The Open Journals
An open-access, crowd-sourced solution for scientific publication
Academic Publishing Is Broken
The current model for disseminating scientific scholarship does not work. Authors are forced to give up their rights to their work or required to pay to share their research. The public is required to pay to read scientific research or researchers must pay up front to make their work accessible. Reviewers are asked to contribute their time and effort little acknowledgment of their role in advancing scientific fields. (Read more about this here: https://eiko-fried.com/academia-in-the-upside-down-of-publishing/)
We can do better than this. No longer are we bound to journals that require so much monetary and physical resources. It is time to bring scholars, reviewers, and readers together in the effort to make science open, for all.
Where Manuscripts are Laid to Rest
The life span of a scientific paper can vary dramatically but the life of any paper comes to an end. Once the research is published, the paper is entombed in a journal. Readers come and visit it, they may be inspired by it or motivated to counter it, but that manuscript (and whatever flaws it has) will never change. This static presentation and segregation of work made sense when articles were collated and distributed as physical journal issues, but this static approach is no longer our reality. Most of us access articles through databases, journal websites, pre-print websites, and social media. The internet can and should be better utilized for scientific scholarship.
Gatekeepers and File Drawers
While the state of the field is dynamic, the collection of published research articles can provide a sense of definitiveness. The traditional publication process imposes several gatekeepers who are charged with allowing only the best work to be added to the collection. That is, someone associated with the journal decides if the work should be sent for peer review, peer reviewers indicate if the work should be accepted, revised, or rejected, and an editor ultimately decides if the work will be published in that journal. At the end of this process, we may believe that what we read in scholarly journals reflects the state of the science. This is a false sense of security because of biases that can be expressed in traditional publication processes. It is because of the restricted evaluation and these biases that much of the work that is produced is not published. When the whole scientific community is invited to share and to evaluate, we can more quickly establish a strong foundation of knowledge and press the edges of our disciplines.
Hitting the Paywall from Both Sides
Journals and their publishers provide a useful service for researchers; they provide a means of evaluation and dissemination for scholarly work. They provide this service at the expense of readers, the sacrifice of reviewers, and the charity of authors. Open access journals are willing to share the content with the public, providing someone (e.g., the authors) pay it forward. The open access journals are heading in the right direction but are still putting hurdles for science. Open is good, free is good, but open and free should be the standard.
Important Steps
Many scholars and consumers of scholarly work can locate research on the internet through searches locating personally posted published manuscripts, pre-print servers, online communities, and open access journals. These services have increased the availability of scholarship for the all, but we can do more to improve how we build and share scientific knowledge.
The Open Journals Platform
We have collectively complained long enough about the mishandling of scientific research by the traditional publishing approach. We can have a better option with a new approach. The Open Journals will be a platform for researchers to share their work, for peers to evaluate that shared work, and for everyone to read what has been shared.
The Open Journals will help to free science from the traditional publication process. There will be no editors or reviewers to decide the fate of a manuscript. Instead, scholarly work will be reviewed and rated by peers with the goal of improving the work. By crowd-sourcing evaluation and removing the need for editorial decisions, The Open Journals can help accelerate scientific progress by avoiding editorially imposed obstacles and by increasing the number and diversity of judges.
A Living Manuscript
Our work can improve and grow by having open conversations with our peers around our work. This certainly happens with the traditional approach, but only a few individuals are invited to review, and those reviews are often delayed due to reviewers being overworked. With an open, crowd-sourced approach, we can get a broader perspective and a faster turn-around on reviews. The authors will be able to respond to these suggestions by revising and reposting their paper for another round, if they wish. This emphasis on continuity is superior to the common practice of submitting work to another journal after a rejection because we will keep the rich context of how our scientific works evolve. All paper versions and associated reviews and comments will be linked and remain openly available.
Many Voices, Together
Progress follows diversity because limiting who has a say, limits what we can learn. The Open Journals will be a platform where all scholars can share their work and can voice their opinions. One’s work ought to be judged on its soundness of the ideas and the science, not by the culture of the researchers. To facilitate the exchange of scholarly work across cultures, there will be no language or formatting requirements.
Just as all authors will be welcome, so will each review and rating. Small samples can lead to bias but large samples can better approximate a population. By inviting all to rate a scholarly work, we may can better able to appreciate its importance for the field.
Open and Free
Researchers shouldn’t have to give up their ownership of their work and no one should have to pay to read what scientists are willing to share. Publishers justify their charges by the services they offer: editorial oversight, print setting, printing, shipping, and all the infrastructure and staff required for those services. Science needs a platform to facilitate the exchange of ideas and findings, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the producers or consumers.
How can publishing ever be free-of-charge? It requires a refocusing on the core goals of scholarly publications: facilitating the sharing of information and accelerating science. By focusing on these core goals and embracing a new approach of how scholarship is shared and evaluated, the cost of operating is drastically reduced. There is overhead, of course, but there are other funding options that can allow free sharing of and access to scientific research, such as grants and donations.
Recognizing Good Work
Good science deserves recognition. Journals currently recognize good work by accepting those papers for publication. Unfortunately, as described earlier, this dichotomization is not the best approach. The Open Journals will allow each user to recognize good work by giving it a high rating. When enough individuals rate a paper high enough, it will signal to others that it is work worth reading. These highly rated pieces will receive a “Highly Rated” designation and will be added to a curated list of articles. Any article can earn this designation through the democratic, crowd-sourced review process on The Open Journals.
Envisioned Features
Below is a list of intended features for The Open Journals platform. This list will change to meet the needs of scientists and readers.
- Anyone can join by creating account with email address, ORCID, Google, or Facebook accounts
- Any member can upload manuscripts / proposals / data sets
- Any member can comment / review / rate
- Anyone can read and rate posts and indicate helpfulness of comments / reviews
- Uploads searchable by keywords, authors, title, date, etc.
- Anyone can share via link / social media
- Each manuscript/proposal/data set gets DOI
- Authors choose keywords
- Users endorse and add keywords
- Metrics for uploads (number of views, number of shares, rating distributions, Plaudit endorsements)
- Special designation and curation for highly rated manuscripts
- Percent of helpfulness ratings for comments / reviews
- Users can follow researchers
- Metrics for users (number of uploads, rating distributions for uploads, number of comments/reviews, distribution of helpfulness percentages, followers)
- User dashboard with metrics, activity (comments/replies), manage uploads, manage reviews/comments, recent reads, recommended reads
- Email digest with potentially interesting articles
- Trending articles on home page by major area
A Call to Revolutionaries
If you want to change how we build and share knowledge and are ready to democratize the scholarship evaluation process, join The Open Journals in the early stages. Everyone has something special to offer and we’d love for you to share your talents with us. We are seeking a core team of volunteers to help build a better way forward for science. Send us an email to start the conversation: founders@theopenjournals.org
