Needs for disruptive innovation on the academic publishing

Junseon
Junseon
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

In 1995, an article was published in Forbes with a title, “Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals, would be ‘the Internet’s fisrt victim’”. This article derived from the belief that instead of using traditional costly journals to share research achievements, the emerging digital technology would enable a brand new way of gathering researchers nearly free of charge.

That belief, however, turned out to be a futile dream. Figure below shows that unlike the expected ruin of Elsevier, the business has grown to be an enormous publisher. Its operating margin rate in 2016 was 36.77% which is far greater than that of Apple in its highest, 35.30% in 2012. (32.40% in 2016 for Apple)

출처- relx2016-annual-report

As such, large publishers are utilizing their already existing distribution channels and academic reputations of the journals they possess to influence the new business scene and reap excessive profits. The basis of this absurdity is the oligopoly by some large publishers possessing prominent journals. These publishers exploit researchers’ desire to contribute their works to prominent journals. In fact, top four publishers, namely Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor&Francis, possesses 35% of whole journals.

Oligopolist publishers are demanding higher costs to generate much commercial profits, but the quality and reliability of reviews from such long period of publication process is rather deteriorating. Nevertheless, researchers, who act as both providers and consumers of these academic works at the same time, are losing their bargaining power due to oligopolists control over the market.

In short, the inefficiency of the academic publishing comes from the centralized structure with overwhelming influence.

In this context, the campaign ‘The Cost of Knowledge’ was initiated by the mathematician Timothy Gowers in 2012 against constantly increasing subscription prices, bundling strategies, and publishers’ support on Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA). Major activity of the campaign is the boycott on large publishers, especially Elsevier, resisting to write, review, and edit on their journals. The campaign led Elsevier to cut its subscription fees and withdraw its support on Research Works Act, a bill related to SOPA. Still, their market influence isn’t negligible.

Meanwhile, another campaign, Open Access(OA) movement spread over the globe from Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda, and so forth with such problems in academic publishing in mind. OA is an alternative movement to oppose commercialization and deepening of oligopoly on academic journals, a model to enable free access to knowledge which previously was difficult due to high costs and strict copyright policies. The typical concept of Open Access can be found from the Budapest Open Access Initiative(BOAI, 2002), which claims, “the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.” Early OAs were “green OAs” based on self-archivings, where researchers themselves uploaded their manuscripts to online ‘repositories’. The concept of gold OAs came out to cope with both commercial losses witnessed by publishers due to green OAs and the barriers experienced by researchers to self-archive their own works. These gold OAs cost researchers additional fee, article processing charge(APC), to replace the traditional subscription fees that disappeared in OA models. Following figure shows revenues earned by publishers via APCs.

“Article processing charges (APCs) and subscriptions — Monitoring open access costs” © Jisc

Furthermore, in the stream of OA movements came up several variations of OA models with different problems caused. These cases will be dealt with in future posts.

The most important problem is that publishers do not provide appropriate review services at such extreme costs. In the last five years, Elsevier and Springer have experienced fake reviews, and manipulation of reviews is constantly witnessed. Just three months ago, in April 2017, “Tumor Biology”, a journal possessed by one of the largest publishers, Springer, conducted a group retraction of 107 articles due to manipulated reviews. This definitely proves that there still exists the quality and trust issue on peer reviews, and the problem is significant. In addition, numerous journals have no certain standard announced how editors with full authorities on acceptance of papers select specific peer reviewers. There are even occasions where reviewers without expertise on relevant field conduct peer reviews on the papers. This has led to the launch of a platform where peer reviewers archive their reviewing activities.

Process of peer review differs among publishers, and mostly takes a long period time. Some alternative methods have been suggested including Portable Peer Review, Consortium Peer Review, and the concept of Pre-prints, sharing of the original manuscripts of papers on public online spaces to enable faster reviews between fellow researchers. Detailed analysis of problems in peer reviews and how Pluto aims to solve them will be posted in the near future.

Pluto team believes all those problems mentioned above derive from centralization of authorities and bargaining power, the middlemen called publishers. By implementing this role of “middleman” on the blockchain to run autonomously, barriers to access and sharing of research achievements must be eliminated.

To realize the concept of “Decentralized Academia,” Pluto team is developing the platform with following rules in major consideration.

1. Cost of submitting a paper, or APC, should be extremely reduced from the traditionals, and such cost should be used only as an expense to evaluate the submitter’s paper.

2. Authors have full rights over their works. They will set values of their own works, including free access.

3. Evaluation of the papers is done solely by peer reviews, and reviewers have REPUTATION scores that is reinforced by the result of their prior reviews. Reviews are weighted with these scores.

4. All information about activities on the platform are 100% transparent. Ethereum ensures no modification or deletion.

Then the Decentralized Academia platform will achieve…

1. to eliminate barriers on sharing of academic achievements via low fee

2. to seriously reduce time required for peer review process

3. to improve quality of reviews and prevent abuses

4. to facilitate cross communications between researchers in the same field

In this blog, we will continue to introduce problems in the academic paper industry and alternative methods that are currently used, and describe how to implement them on blockchain network. We would appreciate your interest and feedback on this project.

Thanks

Pluto Network

Breaking down barriers in Academia | #Decentralization #OpenScience #Transparency | Seoul, South Korea

Junseon

Written by

Junseon

The founder of Pluto Network. We are working on accelerating scientific progress for all of humanity.

Pluto Network

Breaking down barriers in Academia | #Decentralization #OpenScience #Transparency | Seoul, South Korea

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