Board Report 2021 of the SciPost Foundation
July 2022

The SciPost Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing, implementing andmaintaining innovative forms of electronic scientific communication and publishing. The SciPostFoundation operates the SciPost.org interactive online portal for the benefit of the international
scientific community and further interested parties.

Board SciPost Foundation
Prof. Jean-Sébastien Caux - Chairman
Dr. Joost van Mameren - Secretary
Dr. Jasper van Wezel -Treasurer

Report of 2021 activities
SciPost team- The core team in charge of the daily running of SciPost in 2021 consisted of:- Jean-Sébastien Caux – Lead Developer- Paula Perez – Editorial Admin- Sergio Enrique Tapias Arze – Editorial Admin and Sponsors Admin- Jan Willem Wijnen – Strategy Officer- Teun Zwart - Developer
Three new team members were hired at the end of 2021:- George Katsikas – Production coordinator- Thijs de Goede – Editorial admin- Ana Silva – Editorial admin- SciPost employs a pool of freelance production editors work on typesetting of accepted papers.

Publications
In 2021 SciPost published papers in 6 journals, including two newly launched ones: SciPost Chemistry
and SciPost Astronomy Core. The total number of papers published across all SciPost journals was361. In addition, first steps were made to establish SciPost Physics Codebases and SciPost ChemistryCore. Furthermore, the SciPost platform is scheduled to be used to launch a new journal Migration
Politics, in collaboration with the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University ofAmsterdam.

1In 2021 SciPost Physics received an Impact Factor (for 2020) of 6.18. This journals is now also coveredby Scopus. Both SciPost Physics Lecture Notes and SciPost Physics Proceedings applied for coverageby both Web-of-Science and Scopus.

Table 1: SciPost journals and number of published papers in 2016-2021
Journals
SciPost Physics
SciPost Physics Core
SciPost Physics Lecture Notes
SciPost Physics Proceedings
SciPost Astronomy
SciPost Astronomy Core
SciPost Chemistry
Migration Politics
Total

2016
16201765

201811162019
160
2
555

2020
187
27
9571

2021
265
33
144513

16

65

117

222

281

361

Sponsorship and grants
In 2021 new sponsors were actively approached and these activities resulted in 26 additional
institutions sponsoring SciPost, bringing the total number of active sponsors to 70. An actual
overview of sponsoring institutes can be found at: https://scipost.org/sponsors. The table shows thenumber of supporting organisations in 2016-2021.

Total SciPost sponsors
8060
40
2002016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

Figure 1: Number of SciPost sponsors 2016-20212

Finances
IncomeThe income from sponsorships and grants in 2021 totalled up to € 160.360, a considerable increase
compared to 2020. Particularly generous contributions came from:- Diamond Open Access Fund (University of Amsterdam) € 35,461- FNSO (France) contributed € 22,206- NWO (Dutch Research Council) € 15,000Expenses
Expenses in 2021 consisted mainly of salaries and wages. These were about 40% higher compared to2020, due to the expansion of staff in 2021.

Finances - summary
Income and expenditure statement 2021 and 2020 (taken from Financial Report 2021):

Table 2: Profit and Loss 2021

Gross margin
Salaries and wages
Other operating expenses
Operating expenses
Operational Results

2021€
160,360

2020€
64,387

194,044
30,776

Financial expenses
Results before income tax
Result after tax

139,358
15,318224,820-64,460

154,676-90,289647-65,107-65,107341-90,630-90,630

The year-on-year overview of income and expenses is presented in the table below:

Tabel 3: SciPost’s Income and Expenses 2016-2021
Year2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021

Income€ 25,470€ 42,013€ 193,802€ 112,876€ 64,387€ 160,360

Expenses€ 4,381€ 20,867€ 87,650€ 83,573€ 154,676€ 224,820

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Virtual General Meeting
A Special Virtual General Meeting of the Advisory Board and Editorial College was held in March
2021. The main points of discussion were:- Lookback at operations in 2020 (editorial side, business side, technical side)- Organization of meetings- Peer review process- User-friendliness of website- (Self)Evaluation of editors- Promotion of SciPost by Editorial Fellows and Senior Fellows- Core and flagship journals- Scope of Lecture Notes- Paper retraction procedure- Gender-neutral language
The discussions and minutes of the VGM are archived and accessible for Fellows and Advisory Board
members.

Outlook
SciPost has become a recognised and appreciated player in the international open science
movement. Its flagship journals, SciPost Physics, is now a leading journal in the field of general
physics. This success has led to an increased number of submissions as well as challenges to manage
the associated workload.
The portfolio of SciPost journals is expanding and we expect this expansion to continue in the comingyears. SciPost’s ambition is to make its infrastructure available throughout diverse scientificcommunities, that can run their own diamond open access journals within the SciPost ecosystem.
The support for SciPost from institutions has increased considerably, resulting in new and potential
future sponsorships, but also in many new contacts that are likely to materialise into newsponsorships. It is encouraging that support for diamond open access initiatives (like SciPost) is also
discussed at national and library consortium level and we expect more umbrella agreements fromsuch organisations. Nevertheless, sustainable financial support remains the main challenge for
SciPost, since the growth of the publication activities outpaces the growth of the income fromsponsorships

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