ARPHA Preprints

For millennia, people have gathered data and knowledge – about where to hunt, eat, trade, and live – and shared it through experiences, stories and songs. Today, we continue to do so by creating and sharing knowledge in order to “advance human understanding and the common good.”

This year’s International Open Access Week theme, “The Cost of Knowledge,” reminds us that sharing knowledge has a price: subscription fees and article processing charges, the time and expertise of authors, reviewers and editors, and the investment and know-how behind user-friendly digital infrastructures.

Open from the very beginning
A streamlined process
- The ARPHA suite
- ORPHO – the next-gen tool for scientific writing
Reclaiming knowledge as a common good

The themes echo the ones we looked at during Peer Review Week 2026, where we gave our Editors-in-Chief the chance to share the challenges they face in sustaining the peer review process, from the influx of papers and data to the shortage of researchers willing to review – you can read what they told us here: https://blog-pensoft.blogs.awt-2.arphahub.com/2026/09/11/peer-review-week-2026-building-capacity-for-the-long-run/

Open from the very beginning

At Pensoft, open access has never been an add-on. Founded in 1992 by scientists for scientists, we launched our first journal, ZooKeys, as fully open access in 2008, and it has been open from its very first issue. After all, it has always been our thinking that research can only serve the common good when everyone can read it, use it and build on it. This is why from the very start, we wanted ZooKeys to speed up research and free the exchange of information in taxonomy.

That principle has shaped every journal we have incepted since from PhytoKeys and MycoKeys to Biodiversity Data Journal to more recently launched Natural History Collections and Museomics and Individual-Based Ecology.

Research Ideas and Outcomes journal homepage — RIO journal homepage.

In 2025, together with long-term collaborators from the open-science community, we founded the quite revolutionary and unique journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) with the aim to catalyse the culture change in research communication by publishing ideas, project proposals, data/software management plans and various other outcomes that would typically be lost for the scientific community. The recognition for RIO’s approach to scholarly communication came only half a year later when SPARC went on to name an Open Science Innovator.

Throughout our existence as a publisher all of our journals have been 100% open access. Hosted on our own ARPHA Publishing Platform and operating under CC BY license, all scholarly titles in our portfolio make sure that every article can be read, shared and reused freely while authors retain the copyright to their work.

Yet, open should also mean fair. Our article processing charges are among the most competitive in the field, and we are transparent about what they cover: we were among the first publishers to share our pricing and services through Plan S’s Journal Comparison Service, and publicly provide our Open Access and APC Policies in full compliance with the Plan S requirements. We also work with international consortia to further reduce financial frictions and administrative burden for researchers and their institutions. As of this year, for instance, we’ve partnered up with Bibsam Consortium to advance open scholarly publishing across Sweden.

A streamlined process

ARPHA Publishing Platform services — ARPHA services

Our proprietary ARPHA Publishing Platform offers a full-featured, end-to-end open access publishing and hosting solution, with a suite of connected services built around it.

The ARPHA suite

Apart from about 100 open-access scholarly journals, ARPHA powers the ARPHA Preprints platform, which seamlessly integrates with journals to let authors make their manuscripts publicly available upon submission; the platform also provides high-quality and technologically advanced open-access publication for conference outputs through ARPHA Proceedings and ARPHA Conference Abstracts. Through Advanced Books, authors and researchers can bring whole open access books to readers in semantically enhanced HTML and PDF formats.

ORPHO – the next-gen tool for scientific writing

Most recently, we launched ORPHO, our next-generation collaborative workspace for scientific writing. Within ORPHO, researchers and authors can enrich their manuscripts semantically, so that their research, as well as underlying data remains FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and AI-ready.

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Together, these tools streamline the publication of text and semantically rich data, making openness a natural part of the research workflow rather than an extra step.

Also, along with Plazi, we run the Biodiversity Literature Repository on Zenodo, which gives articles, figures and taxonomic treatments their own DOIs and releases them under CC0, so the data inside publications can be found, cited and reused by platforms such as GBIF.

This is what a publisher built by scientists can offer: a model that treats knowledge as something to be shared, prices that stay open and transparent, and infrastructure that makes research easier to find, reuse and trust.

Throughout our existence as a scholarly publisher and technology provider, Pensoft has always considered it our responsibility to ensure that valuable research outputs are shared efficiently with the world. This gives everyone, everywhere, the opportunity to make sense of and use this knowledge, while giving full credit to the scientists behind it. This is how, in our vision, scientific work and knowledge can achieve optimal impact on society and future research.
comments Iva Boyadzhieva, Head of Journal development and PR at Pensoft.

Reclaiming knowledge as a common good

Open Access Week 2026 at Pensoft

As this year’s Open Access Week puts it:

“Momentum is growing for approaches to treat knowledge as a common good and not a commodity to be mined.” – Open Access Week 2026

We believe that momentum is real, and we have seen it grow ever since the first issue of ZooKeys. At Pensoft we are proud to say that we have championed open access in publishing, building the tools, workflows and partnerships that make it work in practice, and we will keep doing so alongside the institutions, funders, editors and researchers who share this commitment.

Explore our journals and services at pensoft.net

After 40 years, Hill’s horseshoe bat has been rediscovered by a team of conservationists.
**Credit:** Jon Flanders, Bat Conservation International

Originally published by Bat Conservation International.

