Innovative technologies designed to assist the research community could help overcome mistrust in science publishers
Real life is often more colourful than the most imaginative drama. The unfolding scientists versus publishers saga is no exception. It features the discovery of fake journals; dodgy ‘peer review’ papers; an ideological war over open access; metrification; copyright claims; bloated profits; submission and conference boycotts; subscriptions cancelled.
Weapons-grade mudslinging between academics and scientific publishers has become common practice in the last ten to fifteen years. It is serious. People have been criminalised, and then committed suicide. Others have got rich on the basis of work funded by the taxpayer. But the fierce opposition may be receding, facilitated by technologies designed to improve the way the scientific process works, and providing scientists with tangible benefits.
Unequal relationship
The ongoing opposition between the two protagonists is like a match between many clones of David versus a handful of Goliaths. In the blue corner is the modern stressed academic. “Will perform science for food” read their funding-hungry tweets typed while trying to get the last experiments into a top-ranking journal. Well, top-ish.
In the red corner: the oligarch of publishers. Milking the boom in online publishing for all its worth; locking up work they did not fund from its own creators. Then, selling it back to the world at inflated prices for a product—the humble PDF—that pays little homage to the skill and ingenuity of the original work.
If only it were so simple. Perhaps 10-15 years ago it was. But for all the mistrust that has built up in the research community against science publishers, some people are seeing real signs that the battleground is changing. “Over the last five years I think the story has changed considerably from all the gripes on pricing, open access so on. There’s a different conversation going on,” says Tracey Brown, managing director of Science about Science, a policy discussion and research advocacy organisation based in London, UK. “There’s been a huge evolution in response to the increasingly interactive research climate.”
Now, open access is on its way to being the new normal in science publishing. And technology looks to be the key driver. The publishing landscape is simmering with new spin-outs and start-ups, networks and funky web tools. Some will inevitably be successful, and could come to redefine how scientists interact with each other. They could even alter the way researchers interphase with the publishers that bring their work to the global audience. It could go as far as bringing a new trust to a relationship fraught with virtual fisticuffs.
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The problems began with the internet. When digital publishing arose, the scientific community began to ask what value publishers were adding to the process. In theory, the web’s early proliferation of blogging and publishing platforms should have resulted in the democratisation of the sector. Instead, the biggest science publishers’ turnover went from millions to billions of Euro and the criticisms mounted.
Reforming the relationship between scientists and publishers is a work in progress. One of the ways to restore trust has been to try and improve on the peer-review system. While some like ScienceOpen bet on post publication peer-review, others prefer pre-submission peer review. The second approach has seduced Springer, headquartered in Germany. Springer journals work with Peerage of Science, which is a slightly different way of approaching peer review, based on a pre-journal submission peer-review system. And BioMed Central is working with another similar initiative called Axios Review.
Both of these initiatives can be described as standalone peer review platforms, and get the thumbs up from Bjoern Brembs, a neurobiologist at the University of Regensburg, Germany. “Journal-independent peer review is something I really like and there are a whole bunch of initiatives already offering this service.” The Episciences Project is a similar effort, launched in 2014 by Jean-Pierre Demailly from the University of Grenoble, France, and mathematician colleagues which reviews preprint papers deposited on open archives such as arXiv or HAL.
Brembs has been a critic of mainstream publishers, and has signed up as an editor to a new initiative to increase trust in scientific publishing via study pre-registration, where publishers are bound to accept papers before results are in, thus preventing the bias in favour of positive results. He says it’s too early to say if it’s worked. “It’s hard to say. The mistrust goes much deeper than that. Pre-registration will ever only work for a subset of works, and will take time for wide adoption, at least in the short term.” He adds that the concept is being discussed and some articles have been published after pre-registration.
To cut the inefficiencies of the current publishing process, physicist David Harris has just launched in February 2015 a platform, called The Journal of Brief Ideas, which allows researchers to publish their ideas online before they even start conducting experiments, thus making them available for public scrutiny It is a citable online index of research articles that are up to 200 words similar to pre-prints, non-peer-reviewed articles . Its goal is to enhance collaboration between different fields.
Time for more radical changes in science publishing
Yet, all of these improvements may not be enough. The science community is clearly hungry for new techs that are genuinely useful and not fancy-looking profiteering. When solutions that genuinely improve the overall scientific process come on-stream, the trust should return.