Board Report 2020 of SciPost Foundation
June 2021

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

BoardProf. Jean-Sébastien Caux - Chairman SciPost Foundation
Dr. Joost van Mameren - Secretary SciPostDr. Jasper van Wezel -Treasurer SciPostReport of 2020 activities
SciPost team- Next to full-time employee Paula Perez, three new team members were hired:- Sergio Tapias Arze - Editorial and Sponsors Admin, as of March 2020
- Teun Zwart – Developer, working on the xMeta project (sponsored by ERC).
- Jan Willem Wijnen – Strategy Officer, as of October 2020
Furthermore a pool of freelance production editors work on typesetting of accepted papers.
Sponsorship and grants
A dedicated Sponsorship admin was appointed in March 2020. In 2020 EUR 48.418 sponsorship wasacquired from institutions. A considerable amount were institutional renewals from earlier pledges.
More details can be found at:https://scipost.org/sponsors/
https://scipost.org/finances/subsidies/
New efforts were initiated to reach out to new sponsoring institutes, in particular in USA, Canada,UK, Germany, Scandinavia. New institutes and also the Spanish National Research Council became
SciPost Sponsors.
An ERC grant of EUR 60,000 was received for the development of the xMeta project. This project
started in May 2020 and will last 24 months. Furthermore grants were awarded by the FNSO
(covering costs of approximately 100 publications from French researchers) and by NWO (for generaldevelopment). These grants will be included in the 2021 financial report.

Publications
In 2020 SciPost journals published the following number of articles:
SciPost Physics
SciPost Physics Core
SciPost Physics Lecture Notes

187279SciPost Proceedings
SciPost Astronomy

57
1In addition, first steps were made to establish SciPost Physics Codebases and SciPost Chemistry.
Furthermore, the SciPost platform will be used to launch a new journal Migration Politics, incollaboration with the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
SciPost Physics received an Impact Factor (for 2019) of 5.051. Despite well-known caveats associatedto the Impact Factor, this indexation demonstrates this journal is highly recognized by the scientificcommunity.

Virtual General Meeting
A Special Virtual General Meeting of the Advisory Board and Editorial College (Physics) was held inJanuary 2020. The main points of discussion were a lookback at operations in 2019 (editorial side,business side, technical side, General context on Open Access, Points requiring attention, and main
upcoming developments). A decision was taken to implement the role of Senior Fellows. The
discussions at the VGM are recorded and accessible for Fellows and Advisory Board members.

Finances
Income and expenditure statement 2020:

Gross margin
Salaries and wages
Other operating expenses
Operating expenses
Operational Results
Financial expenses
Results before income tax
Result after tax

2020€
64,387
139,358
15,318

2019€
112,876
45,05538,518

154,676-90,289

83,57329.303341-90,630-90,630211
29,09229,092

Outlook
SciPost has become a recognised and appreciated player in the international open science
movement. An increased number of academic libraries and funding agencies are interested in andsupportive of SciPost’s diamond open access model, as alternative for subscription based or gold
open access journals (with APCs). The established SciPost journals are growing and expected tocontinue to grow, and SciPost’s new journals are expected to develop accordingly, in particular inchemistry and astronomy. But reaching a sustainable financial position remains a challenge, SciPostneeds more and more generous sponsors. Initiatives towards that end are under way, but arehindered by slow processes at potential sponsoring organisations. Recently awarded grants will allow
expansion of the web development team, and the team will focus on developing the SciPost platformto accommodate multiple communities and journals in parallel.