A multi-national team of experts led by Bat Conservation International (BCI), Rwanda Development Board (RDB), and the Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association (RWCA) has rediscovered Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli), a critically endangered ‘lost species’ not seen in forty years. To support wider efforts to understand and protect imperiled bats, BCI has published records of the rediscovery in their first dataset shared openly through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

“Going into this project we feared the species may have already gone extinct. Rediscovering Hill’s horseshoe bat was incredible – it’s astonishing to think that we’re the first people to see this bat in so long. Now our real work begins to figure out how to protect this species long into the future.”
said Dr. Jon Flanders, BCI’s Director of Endangered Species Interventions

The rediscovery marked the culmination of survey efforts that started in 2013, as the team’s dedication paid off during a ten-day and night expedition to Nyungwe National Park in January 2019.

“We knew immediately that the bat we had captured was unusual and remarkable. The facial features were exaggerated to the point of comical. Horseshoe bats are easily distinguishable from other bats by characteristic horseshoe shape and specialized skin flaps on their noses,”
recalled Dr. Winifred Frick, BCI’s Chief Scientist.

Bat Conservation International and collaborators working through taxonomic keys to determine whether they had just caught Hill’s horseshoe bat in Nyungwe National Park.
**Credit:** Jon Flanders, Bat Conservation International

Careful measurements of the bat before they released it back into the wild were an early tip-off that this could be the lost species they came to find. Dr. Flanders then traveled to visit museum archives in Europe to compare the only known specimens to verify that what they had captured in the African forest was, in fact, the first evidence in 40 years that Hill’s horseshoe bat still exists.

Catching this elusive species also allowed the team to collect additional information to ensure it is easier to find in the future – including recording the first-ever echolocation calls that Hill’s horseshoe bat emits as it hunts for insects.

“Knowing the echolocation calls for this species is a game-changer,”
said Dr. Paul Webala, Senior Lecturer at Maasai Mara University, and one of the team’s lead scientists.

Bat Conservation International and collaborators capture the first-ever recording of Hill’s horseshoe bat.
**Credit:** Winifred Frick, Bat Conservation International

Since catching the pair of Hill’s horseshoe bats, the Nyungwe Park Rangers have been setting out detectors that ‘eavesdrop’ on the bats during their nightly flights through the forest.

The rangers conducted audio surveys with Wildlife Acoustics bat detectors in 23 locations over nine months resulting in recording a quarter-million sound files. Analysis of the sound files revealed Hill’s horseshoe bats were heard at eight locations, all within a small area.

“All the work so far confirms that this is a very rare species with a very small core range. We look forward to collaborating with the Rwanda Development Board and Nyungwe Management Company to strengthen the existing conservation efforts to ensure it stays protected,”
said Dr. Frick.

Team members work together to review acoustic data collected in the field.
**Credit:** Winifred Frick, Bat Conservation International

Careful planning and strong partnership support between all the agencies, organizations and experts involved in this initiative were key to its success, according to Dr. Olivier Nsengimana, founder and executive director of the Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association.

Records from the 2019 survey and the rest of the nine-year project’s field work are included in a dataset openly available through GBIF. Other notable highlights include the first record of Lander’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus landeri) in Nyungwe and the first known occurrences of the Damara woolly bat (Kerivoula argentata) in Rwanda.

The research team has released the dataset alongside a preprint describing the findings and survey methods currently in review with Biodiversity Data Journal. Sharing such data, even for such a rare species, allows the international scientific community to put it to use immediately and aid conservation and research aimed at documenting and protecting African bat diversity.

“Nyungwe National Park is one of the most biologically important montane rainforests in Central Africa, supporting an exceptional range of biodiversity including many rare and endemic species, including bats. These findings reinforce the importance of Rwanda’s committed stewardship of Nyungwe National Park as a global biodiversity hotspot and our conservation efforts, including implementing species management actions. We look forward to continuing this collaboration with BCI, RWCA, and the rest of our partners to find out more about the bat diversity in this incredible landscape,”
said Mr. Eugene Mutangana, the Conservation Management Expert, Rwanda Development Board.

Nyungwe National Park is the only location that Hill’s horseshoe bat has ever been detected.
**Credit:** Winifred Frick, Bat Conservation International

“Sharing the survey data to be accessible freely through GBIF is as important to bat conservation as the actual findings. These data belong to anyone and everyone working to ensure these species have protected forests to call home. Open data sharing ensures we live up to the promise that conservation benefits us all,”
said Dr. Frick.

***

Preprint citation:

Flanders J, Frick WF, Nziza J, Nsengimana O, Kaleme P, Dusabe MC, Ndikubwimana I, Twizeyimana I, Kibiwot S, Ntihemuka P, Cheng TL, Muvunyi R, Webala P (2022) Rediscovery of the critically endangered Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli) and other new records of bat species in Rwanda. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e83547

Category: ARPHA Preprints

Open Access Week 2026: Why Pensoft Chose Open from the Start

Table of Contents

Open from the very beginning

A streamlined process

The ARPHA suite

ORPHO – the next-gen tool for scientific writing

Reclaiming knowledge as a common good

African Bat Species “Lost” for 40 Years was rediscovered