@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?
@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 ->
@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
@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 :)
@minimammoth sorry - one pandemic, one epidemic.