In the Dark

Last week I encountered, for the first time, a website called Qeios.com. This is a platform that does peer review of preprints and then posts those approved with Open Access. It also issues a DOI for approved articles. Qeios is also a member of Crossref so presumably the metadata for these articles is deposited there too.

You might think this is the same as what the Open Journal of Astrophysics does, but it is a bit different. For one thing, it is not an arXiv overlay journal so the preprints actually appear on the Qeios platform, though I suppose there’s nothing to stop authors posting on arXiv either before or after Qeios. Since most astrophysicists find their research on arXiv, the overlay concept seems more efficient than the Qeios one.

Anyway, my attention was drawn to Qeios by an astrophysicist who had been asked to review an article for Qeios that is already under consideration by OJAp. In our For Authors page there is this:

No paper should be submitted to The Open Journal of Astrophysics that is already published elsewhere or is being considered for publication by another journal.

This rule is adopted by many journals and has in the past led to authors being banned for breaking it. Apart from anything else it means that the community is not bombarded with multiple review requests for the same paper (as in the case above). There is an issue of research misconduct, the definition of which varies from one institution to another. For reference here is what it says in Maynooth University’s Research Integrity Policy statement:

Publication of multiplier papers based on the same set(s) or sub-set(s) of data is not acceptable, except where there is full cross-referencing within the papers. An author who submits substantially similar work to more than one publisher must disclose this to the publishers at the time of submission.

The document also specifically refers to “artificially proliferating publications” as an example of research misconduct. Authors whose papers do end up in multiple journals could thus find themselves in very hot water with their employers as a consequence.

Getting back to the specifics of Qeios and OJAp, however, there two questions about whether this rule applicable in this situation. One is that the preprint may have been submitted to Qeios after submission to OJAp, which means the rule as written is not violated. Authors of papers published by OJAp retain full copyright of their work so we can’t control what they do after publication, but if they try to publish it again in another journal they will fall foul of the rule there.

The other is whether Qeios counts as a “another journal” in the first place. Instead of going into the definition of what a journal is, I’ll refer you to an old post of mine in which I wrote this:

I’d say that, at least in my discipline, traditional journals are simply no longer necessary for communicating scientific research. I find all the  papers I need to do my research on the arXiv and most of my colleagues do the same. We simply don’t need old-fashioned journals anymore.  Yet we keep paying for them. It’s time for those of us who believe that  we should spend as much of our funding as we can on research instead of throwing it away on expensive and outdated methods of publication to put an end to this absurd system. We academics need to get the academic publishing industry off our backs.

The point that I have made many times is that the only thing that journals do of any importance is to organize peer-review. The publishing side of the business is simply unnecessary. Journals do not add value to an article, they just add cost. The one thing they do – peer review – is not done by them but by members of the academic community.

There is a thread on Bluesky by Ethan Vishniac (Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal) about Qeios. There are six parts so please bear with me if I include them all to show context:

This thread is for authors of scientific papers, and particularly astronomers. I struggled a bit with how explicit I had to be, but I think including a name is important. We (meaning all the major journals) have rules against submitting a manuscript to more than one journal at a time. 1/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.368Z

People who ignore this rule can find themselves banned from submitting papers for years. Recently we had a case where a potential referee noted that he had just been asked to review the same paper by someone else. 2/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.369Z

I wrote the author, who was startled and explained that he had been asked to allow his preprint to be posted at Qeios.com and that he had agreed – the issue of peer review was never raised and posting a preprint is not an ethical violation. It’s a normal part of the process. 3/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.370Z

He cc'd me the emails and I would have read it the same way. Qeios.com takes the position that they are not a journal, but a website that vets papers through peer review. The AAS journals (and as far as I know, all other professional journals) does not regard this as a meaningful distinction. 4/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.371Z

We ban this kind of simultaneous submission in order to avoid over-burdening the community with review requests and because we do not want to encourage people to shop for a referee who will not give significant feedback. The task of reviewing a paper is time-consuming but important service. 5/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.372Z

There is no point in participating in a process which makes this work meaningless. TDLR submit to the AAS journals, or submit to Qeios.com , or any other journal of your choice, but remember that it is a choice. Also, you can post to the ArXiv as well. It's fine. 6/6

— Ethan Vishniac (@ethan-vishniac.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T21:27:57.373Z

This thread repeats much of what I’ve said already, but I’d like to draw your attention to the 4th of these messages, which contains

Qeios.com takes the position that they are not a journal, but a website that vets papers through peer review. The AAS journals (and as far as I know, all other professional journals) does not regard this as a meaningful distinction.

I’m not sure what a journal actually is, as I think it is an outmoded concept, but I agree with Ethan Vishniac that to all intents and purposes Qeios is a journal. It has an ISSN that says as much too. On the other hand, this quote seems to me to contain a tacit acceptance that the only thing that defines a journal is that it vets papers by peer review, which is the point I made above.

This entry was posted on December 15, 2024 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Open Access with tags academic publishing, arXiv, Open Journal of Astrophysics, Qeios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.