@cyrilpedia Oh absolutely. Publishing has huge profit margins and this would imply losing at least some of that. There will always be resistance to loss of profits, which I can understand. The other side, of course, is that publishing (peer review, typesetting, editing and copyediting, and the management of all this) does cost money, especially when done for large volumes of articles. It's important to recognise this. Of course we could also have a conversation about the value of publishing ->

@minimammoth I think that is one underestimated (or understudied) value of preprints: we can finally ask, with data, the question: what value do journals add to the scientific process?

@minimammoth I just think that this needs to be asked at the individual journal level - in the interest of full disclosure, I've been (but am not anymore) an editor at J Exp Med. In my opinion some editors and journal do add a great deal. Many do not, and just drain cash from a system that requires "peer reviewed" publications without carefully monitoring the quality of the process at different journals

@cyrilpedia yes, exactly. I think journals (but not individually, as a corpus), have a... sort of... administrative role? They are an efficient way to connect papers with good peer reviewers, and to provide editing, copy-editing, etc. Personally (partly because I am a professional editor working for eLife), I think these are valuable services, but not everyone has to agree. Some will be happy simply reading preprints, and that's OK, and should affect journals' bottomline, especially if most ->

@cyrilpedia scientists prefer to read preprints and either make their own judgements or discuss amongst themselves or provide public peer review.

@minimammoth In my (obviously biased) opinion, people underestimate how much works goes into curating proper peer review. Making sure you have the right expertise, screening for conflicts of interest, arbitrating the result and chasing reviewers

@cyrilpedia having had to manage peer review a few times, absolutely. I think it's the sort of thing you don't realise until you do it.

@minimammoth It's going to be difficult to work out - because Science and Nature for example have great science journalism in the front matter (again with the disclosures, I also write front matter for Nature Medicine) the work of people like Kai Kupferschmidt (hope I spelled that right) and Amy Maxmen was amazing during the pandemic (or in her case, with the great writing on Ebola before, pandemics). But that certainly does not apply to the endless trickle down of journals in the Ikea now you can't get out of here model

@minimammoth sorry - one pandemic, one epidemic.

@cyrilpedia agreed. I think the science journalism aspect is incredibly important (though I wonder if that doesn't mean that manybe we need more science magazines – places where journalism about science is published – and fewer journals?).

@minimammoth The niche they fill in this respect is science journalism for a scientifically literate readership - so it's not like SciAm or the (again great) work of people like Carl Zimmer or Ed Yong. The economics of all this is a mess, but it was less complicated before commercial publishers began the brand driven expansion phase

@cyrilpedia completely agreed. I don't know if this type of science journalism could be funded (or realistically, would exist) any other way. Because it's funded by the subscription charges and APCs that scientists pay for the research. I'm not sure how many scientists would buy a science-journalism-only version of Nature or Science (unfortunately). (And of course this goes back to funding and also how funding for journalism is... well...)

@minimammoth Definitely is the case now - but I do remember a time when individual subscriptions (I had one) the Science and Nature were not uncommon, and they were read as magazines for the weekly news, book reviews, interviews etc and then you read the papers that caught your eye or were in your field. That could still work, I think - but with OA and preprints, that means enough subscribers for the news and front matter. I don't know if the numbers could work, but they might

@cyrilpedia I suspect it would mean these sort of publishers losing out on a lot of profits, which I suspect they're unwilling to do in the end, since they're private enterprises.

@minimammoth Yes, and now they often belong to ever larger conglomerates (and I suppose ultimately to the Scheinhardt wig company)

@cyrilpedia Exactly. Thanks for the convo by the way. It's one of my main interests, as an ex-scientist and currently an editor who is invested in keeping science open and accessible.

@minimammoth Thank you - and I hope to have more convos here. Cheers

@minimammoth The only other scientific journal where for the last almost 30 years I've consistently read the front matter is Current Biology. (and back matter, the last page with Sidney Brenner was a reason to wait for the next issue at my university library)

@cyrilpedia yes! Always a pleasure to read.

