intechopen.com

What it is

IntechOpen is the world's earliest open-access academic book publisher. It published its first open-access book in 2005, and has now grown into a top global multi-disciplinary open academic publishing platform. It primarily serves the global research community with outcome publishing and open knowledge sharing services.

Core features

IntechOpen's core functions are split into two main parts:

• For authors: it provides open academic publishing services, and accepts submissions of book chapters, monographs, and journal articles. After standard peer review, publishing is completed in an average of 3 months. It issues international standard ISSNs and ISBNs, supports advance online publication, and helps authors boost the visibility and citation rate of their work.
• For readers: all content is completely free to access. To date, the platform has hosted more than 8,000 open-access books and over 88,000 academic works, covering natural sciences, engineering technology, life sciences, health sciences, social sciences, humanities and many other fields. All content can be read, downloaded and shared for free.

Pros and cons

Advantages: The platform adheres to the open-access principle, drastically lowering the barrier to accessing scientific research knowledge. Its publishing efficiency is far higher than traditional academic publishing, and the overall academic quality of content is guaranteed by a sound peer review system. It also hosts many works by top scholars including Nobel laureates.
Disadvantages: It uses an author-pays publishing model, which is not friendly to researchers without institutional funding support. There is no Chinese language option for the interface, and access speed from within mainland China is poor.

Suitable users and access from China

It is suitable for students and researchers looking for open-access academic materials, as well as academic authors with open publishing needs. Currently, a proxy is required to access the site from China.