Curious what is the leading open source system being used for publication of journals where academics are trying to get out of such exploitative practices? Or is it a collection of bespoke setups with no clear leader?
The problem is that academics are evaluated based on the impact factor of the journal they publish in.
If I submit a grant application and I have five papers in Nature, I will get the job. If I submit the application with five preprints on biorxiv, I might as well not have published those. It's like that all the way down - my last academic employer required me to publish a certain amount of papers per year in my niche's top 10% impact factor journals. it's due to laziness - I'm an expert, my employer is not, so my employer cannot evaluate my work quality. So the evaluation is outsourced to journal editors, with a paper acceptance in a prestigious journal being a stamp of approval of my skills.
The reason why people do not build their own journals is that they will work, for a long time, outside this impact factor system. You could chuck all of your papers into alternative journals, but you will fast jeopardise your career. It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem.
Thanks for responding - I obviously don't have much idea of academia but this is seems like an area ripe for "disruption" (as much as I hate the tech-jargon). So if the core issue is being reviewed by respectable peers (the publication is mainly the easy to understand condensed outcome of that review), what is stopping the editors of a reputable journal to get together, tie-up with tech solutions and form their own editor boards? Or is there some sort of exclusive contract between the journal and the members its editor board that they can't review outside of the journal?
Because if there is no such restriction, instead of paying £2,700 to Elsevier, they can pay the new platform significantly less and still get the review done by the same quality of editors. Sure the platform name isn't as reputable as Elsevier's is but the editors are the same and the only way to build reputation is to spend time and effort on it - it is obviously not an overnight task.
It is definitely a hard problem - obviously our armchair discussion can't solve it. But it is a very interesting problem.
Ah but you see, it takes a few years before a new journal even has an impact factor, the sole number with which it is evaluated. To have a high impact factor means that other journals have cited your journal for years in high numbers.
It's a chicken & egg problem - you need a good decade for a journal to be come influential/high IF, but for that to happen you need people to submit their papers to your journal. And they won't do that if there's no or a low IF.... having good editors might help as they'll be able to choose or attract highly influential papers, but that's the least of your worries! Those papers will go to high-IF journals and there's little reason for those papers to go to your journal.
I guess it is the equivalent of the Facebook problem. You are on Facebook because all your family is and no one leaves for a new platform because no one else is using that. Except it is worse here and instead of just missing out on updates/photos, it directly affects your livelihood.
Exactly!!! And there's very little 'regular' scientists can do about this. It's a system upheld by senior academics' conceptions, funding agencies, and university management staff.
Seems like the only answer to this is law enforcing open sourcing of academic research, atleast that which is funded by the taxpayer; though not much hope of that with the lobbying pushed by the incumbent journals.
Yes, there used to be Plan S by the EU, 'all research has to be open access' - which led to an explosion in publisher's prices as people were forced to pay them! Nature used to be Closed Access only, but once Plan S came around they added an OA option for about 10k in euros. Ridiculous.
> Good news! We'll see how the publishers will torpedo it
Indeed! Maybe they will try to make it difficult to access but atleast as long as the access is open and free (as in beer), all those efforts will do is give rise to a secondary platform that will solve the ease-of-access issue.
I suggest you submit a new post once EU decision is final, either way, so that this topic stays in the forefront :)
There are several open access solutions but few (if any?) open source solutions. Arxiv is free but lacks reputation outside a small number of fields. PLOS One has a decent reputation in some fields and probably comes closest in being good value.
I know a couple of people working in this space, and ultimately it ends up being a networking issue: in order to get peer reviewers at a scale which is acceptable, you basically have to buy editors with networks of contacts. Since good or even mediocre reviewers are scarce, this ends up leading to significant competition for reviews. But reviewers are not compensated so there is no market pressure for reviewers to actually exist. Publishing is now a profit-driven system built on top of an informal network created by enthusiasts who were originally doing the work because it was important to them.
There have been a couple of attempts at matchmaking systems and rewards systems. https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is the most visible in my field, but they only get 1-2 preprint reviews out per day so far. This is still quite new and there are a couple of other platforms in development.
