@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 ->
@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.
@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 ->
@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
@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).
@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.