Stories can wait. Science can’t.
ScienceMatters is the next generation publishing platform which aims to improve the way science is published.
Academia needs a profound change when it comes to the dissemination of scientific work. The current dysfunctional publishing system has led to a great amount of research failing to be published and to a reproducibility crisis.
The main challenges in scientific publishing
Barriers to knowledge creation: the story-telling incentive by most journals creates a threshold as to what can be published. This leads to long delays in turning research into publications. During this long processing period the data is hidden, which is slowing down the progress of science.
Barriers to knowledge access: Charles Darwin’s paper published in 1858 is still behind a paywall. The average price one pays for an individual research article is $38. Institutions are paying millions each year to access publicly funded research. In 2018 science should be open access and freely available.
Reluctance adopt new digital technologies: the academic world is very traditional and slow to adopt new technologies. This is also the case when it comes to publishing. The modular publishing practice at ScienceMatters makes the whole process more efficient. Being an innovative company, we are leveraging advanced digital technologies including blockchain technology to improve the publishing process even further.
ScienceMatters eliminates the need to create stories in order to publish scientific work. Instead, we focus on the foundation of science: the observation.
Single observation publishing not only takes away the pressure to create stories, but also reduces the time from discovery to publication. Additionally, scientists minimize the risk of “getting scooped” while collecting enough data to create a compelling story. Many observations are never published due the current incentive of story-publishing.
Once a single observation has been published, the authors or other researchers can extend the observation, slowly creating a natural narrative. Additionally, we are incentivising publications of replications to validate already existing work. Reproducibility Matters, a new journal that will be launched, focuses on publishing confirmatory or contradictory data.
Additionally our concept improves the quality of the peer review process. Reviewing of a traditional article takes almost half a day to complete. Reviewers do not receive any credit or financial compensation for the time they invest in peer reviewing. At ScienceMatters, we have simplified the reviewing process. Since we only publish single observations, reviewing an article on our digital platform takes, on average, one hour to complete, allowing reviewers to assess the actual data. Additionally reviewers are paid $25 per reviewed manuscript.
Leveraging blockchain technology we are looking into the possibilities of automatically compensating reviewers, using the EUREKA Token, as soon as a review has been submitted. A future project is to implement crowd-sourced peer review in order to improve not only the efficiency, but also the quality of the evaluation process.
The waiting game: how the culture of the academic publishing industry is stifling global research and development
Bo‐Christer Björk and David Solomon (in an open access paper available here) identify three problems which affect the publication process in academia.
First, under traditional subscriptions to journals, access to information and research findings is not adequate. In practical terms this means that libraries must renew subscriptions to access journals (in print or electronic form) behind paywalls. These academic libraries can be subject to institutional budget cuts. This could make it harder to maintain access to a wider variety of journals behind paywalls. And with the advent of file sharing websites like Sci-Hub, economic necessity, if not opportunism, has lead to a practice of circumventing subscription fees. The example of Aaron Swartz’s arrest in 2011 comes to mind. After hacking into MIT’s servers to download and distribute journal articles behind paywalls, the punishment for his crime would have included a hefty fine and a 35-year prison term. Swartz hanged himself in 2013.
Swartz’s actions, and his tragic death, are evidence of the dire need for access to research.
Second, the peer review process is patently unfair, and this process often affects, based on chance alone, the choice of which research output or article can be published. Under the current system of publication the services of peer reviewing and editing are essential in ensuring quality control of individual published articles and studies. However, peer reviewers and editors are typically not remunerated for the work of their applying expertise in reviewing and editing research. The submission fee for one article in a “high impact” journal can cost over 5 000 USD.
The argument for non-remuneration of peer reviewers and editors could be maintained on a basis of mutual benefit to authors of articles. Editors and reviewers are usually published authors themselves. This means that when the time comes for the editors and reviewers to publish, this group of people can call in a ‘favour’ which they earned reviewing an early author’s work.
Whether this ‘favour’ is more of an obligation is not a relevant question to pose at this point.
The essential point of understanding is that publishing houses outsource the work of review and editing to volunteer reviewers and editors. This is particularly disturbing when one makes comparison of the services within academic publishing industry to the services within the legal profession. As a thought experiment, imagine that lawyers had no professional structures which allowed them to charge a fee for checking a contract. This group of professionals would simply have to rely on an economy of favours. They would have to assume that when the time came they could exploit their professional networks in order to have a contract checked by the right expert. The sobering reality is that lawyers have refined the act of charging for their expert services to an exquisite art. Given the scarce skills and expertise required in the editing and reviewing process, one hopes that authors in academia might take note of this ‘exquisite art’.
This comparison raises important questions about the fairness of the non-remuneration of editors and peer reviewers.
The third problem is that the publication process of an article is often very delayed. This delay is compounded by a lengthy review process. This problem is dangerous for research and development because it contributes to a seemingly wanton stagnation of global research and development. Its cause is rooted in the outmoded mindset and lax attitude of traditional publishers. This mindset is exemplified by an existing practice of bundling of print journals. The reasons for this practice originate from page limits set in place due to the high cost of printing. Bundling the articles along type and length allows publishing houses to maximise their profits at the expense of delaying the publication of some article that do not make the cut until the next issue. In some cases that has lead to a serious bottleneck effect in the dissemination of published articles. The mindset extends beyond journals which issue printed volumes. This delay is compounded by the fact that authors must pass through several rounds of review, in which authors make changes to their work.
The review process can take years. Authors must implement changes to such a degree that the review might take on the level of work of the original project itself. Consequently some authors may actively choose to delay the submission of research to a publisher for fear of having their ideas stolen or ‘scooped’. Given the increasingly competitive nature of the ‘publish or perish’ world of academic, this hoarding of data might seem justified, however, its effects on scientific progress are deleterious.
Electronic journals and repositories are still partially affected by this outmoded mindset. Today, the practice of bundling electronic articles by type and length exists, to a somewhat limited extent.
As a millennial and digital native, I find this mindset infuriating. For those of us who come from a position of relative privilege, our generation has grown up with expectation having unfettered access to information on immediate and current basis. In short, we expect better. And our native knowledge of technology has allowed us to begin divest from publications behind paywalls. Judging by the number of uploads and downloads on certain websites which flaut copyright law, the infurituation can be followed by action.
My intention here is not to lambaste the entire publishing system within academia. My intention is to call attention to a culture of reluctance to embrace change which has caused some of the biggest publishing companies to fail to innovate. I also mean to offer solutions to these problems.
A researcher from an established research institute delays publication of their findings for several years. The existing system in academia incentivises researchers to delay publishing research until they have a sufficiently large ‘story’ in order to further their careers. As a result, several years can pass until important findings are published.
A researcher can instead publish multiple single observations on the EUREKA platform, giving other scientists the chance to incorporate these observations into their own research. As the single observations are recorded and timestamped on the blockchain, the researcher can take credit for their work immediately. This will be especially useful for junior researchers looking to make an early mark on their careers.
EUREKA is a scientific review and rating platform fuelled by the EUREKA token, which has the potential to radically improve the $20 billion global science publishing industry and the science research process.
Watch the introductory video featuring prominent academic supporters of our open science mission:
https://youtu.be/ScU9ytVP5WcJoin our Telegram channel to chat directly with the EUREKA team: https://t.me/joinchat/EXhWdw1KgAQgnraZhI9XBA
The EUREKA team is from the established open access Swiss science publisher www.sciencematters.io, which will be the first to implement the EUREKA Platform.
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