@bohaceklab @eLife @richardsever
interesting question. Preprints were a similar massive movement in #neuroscience, wouldn't you say?
Thing is, publishing preprints was pretty riskless (so is leaving twitter), whereas abandoning the publishing system is, at this time, rather risky if you still have a career in front of you.
@HeedLab @bohaceklab @eLife @richardsever Interesting question, but IMHO it is the wrong question.
Similar to how the climate crisis has been wrongly pinned on individuals and their choices rather than big corporations and governments, our infrastructure crisis is tackled more effectively if our institutions are "incenitvized" to modernize, rather than incentivizing ECRs to risk their careeers.
@brembs *whispers*: what if instead of funders giving money to scientists earmarked for publishing costs they directly funded publishers depending on their policies and incentivised openness and eliminated APCs?
@minimammoth @brembs To have publishers compete for public/philanthropic funds on the basis of quality & cost was an interesting idea that we discussed with Adriano Aguzzi on the #EMBOPodcast https://www.embo.org/podcasts/from-prions-to-preprints/
@cyrilpedia oooh, thanks for sharing! I'll have a listen. It's obviously a problematic question cos you end up with the same issues you get in science funding generally, but considering how much profit publishers currently make? It feels like a way to save money in the long term (though of course it would have to be done very carefully and transparently). This is of course ignoring diamond open access journals, but those rely on volunteer labour, which poses its own issues.
@minimammoth I know that it comes up in the second half of the episode (we discussed prions in the first half, publishing and preprints in the second - also with Thomas Lemberger of EMBO). I think if you remove the lobbying component from publisher's, it's not that hard to see the general framework: ban the use of funds for APCs, mandate preprints, and fund only publications in journals that accepted the public competition model, which would include a cap on either profit margins or total cost per paper (or some version of both)
@minimammoth I think the main resistance would be political lobbying by big publishers. It also has the advantage of moving the discussion away from "journals" as a unitary category: there are good journals, bad journals and mediocre journals.
@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
