Ludo’s vision was to turn preprint peer review into truly meaningful bidirectional conversations and move away from it being simply a bureaucratic exercise.

multiple publishers

We have found that these public preprint reviews and assessments are far more effective than binary accept or reject decisions ever could be at conveying the thinking of our reviewers and editors, and capturing the nuanced, multidimensional, and often ambiguous nature of peer review. eLife will now let them stand on their own by publishing every paper we review, along with our reviews and an assessment as a Reviewed Preprint, a new type of research output we hope will become the norm across science.

The choice of business model and the level of involvement of academic publishers will affect the simplicity of workflows to track the status of a preprint throughout and after publication (Table 2, p.36

Finally, we note the importance of distinguishing preprints from preprint servers.

Clearly, the choice between a researcher- or publisher-centric approach will affect funding, too: in the former case, grants or pooled funds would likely form the bulk of funding for preprint servers, while in the latter these could be supported by publishers, provided they perceive

For Preprint Platforms

Assign a Spotter on the Host side. This is the human responsible for paying attention to the distributed folks and looking for visual cues they are ready to speak.

Given this emphasis, it is not worth the effort for libraries to spend money or staff time to meticulously eliminate bot activity through their own local system.

Repositories and linked data platforms have the potential to be our most potent leveler of access and privilege, if we choose to embrace our responsibility and respond with intention.

How do the roles and services of consortia need to change to support changes in libraries and schol-arly communications?

ome specific research questions to address on the topic of infrastructure include

While the enthusiasm for retaining, preserving, and hosting content is to be commended, the relative value of institutional repositories versus domain repositories or even “preprint” servers is still to be determined.41 Standards for IRs are still emerging and may not be easy to implement for all institutions. Even larger-scale efforts and domain-specific repositories that may appear to be “success stories” struggle mightily to attract users and sustainable funding sources.42

A randomly-selected node col-lates all the submitted transaction records and applies the COUNTER rules

One response has been to suggest “submission charges” in order that successful publications do not subsidise unsuccessful ones, a proposal which would further disadvantage early-career colleagues and those from less wealthy countries.

n OA, there is no constraint on publication, which takes the form of a stream, where each platform maximises its revenue by maximising the number of papers it publishes.

There is likely to be a demand management process for APC funding, with a consequent tendency toward the reinforcement of “normal” science.

We are moving from a system of global open access to publish to one of global open access to read, without paying attention to the new forms of exclusion that will entail for the production of knowledge.

The wider public is not, in fact, a major consumer of OA research, George Monbiot notwithstanding. OA may have benefits from the point of view of the consumption of knowledge, but it is less clear that it has equivalent benefits from the perspective of the production of knowledge and, more importantly, the ecology of that production (which includes publishers aligned with academic interests and our learned societies and associations).

The incantation that the “public” should have access to what they fund through their taxes is a little hollow in the context that none of the private beneficiaries of publicly funded research are required to repay any of the investment from which that benefit derives (in contrast to the student beneficiaries of higher education in England who are now required to pay full fees).

However, its dominant logic is that of commercialisation.

FOAA asks for publishers to provide information about (1) indirect costs (a. journal support and submission system; b. Platform development and maintenance c. general management costs; d. profit); (2)direct costs(a. editorial assistance; b. copy-editing c. promotion d. indexing and archiving (DOI, CLOCKSS etc)); and (3) profit

we strongly recommend that any new infrastructure be public and open infrastructure,

Provide incentives for editors to ‘flip’ existing subscription journals to Open Access

he Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high-quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide;

oice of CC-BY is the right on

The Funders will ensure jointly the establishment of robust criteria and requirements for the services that compliant high quality Open Access journals and Open Access platforms must provide;

They may be paid fair value for the services they are providing, but no science should be locked behind paywalls

Breaking down an APC and how it relates to submission numbers and acceptance rates suggests another way to cover publication costs: a submission fee of $350 and a publication fee of $850 would generate the same revenue as the current APCs at these journals. (This approach has been suggested before, see here, here, and here.)

APCs have the unfortunate feature that the authors pay for the assessment of all the other submissions that ended up being rejected.

On the journal side, those with APCs above the cap must either accept more (i.e., lower quality) articles or cut expenses by doing less review and editing.

libraries would still buy subscriptions to allow scientists to catch up with the most recent developments, and the broader public would have access to all research without a paywall (but with a slight delay).

As written, Plan S could create a “pay-to-play” system, where only the best-funded researchers and institutions will be able to publish in the mandated journals, thus creating automatic inequality in publishing opportunities based on one’s geographic location and the size of one’s research budget.

it creates a baseline equality of opportunity for researchers: if they have performed sufficiently good research, they will have the possibility to disseminate it in venues with high esteem and high visibility within the community of researchers.

While the TA model creates some inequality of access for readers (the so-called ‘paywall’)

Option A (self-archiving their published research)

The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an order of magnitude less than the publishers extortionate fees and profits today.