@minimammoth @cyrilpedia IMO, as a collections librarian, a lot of the value I see from Science and Nature is their front matter and it makes it easier for me to somewhat justify the crazy prices...

I know our researchers would sacrifice limbs to get their research published in either place but I remain skeptical as to how much value they are adding on the research side...

I also recognize that my views are definitely not representative :)

@cyrilpedia in itself: peer review could simply happen in the public forum after posting of a preprint (this is what a lot of public peer review initiatives are about), and revisions wouldn't necessarily need to happen (because someone could be aware of the limitations of a study by reading the public peer reviews). But then, we'd need to be really careful about how preprints are being used, and make sure that peer reviews are available and easily accessible, which again, isn't always simple.

@minimammoth In the middle ground you have refereed preprints like Review Commons at EMBO (again, to be clear, I have worked for EMBO and I still do freelance for them, including the podcast) https://www.reviewcommons.org

@cyrilpedia There's of course the question of what the actual point of peer review is in itself. Peer review can only do so much: in essence, it can check whether the conclusions in a paper follow from the data presented. Occasionally it might detect fraud, but for the most part, peer reviewers have time to read a paper and find obvious flaws, but can't be expected to e.g. replicate the experiments to see if the reporting is accurate (does that make sense?). So one important thing is for ->

@cyrilpedia everyone reading papers (with and without peer review) to be aware of what role peer review actually has, what it can do and what it's limitations are.

@minimammoth I think most editors would agree that the function of peer review is not to detect fraud (though if it does, wonderful). But good publishers have image, data and text screens for manipulation and plagiarism that run parallel to and are independent of the peer review process

@cyrilpedia yes, of course. The reason I'm saying that about peer review is that there seems to be this idea that a preprint can't be trusted and a 'published' article automatically can, and this is also not accurate.

@minimammoth We also have to be careful not to just by extreme cases - as my courtroom drama TV and film education taught me "hard cases make bad law". But what journals are for, in the age of preprints is a question we've been systematically asking authors on the EMBO Podcast and on the RC blog https://www.reviewcommons.org/blog/

@minimammoth A consistent pair that turn up is "journal help me find content and my readers/community find my own work" and "I know the bar/value the QC of certain journals". (note that this last does not at all imply valuing glamour mags)

@cyrilpedia actually this is a point I talk about a lot: most scientists (at least the ones I interact with) want to publish good science they believe in. We should be infrastructure for those scientists, not for the exceptions or rare cases that break the rules (even if we still try to detect those cases).

@brembs yeah, I think caps are a great idea in principle, but are not practical (and I doubt they're lawful) in most cases. There needs to be a different way.

@minimammoth Yes, indeed..
In our publication, we describe such a way.

@brembs yes, apologies, I've only had a chance to take a quick look. I'll read it in more detail later today cos it looks like a possible good framework.

@minimammoth @brembs For me the important thing is having the competition for funds public funds based on quality. But, to paraphrase the Dude, "that's just, like, my opinion"

@cyrilpedia @minimammoth That is the opinion expressed in our paper as well... 😇

@brembs @minimammoth Sorry for jumping on to thread without reading it first.

@brembs @minimammoth I think one way to view it is through the public contracts bidding system. We offer X amount for the publication of Y. This is not dissimilar from build a rocket for the Apollo program, and now lets see the price bids from private companies and the quality on offer. Authors would be free to publish anywhere, but publishing outside this system would not be permitted with public funds, for example.

@cyrilpedia @minimammoth Yes, this is what we propose as wel - but it requires that the current journals are replaced with something else, as they are owned by single companies: you can't have different companies compete to publish, say, Nature. 😂

That's what we try to explain in our publication.

@brembs @minimammoth I hope we could recover/reboost the diverse ecosystem of academic run journals.

@cyrilpedia @minimammoth In principle, yes, but what purpose do journals serve that we could not replciate more efficiently in a system wthout journals?

I mean, if journals were so crucial for communication, why don't Twitter, facebook, TikTok or Mastodon have any journals?

