Alternative Framework Proposed for Academic Publishing

Costly subscriptions, the overwhelming amount of science journals and the pain of getting that one research article you have no access to because the German institutions are boycotting Elsevier. Sounds familiar?

“Most scientific work in the life sciences is still disseminated using a process inaugurated by the Royal Society in the 17th century, with the notable addition of peer review in the middle of the 20th century,” — Dr. Bodo Stern and Prof. Erin O’Shea

I find it quite remarkable that in our digitalised, mobile-first, progressive world getting hold of the original scientific research remains excruciatingly difficult for the scientists and non-scientists alike. “Most scientific work in the life sciences is still disseminated using a process inaugurated by the Royal Society in the 17th century,” admit Dr. Bodo Stern and Prof. Erin O’Shea, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in their recent article in PLOS.

Many researchers and librarians have campaigned for Open Access and some journals (I am not looking at you, Elsevier) experimented with new business models, where research article could be openly available to everyone straight away and the reviewing process would happen after the article is published. However, reading this proposal in PLOS truly made my week.

The authors of the proposal put together a list of suggestions to not only improve the quality control and access to academic research, but to create a whole new framework of academic publishing revolving around the three main points:

1. Changing peer review to better recognize its scholarly contribution.
2. Shifting the publishing decision from editors to authors.
3. Shifting curation from before to after publication.

Towards the end, the authors mention that the business model they propose remains to be tested. But I would argue that this business model, in fact, already exists and have proven itself quite successful. I am speaking of Medium.com here — those of us who have been using it for a while would surely agree that it works?

As you read through the Proposal, you will notice similarities:

• Post-publication quality control and curation of articles, instead of the pre-publication screening. This is the foundation of Medium, especially since the platform expanded its editorial team and introduced the idea of collections — selected articles, united by a shared theme and published independently but more or less at the same time.
• Making each peer review an open and independent “mini-article”, therefore acknowledging the reviewer’s work. See comments on Medium — each comment counts as an independent piece, with its own separate link.
• Alternative metrics to define the impact of each article, instead of relying on the impact factor of the journal. Altmetric and some other academic initiatives are already on it, but even simple tools like claps, reads and user-ratings, when linked to the distribution algorithm (the higher the article’s rating, the easier it is for people to discover it), work for the majority of social media platforms. Of course, if we let things be governed by those metrics only, we risk ending up in an “opinion bubble”, but I believe that the human moderation and curated article collections can help us avoid that.

I hope that I am not the only one who sees great hope here. Have a read through the original proposal and see for yourself. My feeling is that we are on to something fundamentally transformative, which could mean that in a decade or so we may be reading and publishing academic papers in an entirely different way. What the science world needs now is a business team to take on this task.

“A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences” by Bodo M. Stern and Erin K. O’Shea was published in PLOS Biology on 12 February 2019.