to compare solutions – then research infrastructure is for you.
What sort of infrastructure does ScienceOpen provide, and who are your users?
At its core, ScienceOpen is a hosting platform embedded in a discovery environment with nearly 100 million records, our own citation index and integrations with Altmetric, scite.ai, ORCID, Crossref, ROR, Sciscore, iThenticate, and more. Our interactive user interface was originally developed for open, post-publication peer review and has been expanded to offer a range of interactions for our members. We provide services to publishers that exploit the context of their content for better discovery, focusing on open access hosting and full publishing solutions for journals, conferences, and books but including metadata support and promotion of journals or content in topical collections. We have a built-in peer review management system that grew out of our open peer review interface, but now supports more traditional forms of research evaluation. When we started ScienceOpen in 2013, we wanted to create a new megajournal in the context of all the published literature out there. We set out to create this interdisciplinary discovery environment and, when we got there, it made more sense to share it with the scholarly publishing community. We feel that context can improve the publishing and research experience.
How is ScienceOpen sustained financially?
The services we provide to publishers, libraries, societies, funders, and institutes make up most of our operating budget. We are a bit unusual in the fact that we are not selling analytics as a subscription product, but focus rather on hosting and publishing to finance our freely-accessible discovery infrastructure. We are also involved in some funded projects. Currently we have created a hub for open science publishing — Drug Repurposing Central — for the drug repurposing community for an EU-funded project REPO4EU. We also created a book metadata portal, BookMetaHub, based on our technology with a grant from the German Ministry of Research and Education. And we have been particularly lucky that ScienceOpen’s founders Tibor Tscheke and Alexander Grossmann have always taken the long view and supported the company through ups and downs.
As the leader of a research infrastructure organization, what do you think are the biggest opportunities we’ve not yet realized as a community — and what’s stopping us?
Interoperability is key to having different interfaces interact smoothly and deliver real insights and value to the research community. But poor and missing metadata or closed systems often prevent infrastructures from working together optimally. Even in 2025, we are all still often inputting data by hand over and over again. Researchers submit manuscripts to multiple journals at different publishing houses, engaging multiple peer reviewers each time. Shared, open data about peer review seems to me the most challenging goal, but also the one that could reduce waste and friction in the scholarly workflow the most. It would require cooperation and trust on many layers – publishers, editors, authors.
Looking at your own organization, what are you most proud of, and what keeps you awake at night?
I am most proud of our active role in the Open Science community. I feel that ScienceOpen has been on the cutting edge, testing new ways of openly sharing knowledge – from preprints and open peer review to persistent identifiers and open citations. When we set off down this road, I was a huge believer in Open Access as a way to drive more equitable development. But now APCs seem to be a force fueling inequality, so the financial model of Open Access is what really keeps me up at night. We need solutions for Diamond Open Access, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
What impact has/does/will AI have on ScienceOpen?
We are already using AI for some small, local solutions, but clearly with 100 million records, there is a huge potential for AI to be built into our publishing tools and search experience at a deeper level. We are exploring what to tackle first. I think that, as with all stakeholders in our field, AI will make some of our tasks easier and some much harder and more expensive. We are already seeing an influx of articles written with AI submitted to our preprint server, so we are having the same discussions about quality control that are gripping the whole industry.
What changes do you think we’ll see in terms of the overall research infrastructure over the next five to ten years, and how will they impact the kinds of roles you’ll be hiring for at ScienceOpen?
Certainly AI will be an essential part of all kinds of research infrastructure in the near future. But I am a firm believer in the “human-in-the-loop” principle and see the role of editorial oversight becoming more important than ever. I am sure that we will be looking for developers with some AI experience, but also managing editors who understand the implications of those developments. AI has the potential to exacerbate some of the biggest challenges for our industry around research integrity. But it also may help to fill in the gaps in missing metadata and harmonize formats to create more interoperable datasets which, if shared openly, could increase the ability to highlight game-changing research and quickly pick up on bad actors. The next 5-10 years will definitely be interesting in research infrastructure.