Why would one re-create journals?

@brembs how would you replicate the curation-side of journals? Their selection of papers for one (especially in the case of smaller, specialised journals), but for another their science journalism, which is valuable in itself. And the experience and infrastructure that journals have built around organising peer review is also valuable. It could of course be replicated, but I would the resulting 'thing' be that different from a journal?

@minimammoth The Glam signal is easy to copy and improve upon, as we currently don't even have a false negative rate for each service, i.e., we don't know which rejections or misses went on to be great hits:
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2022/02/replacing-the-prestige-signal/

WRT non-journal peer-review, I'mm sure you know funding agencies perform peer-review, too?
Other than funders, journal-independent peer-review services have been around for more than a decade now. Oldest one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerage_of_Science

@minimammoth So for peer-review, we all know journals are not required. WRT Glam, given the evidence that the highest ranking journals publish the least reliable science:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full
We of course COULD replicate that - the question is SHOULD we do that, given the pernicious consequences?

@brembs of course, I'm not saying that peer review is only the purview of journals. All I'm saying that if journals exist and we keep using them, there may be some value? And the value I can see personally (from my own experience doing a PhD) is curation through subject (e.g. an issue of Development is usually a great read for me as a developmental biologist, without having to look for/find individual papers), the facilities for peer review (which exist elsewhere, but that doesn't take away ->

@brembs the experience of journals) and again, science journalism for a science literate audience, and covering topics of exclusive interest to scientists.
As someone who has enjoyed reading journals for more than just the research articles for years, I struggle to believe that they are entirely value-less, even if they could what they could do more cheaply.

@minimammoth
Science journalism is a great topic!
But what does it have to do with publishing research articles? Scientific American, The Scientist, New Scientist, etc. they don't publish original research.

Why should we pay extra for our research papers, so that journalism, which ought to be paid for, can be had for free? Doesn't that devalue the work of these journalists who have to give away their work for free?

@brembs @minimammoth I can't speak for all publications, but Nature does pay journalists for the front matter content - these are commissioned pieces with a rate attached. So that actually is a legitimate cost (if you consider the content valuable). But it absolutely does not have to be packaged with the original research papers. I think this is a holdover from when they (the two weeklies) had a broader individual subscription base of people who read them as magazines.

@minimammoth
By the way, we are paying these publishers so much for journalism and other non-publication activities, that this is no by far the biggest item on what we pay:

https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2

@minimammoth Image did not get attached, it seems:

@minimammoth
However, mostz of that non-publication money doesn't even go to journalism, it goes towards surveillance technology:

@minimammoth See these articles to löearn more about how publishers are not publishers any more, but are now data analytics corporations that have reversed the flow of information, such that, effectively, it's now our information that they collect that makes them the big money:
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/1874/
or
https://zenodo.org/record/6399726
or, from our funder (!):
https://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/foerderung/programme/lis/datentracking_papier_en.pdf

@brembs Yes, this is a HUGE problem.

@minimammoth

Good point!

But how is journal based sorting into topics superior to more modern solutions such as, e.g., tags and keywords?

My field is spread over so many journals, there is no usefuilness for that sorting at all:

Journal of Neuroscience, European Journal of Neuroscience, Neuroscience, Nature Neroscience, Neuroscience letters, Neuroscience buletin, neuroscience research
.
.
.
.
They all publish the same stuff!

@brembs this is a fair point. I do think that given the internet (especially) there should be better and easier ways to disseminate science, definitely.

@brembs yup, totally agreed. It's an issue. You'd have to basically reset the entire publishing landscape in a way.

@minimammoth @cyrilpedia Hence the title of our paper 🤣

@cyrilpedia @brembs this is certainly how I think of it. Instead of money being earmarked in grants (for scientists) to spend on publishing, the money goes to publishers fulfilling certain criteria to publish X number of articles, in exchange for them not charging APCs or subscription charges. Of course, this is can only work if it's enforced (e.g. scientists in institutions agreeing to this mode of funding cannot publish in other journals, which would not be popular).