Who are you?
- Scientists: 12, a few review papers currently.
- Non-scientists: 7
Total number: 20 present
What does publishing mean to you?
- A way of securing your academic position
- Dissemination
- Talking to ourselves (closed loop)
The current scientific publishing system is broken. Why?
- Publish or perish - it's hard for early-career researchers
- The monopoly - pay to publish and read, free reviewing, all because we need to publish for our careers
- Multiple cycles for a manuscript: submit to journal 1, reject, journal 2, etc etc ... revise, accept! This can take a long time. Sam's manuscript took two years to get out.
"The opposite of 'open' isn't 'closed'. The opposite of 'open' is 'broken'." –John Wilbanks
What can we do to make it better?
- Preprints are a big change - the submitted version of a manuscript, not yet gone through peer review, is posted online (disseminate in a day! Doing this made Sam proud). Free to access and read, plus opportunity for the community to give feedback before the manuscript is finalised in a published article.
- Q: Who owns preprints? Multiple servers - some are in a journal line (e.g. PeerJ, F1000Research), some are whole community (BioRxiv, OSF preprints, preprints.org)
- Physicists, etc have been doing this for years on the arXiv (arXiv.org)
- It's like reading the daily news, you can go to the preprint server
- Comment: as an astrophysicist, we used to have a weekly meeting to discuss the latest preprints on astroPH, and I've carried that model forward after academia. Did they send the feedback back to authors? We used to invite speakers because of interesting preprints, and send Qs to authors.
- You can see how the science changes, from preprint to published version. Opens up the scientific process of peer review.
- Preprints are open access and permanent, versioned, citable.
- Now they matter in grant applications (no matter "manuscript in submission") - this is a huge deal.
ACTIVITY: what do you like in science publishing? What is broken for you?
Are we talking publications or all communications? In the past, we were more certain. Now it is less certain. Yet we're using print to express ideas, when we have many other technologies. What about publishing data? tools? The incentives don't work for this right now.
Problem of not being taken seriously unless you publish in certain journals.
OPEN vs BROKEN brainstorming ideas: What are the good things related to open science and preprints? What does make the system broken?
Open:
- Feedback on my research
- Positive almetrics & ALM (value the article not the journal)
- Open Science is the basis for open education
- eLife! Innovative, community driven
- How much does publishing cost?
- Change academia culture to define research prestige differently
- Access (legally)
- Universities are too slow at adopting open science
- Preprints--> behaviour change at the grassroots / System change
Broken:
- The CEO of Elsevier made $3 millions last year
- Too slow, too costly, too PDF
- Very long publishing process
- Hard to change the status quo when you are junior
- Academics are conservative and won't move away from a corrupted system
- Payable access to other published articles
- Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis (Big Four)
- Reputation is the currency
- The publishing system has been co-opted by powerful corporations
- Students are not educated about open science or preprints
- Develop trust metrics that aren't commercial journals
DISCUSSION: What do you want to see in publishing? How to change it?
Understand what is going on, the economics of it.
Political not technical.
Start a revolution - boycott specific journals, preprint everything, review the preprints. But who will do this?
Preprints are a quiet revolution, more accessible to the scientific community than boycotting journals bottom up change.
Fear of preprinting due to journals not accepting it. See Sherpa/Romeo for a list of preprint policies by journal.
Fear of preprinting due to scooping - other researchers do my research and publish it before me. But we already share our research at conferences, sometimes it happens but it's rare. Plus some journals have "scoop protection" - see your preprint as priority.
How difficult is it to get feedback and reviews from people who are not your colleagues? Only 11% preprints on bioRxiv have comments, some might get feedback by email. Are preprints lost in the ether?