A few days ago I posted an item about how the current system of scientific publication is under such intolerable strain that it is no longer fit for purpose. This is something I’ve felt for a while. Some time ago I wrote a post musing about what should replace it. That article included this:
I know I’m not alone in thinking that the current publishing ecosystem is doomed and will die a natural death soon enough. In my view the replacement should be a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good.
https://telescoper.blog/2023/09/12/lets-make-no-pay-open-access-real/
The Open Journal of Astrophysics was set up to demonstrate a way of achieving this kind of change in the field of Astrophysics. With this in mind I was delighted to to see a paper in PLOS Biology by Richard Sever (published just yesterday) with the following abstract:
Academic journals have been publishing the results of biomedical research for more than 350 years. Reviewing their history reveals that the ways in which journals vet submissions have changed over time, culminating in the relatively recent appearance of the current peer-review process. Journal brand and Impact Factor have meanwhile become quality proxies that are widely used to filter articles and evaluate scientists in a hypercompetitive prestige economy. The Web created the potential for a more decoupled publishing system in which articles are initially disseminated by preprint servers and then undergo evaluation elsewhere. To build this future, we must first understand the roles journals currently play and consider what types of content screening and review are necessary and for which papers. A new, open ecosystem involving preprint servers, journals, independent content-vetting initiatives, and curation services could provide more multidimensional signals for papers and avoid the current conflation of trust, quality, and impact. Academia should strive to avoid the alternative scenario, however, in which stratified publisher silos lock in submissions and simply perpetuate this conflation.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002234
(I added the emphasis). In case you were not aware, Richard Sever is a cofounder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.
I’m very glad to see similar thoughts to those I expressed about astrophysics being echoed in the field of biomedicine. I hope that more disciplines follow this path. The way it is realized will no doubt be domain-specific, but the benefits of such a new ecosystem will be for all science.
In the Dark 