@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)
@cyrilpedia @minimammoth
There is a lot in this, but one thing that keeps getting bandied around is 'caps'. I'd like to know in which country it is illegal to have more than a specified amount of profit and if so, how that could be expanded to a global law, when not even the EU can agree on minimum corprate tax?
In terms of price caps, we have had them here in Germany for more than a decade and they have not have had any effect at all.
@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 @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.
