In the Dark

I just saw an interesting paper published by the Royal Society last year with the abstract:

Replacing traditional journals with a more modern solution is not a new idea. Here, we propose ways to overcome the social dilemma underlying the decades of inaction. Any solution needs to not only resolve the current problems but also be capable of preventing takeover by corporations: it needs to replace traditional journals with a decentralized, resilient, evolvable network that is interconnected by open standards and open-source norms under the governance of the scholarly community. It needs to replace the monopolies connected to journals with a genuine, functioning and well-regulated market. In this new market, substitutable service providers compete and innovate according to the conditions of the scholarly community, avoiding sustained vendor lock-in. Therefore, a standards body needs to form under the governance of the scholarly community to allow the development of open scholarly infrastructures servicing the entire research workflow. We propose a redirection of money from legacy publishers to the new network by funding bodies broadening their minimal infrastructure requirements at recipient institutions to include modern infrastructure components replacing and complementing journal functionalities. Such updated eligibility criteria by funding agencies would help realign the financial incentives for recipient institutions with public and scholarly interest.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206

The article is well worth reading in full. It says things that I have said on this blog (e.g. here) but rather more eloquently than I managed. I’ll just make a couple of comments.

First, in the first paragraph of the first section it says:

Replacing traditional journals with a more modern solution is not a new idea […], but the lack of progress since the first calls and ideas more than 20 years ago has convinced an increasing number of experts that the time for small tweaks is long gone and a disruptive break is now overdue.

I agree, of course, and I think one of the problems is the perennial problem of academia: there’s a huge excess of talking over doing. With the Open Journal of Astrophysics I’m proud to be one of the doers. Incidentally, a senior member of the Royal Astronomical Society recently told me that they were finding OApJ “disruptive”. That is, of course, the point. We need a lot more disruption.

Another issue I’ve written about before is whether there is any future in academic journals as such at all. The concept dates from the 17th Century – when it was extremely valuable and useful – but is now very outdated. As I wrote here more than a decade ago:

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.

https://telescoper.blog/2015/11/05/enough-of-the-academic-publishing-racket/

The revolution has been a slower process than I expected, but I do sense that the worm is at last turning.